Hunt for the Higgs boson

Fullscreen. Via JoAnne Hewett.

Boss of NASA sensible on global warming

Michael Griffin who has been the top administrator of NASA since 2005 said the following on NPR (see news.google.com, transcript, blogs, audio):

I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.

Precious.

I have always believed that the people who actually work with hard sciences and technology simply shouldn't buy a cheap and soft pseudoscientific propaganda such as the "fight against climate change". NASA has been doing many amazing and non-trivial things and they must also be irritated when pseudoscience based on such shaky and unscientific notions is given so much attention - in fact, breathtakingly, more than NASA's space program itself.

The ideology of a "fight against climate change" is based on a whole network of assumptions - dozens of assumptions each of which is highly questionable, to say the least. As long as we are a scientifically inclined society, each of these assumptions should be studied separately because rationally speaking, they are independent.

One of these assumptions says that the current climate is better than a different climate and it should be preserved. It is an arbitrary, irrational assumption that was also recently criticized by Czech president Klaus in his book, among other people.

Needless to say, a different kind of scientists such as NASA's own James Hansen responded in an irritated way. But NASA is not primarily the home of strange scientists who "prove" a 20-meter sea level rise using the concept of scientific reticence.



Antimatter spaceship for Mars missions that the NASA administrator likes (click)

NASA is primarily the home of serious engineers and scientists who are doing some truly impressive stuff - besides the spaceships and devices telling us so much about cosmology, we also find climate-related activities including the stuff about the satellite measurements of temperatures and about cosmic influences on our climate. These are the real sources of NASA's natural authority: James Hansen is not.

The Reference Frame applauds Michael Griffin and encourages him to act as a self-confident boss of a highly prestigious institution. Let me re-emphasize that it is Griffin, not Hansen, who is the boss of NASA and this fact should be taken into account if it turns out that one of them should leave NASA. Any sign of weakness, Dr Griffin, will be used against you. More precisely, I would recommend the boss of NASA to fire Hansen for his despicable comments about his boss as soon as possible.

And that's the memo. (Via Bob Ferguson.)

P.S. So far, Dr Griffin, BS MS MS2 MBA MEng Civil MEng Aerospace PhD is doing very well. For example, they have published the following press release:

• NASA is the world's preeminent organization in the study of Earth and the conditions that contribute to climate change and global warming. The agency is responsible for collecting data that is used by the science community and policy makers as part of an ongoing discussion regarding our planet's evolving systems. It is NASA's responsibility to collect, analyze and release information. It is not NASA's mission to make policy regarding possible climate change mitigation strategies. As I stated in the NPR interview, we are proud of our role and I believe we do it well.

But Griffin must be ready to act in the same way even if the pressure quintuples. Immoral politicians such as Bart Gordon as well as radical communists will suddenly invent criticisms of NASA's work. If Griffin can resist for three weeks or so, things will be OK.

George Bush will visit Prague next week

See also: Bush in Prague and rockets, not radars and Bush liked the dumplings

Laura Bush plans to enjoy gardens of the Prague Castle, together with Lívia Klausová, the Czech first lady who is Slovak.



George Bush has to see the headquarters of the Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty in Prague, a building that used to be the communist Parliament.



Most Czechs are looking forward to see the Bush family. However, Martina Navrátilová wants to get her Czech citizenship back to protest against the "Bush regime". ;-)

Russia has successfully tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile system (ICBM) that can beat anyone. Our Slavic brothers in Moscow's Izvestia daily have calculated that they need 15 minutes to destroy Czechia by nukes if the country hosts the missile defense system. Polish officials have correctly identified this position of the Russian brothers as their mental problem. ;-)

Europe isolated over Kyoto

China, India, Russia reject carbon cuts. Australia realizes that the Kyoto has had no desirable effect.

Nominally right-wing German government is trying to convince the US government to impose caps. But Nancy Pelosi didn't offer the Germans much support.



Other two countries with nominally right-wing governments, Japan and Canada, want to reduce the CO2 emissions by 50% even if they have to pay for the third world and the U.S. However, both Republicans and Democrats want something slightly different, namely to subsidize coal.

It would be a mistake to think that the Japanese actually want to impose all these suicidal restrictions. Today, Japan refused to follow a new EU plan to stop climate from changing.

While Harper's people try to behave as greenies, they are being sued by Canadian ecoterrorists. That's where any kind of appeasement always leads.

When I suggested that right-wing politicians in many countries have started to do a lot of insane things, I should also mention that the German social democrats actually warn Merkel's government that a climate dispute against the U.S. could be dangerous. G8 is very far from a consensus and Europe is isolated over Kyoto.

But I don't mean the whole Europe. Poland and Czechia join Slovakia and all of them sue the European commission over its arrogant bureaucratic attempts to heavily reduce the CO2 emissions in these three fast-growing economies.

Today, the price of the European 2007 indulgences closed at 27 eurocents, more than two orders of magnitude below the price one year ago, but the gigantic worldwide fraud continues.

Via Benny Peiser.

P.S. Václav Klaus' book against the anti-greenhouse religion is now the #1 bestseller on kosmas.cz, a Czech counterpart of amazon.com. Al Gore's book is at #9.

Myths about Einstein

The New York Reviews of Books have published a text by Lee Smolin who uses several recent books about Albert Einstein to define his opinions about the famous physicist. There are many points in Smolin's text that I consider correct and many more things that I consider silly. Let me start with some of the correct ones:

• It is indeed true that people tend to incorrectly think that the revolutionary Einstein was a detached immaterial, spiritual, peaceful sage - an idealized image constructed according to Einstein when he was old. Instead, the real revolutionary Einstein was a young chap with a rather contrived personal life who assertively tried to transform the world according to his visions. I am sure that much like many other similar people, young Einstein was deeply offended by stupid folks who wanted to act as authorities.
• The ideas that Einstein's personal life resembled the life of the (idealized) Jesus Christ are myths.
• Einstein's disbelief in quantum mechanics was the main technical reason why the last 3 decades of his life didn't lead to important scientific results.
• He may have become "officially" irrelevant at the IAS when the younger generation, realizing that Einstein's opinions about cutting edge physics have become silly, decided to transform Einstein into nothing an idealized but impotent symbol.
• Albert Einstein's political abilities were non-trivial and he had the technical skills to be a top-tier politician, including the president of Israel if he wanted.

However, as I have mentioned, there are many more crazy thoughts in Smolin's text.



First of all, Smolin tries to picture Einstein's personal life and his political methods and attitudes as a key aspect of his personality that is essential to understand his creativity or even the technical content of his greatest discoveries. I think it is a completely silly association. There are no direct, rational links between Einstein's creativity on one side and details of his love affairs or political opinions on the other side.

These two projections of Einstein are largely independent of one another. Relativity and other theories could have been found by very different personalities. Whoever thinks that a detailed analysis of Einstein's love affairs allows us to speed up scientific revolutions in the future is crazy.

Smolin implicitly claims that these things are inevitably synchronized which I view as another example of Smolin's inability to think rationally about science. Smolin simply can't or doesn't want to distinguish science from sociology and from love affairs.

More generally, various pundits such as Mark Trodden claim that it is wrong if scientists are painted as people who are detached from material life. It is clear that such a picture is an oversimplification and that scientists are often ordinary people in many respects but on the other hand, I do think that scientists should fit this description more accurately than other people in many more cases. And many of them actually do. Painting scientists as "completely" ordinary people is a misrepresentation of science - or at least a misrepresentation of what science should be. More seriously, it is a hidden attempt to vulgarize science and attract all sorts of idiots into it who are driven by very different things than the passion for the truth. I think that there are already way too many idiots like that in institutionalized science.

Importance of Einstein's personal life and politics

Another weird thing about Smolin's approach to Einstein is the way how he wants the society to judge Einstein's personal ethics and political attitudes. Einstein has surely done, said, and written many things that many groups of people would dislike. But is there an objective method to decide whether Einstein has done the right thing or whether his critics would be right? Smolin thinks that there is one, I don't.

Smolin seems to criticize Einstein's political opinions. Einstein was a socialist, anti-communist, pacifist (at least before he realized how dangerous the Nazis were), and Zionist. Well, I would only subscribe to anti-communism and Zionism in this list ;-) but I don't understand how Smolin can write that "the man [Einstein] himself was an embarrassment." What the hell does it mean?

Einstein held certain political and other opinions. These opinions were rather coherent and there have always been reasons for wise people to listen to him. I may disagree with some of Einstein's opinions but I can't pick Einstein as a scapeboat who should be described as "an embarrassment". There have been millions of pacifists and socialists around.

The same Smolin who is producing hundreds of essays about mad social-engineering projects to increase the "diversity" is always ready to divide people to the correct people on one side and "embarrassments" on the other side. In this case, Einstein wasn't too lucky because Smolin's PC police have transformed him into an embarrassment. Smolin even seems to agree with a director of the IAS who was opening Einstein's mail to prevent him from meeting the U.S. president, among others. I personally think that this treatment of Einstein's privacy was despicable and those who were doing these things had absolutely no credentials for their acts.

What Einstein has thought about politics is no longer a primary question that determines my opinions about politics today - even though the personality of Einstein has influenced me tremendously when I was a teenager. But what a director of an institute thought 50 years ago is even more irrelevant. I just can't understand why Lee Smolin thinks that it's important whether a particular opinion of Einstein was considered to be an embarrassment by an irrelevant director.

Smolin also criticizes Isaacson, the author of one of the books, for claiming that we shouldn't be overly concerned by Einstein's rough edges. I happen to agree with Isaacson. Einstein is such an important personality that his rough edges, whatever they are, are either secondary characteristics or inevitable by-products of his ingenious mind. Another thing that Smolin dislikes about Isaacson's book is that Isaacson claims that Einstein has underestimated the resilience of American democracy when he was very worried about McCarthyism.

Smolin asks: "Why does Isaacson feel he has to assure us that we don't need to take his subject's political views too seriously?" Well, the answer is that Isaacson realizes that history has proven that Einstein's worries about this point and similar points were not justified and Einstein's political opinions - in this case somewhat misled opinions - were simply not terribly important even though they were clearly more important than the opinions of an average person or an average physicist. Why does Smolin feel that the political opinions of Einstein were more important?

Einsteinian stamp on theories

At the end of his text, Smolin displays his uncontrollably huge reliance on authorities when he suggests that some misguided attempts of an old Einstein to revolutionize science once again should be viewed as an argument to support various kinds of contemporary crackpots such as those who envision a discrete spacetime or those who still haven't understood or accepted the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.

I simply think that this approach of Lee is mad. Einstein could have afforded to have held these silly views simply because he had already made it. But there was nothing spectacular about the theories he was writing down in his last 30 years. If these theories were the only thing Einstein represented, there would be no reason to hire him or celebrate him.

And if you think about some parrots who would be just indirectly copying these later theories of Einstein or emulating his flawed way of thinking (and maybe even 50 years after his death) but who have never done anything comparable to what the young Einstein did, it is even more obvious that their work doesn't deserve to be supported. I think that no sane person in science would ever suggest that the society should be supporting people who only try to imitate a well-known personality's acts during an era when he was already irrelevant. Nevertheless, that's exactly what Smolin seems to propose.

Lee Smolin, the same man who often talks about original scientists, reveals that he actually likes something completely different, namely if young people are writing even more confused parodies of his and other narrow-minded and physically naive papers that should be viewed as important because they resemble the flavor of some basic misunderstandings of a genius that were written when he was already unspectacular. That's one of the reasons why he surrounds himself with loads of untalented people who only say Yes Mr Smolin. He also likes when people's opinions about the society are judged according to a universal, politically correct criterion.

Moreover, Smolin tries to discuss whether the new developments in string theory follow the philosophy of Einstein. Other people including myself sometimes talk about these questions as well but it is very important to realize that any kind of an answer to this question is an artificially created story. Einstein was trying to answer different questions in a different context and there is no one-to-one correspondence between the answers to some questions in the 1950s and answers to the present questions in 2000s.

Even if there were some correspondence, the "Einsteinian stamp" wouldn't influence the contemporary scientists' decisions about the validity or value of their theories as long as they would be scientists. Smolin seems to care about the "Einsteinian stamp" and similar rituals a lot which is another profoundly unscientific feature of his approach.

Is string theory a continuation of Einstein's dreams to find a unified field theory? Well, it is certainly a continuation of his attempts to figure out verifiable and mathematically elegant laws that account for all forces. At this superficial level, all string theorists are inheritors of Einstein's legacy, even the legacy of the old misled Einstein. From a more technical perspective, however, it's the other way around. String theory is a full-fledged quantum mechanical theory that is fully accepting the premises that Niels Bohr and his friends believed and that is taking the observations and the detailed work of many careful scientists very seriously, unlike the old Einstein.

String theory surely reveals the kind of beauty and depth that we normally associate with Einstein and his dreams but Einstein wouldn't have been able to work on it because he didn't appreciate quantum mechanics.



Einstein, stop telling God what to do with his dice!

If you look at these aspects of Einstein's approach, string theory is clearly the inheritor of the quantum mechanical generation while various loop quantum gravitational and related alternative physicists are inheritors of Einstein's flawed and superficial games attempting to find some extremely simple-minded laws and to convince everyone else (and themselves) that these naive laws should govern the whole Cosmos, regardless of any evidence and any "details".

It is clear that certain aspects of "good science" - at least most of these aspects - are found in the context of many important discoveries. Analogously, certain aspects of "bad science" are frequently associated with attempts that didn't lead anywhere, including attempts of famous scientists who had already "lost it". For example, if someone loses a contact with all newly discovered "details", it is a bad thing.

As we have already mentioned, Smolin apparently tries to do something completely different than a rational analysis of various aspects of Einstein's life and ideas and their actual causal relationships. He wants to attach the same stickers to ideas and approaches in different contexts, using superficial sociological similarities as a justification, and divide them to "good" ideas of "seers" and "bad" ideas of "craftsmen" according to these superficial keys. Such an algorithm is all but guaranteed to lead to nothing else than noise which is indeed what Smolin writes in more than 90% of cases.

Best strategies keep on changing

Another fundamental fact about the philosophy of science that Smolin and dozens of other critics of science seem completely unable to comprehend is that there is no eternal and universal set of rules that would tell you how to make progress in science or that would determine what the society should do to make this progress happen. Einstein's talent combined with his basic philosophical assumptions were important for many of his earlier discoveries and they allowed him to find many important things including general relativity.

But the same strategy simply didn't work afterwards. It couldn't have been clear a priori whether his disciplined search for beautiful deterministic laws describing physics could have led to further breakthroughs. Nevertheless, the answer turned out to be No. Quantum mechanics has revolutionized the framework in which important cutting edge physical theories had to be formulated. Einstein didn't want to or wasn't able to absorb this additional paradigm shift and this simple fact has become a severe limitation that guaranteed that virtually all of his later work was irrelevant and misguided.

But it could have been otherwise. If Nature were organized a little bit differently, Einstein could have discovered special relativity in 1905, general relativity in 1915, and divine relativity in 1925. There is no philosophical or sociological law that would guarantee that such a scenario was a priori impossible. But once you look into the structure of physics, you will see that there is no divine relativity. Nature happens to work differently and all really important new results in theoretical physics after 1925 rely on quantum mechanics in one way or another.

Lee Smolin also tries to pretend that Einstein was still a leader in the middle 1930s, using his paper with Podolsky and Rosen as an example. OK, I don't think it's true. The EPR entanglement (improved by insights of Bell and others) has become a popular way to express some of the most surprising features of quantum mechanics. But it didn't really lead to an increased ability to make predictions. The quantum mechanical heroes knew how to predict the results of all thought experiments (and real experiments) that Einstein designed for them. Moreover, both sides of the debate deserve credit for having defined the questions about entanglement. Most importantly, Einstein's answers were wrong. I happen to think that it is not an irrelevant detail to see who was right and who was wrong. Most of my respect towards Einstein's criticism results from Einstein's previous amazing contributions. If someone else were saying these things about quantum mechanics, I would think that he is simply dense.

Smolin chastises Freeman Dyson and others for believing that famous old men like Einstein were making fools of themselves by expecting another conceptual revolution as profound as the quantum mechanical revolution. Dyson and others realized that this expectation was completely silly and that the following century in theoretical physics would be built on the same postulates of quantum mechanics that were known to Bohr.

Lee Smolin doesn't like the opinion that after quantum mechanics was found, the major conceptual revolutions were over. Smolin doesn't seem to care that Dyson's thesis that quantum mechanics is the correct framework to describe the world is by 10 orders of magnitude at the energy scale and by 60 years more powerful than when Dyson expressed them for the first time. Again, I don't think that these additional developments are details that can be ignored. Whoever ignores them is making an even greater fool of himself than he is.

Peter Galison's theories

Other scholars offer some opinions that I find strange, too. In his 2003 book, Peter Galison tried to argue that Einstein has found special relativity primarily because he was working with train synchronization patents and because his father and uncle did some business in technology.

From the viewpoint of the actual historical resources showing how Einstein was looking for the answers, I have always found these theories extremely unconvincing. The details about his family and jobs look like unimportant curiosities. Already as a teenager, Einstein was demonstrably asking questions what happens with light if you try to chase it. He was aware of some tension between the Galilean transformations on one side and Maxwell's equations on the other side. He decided to solve this problem, and he did so. It was a theorist's approach par excellence and almost any profession of his father and uncle could be painted as being instrumental in Einstein's discoveries.

Technical jobs are surely helpful but on the other hand, it is very clear that there were lots of people around whose background was expected to be much more useful for making similar breakthroughs than Einstein's background. Einstein's contributions were huge. They were arguably surprising but they were not physically impossible. His life has been affected by many social phenomena and personal affairs but these social events are not the most critical aspect of Einstein's personality. I am always amazed how people - including historians of science - misunderstand not only the way how people like Einstein were thinking but how they misunderstand what was actually important and what was unimportant.

And that's the memo.

Bussard's IEC fusion for dummies: video

Two minutes of video by Foger Rox explaining Robert Bussard's reactor. See also emc2fusion.org. If you ask me how does the geometry from the video lead to fusion, you are not the only one who asks! ;-)

Via M. Simon.

Doomsday arguments

Sabine has written an essay about the doomsday arguments. If I understand her well, I think that the two of us agree. But it may be useful to mention which of the assumptions are rational or justified and which of them are not. Let me start with the

Copernican Principle

The principle says that the Earth is not a privileged celestial body, the Sun is not a privileged star, and the Milky Way is not a privileged galaxy. A generalization of the principle says that the humans are not a privileged species. A more ambitious version of the principle, the mediocrity principle, is the actual driving force of many people who believe the anthropic principle. All these people must believe in some kind of integalactic democracy that gives the same voice to every single intelligent observer within the Galaxy or even the multiverse.

Is the principle universally true and profound?

Well, I wouldn't say so. What would you expect from a person who doesn't even believe in trans-national democracy and who thinks that even the equality within one country is just a convenient law that can never quite work de facto?

In my opinion, the original version of the Copernican principle was mainly an ideological tool to oppose a wrong theory of astronomy, namely a theory that has always been driven by religious and political forces rather than scientific arguments. The Catholic black-buttockers used to insist that the Earth had to play as special a role in the Universe as it played in their favorite book, the Old Testament. While Christianity has made many great things for the Western civilization, its stubborn belief in certain ancient astrophysical theories - and later also biological theories - turned out to be counterproductive at a certain point. The Copernican principle is a symbol of the revolt against the religious dogmas.

In the case of the Earth, Copernicus and his soulmates were right. The physical parameters of our planet don't differ from the parameters of other planets in some spectacular qualitative way.

However, we should ask: Was this conclusion inevitable? Is there a permanent physical principle that tells you that things always turn out to be less special than they are believed at the beginning? My answer is a resounding "No". If you declare that things are not special but they are rather generic, you only choose a probability distribution that describes your ignorance more faithfully.

But it is not true that as we continue to learn how the real world works, objects are constantly becoming less special. Sometimes they are becoming more special and less equal. All values of wavelengths of light may a priori look equally natural and likely but the 21.1 centimeter line turns out to be rather special in astrophysics, after all.

Billions of other insights of all sciences - essentially all insights we have - may be viewed as additional examples of objects and numbers becoming more special than they used to be before you have a learned a new fact or before you have written down a new theory. When we look more carefully, the Earth has certain features that also make it somewhat special, after all. You can also find features of homo sapiens that make our species more viable and more intelligent than many others.

As you can see, I view all kinds of mediocrity arguments to be a tool to construct quasi-realistic "priors" - expectations that you insert as a starting point for your logical inference. These arguments represent a tool to avoid unjustified dogmas. These arguments seem to be a more fair description of your primordial ignorance. However, they are definitely not unbreakable constraints that the final answers must confirm.

Naturalness

Naturalness is another example. If you deal with an effective field theory, are all dimensionless couplings inevitably comparable to one? Once again, the answer is clearly "No". Why do we expect that is should "normally" be so? Well, it's because we describe our ignorance by a uniform prior. With a uniform probability distribution for a certain dimensionless parameter, it is unlikely that the parameter will be extremely tiny.

But the uniform probabilistic distribution is not a God-given law of the Cosmos. It is just a convenient trick to make balanced expectations - expectations that often turn out to be wrong anyway as soon as we figure out how the system works in more detail, as soon as we discover new reasons that make some special expectations more meaningful. Naturalness is thus not an unbreakable law of physics either. Even if you are a huge optimist, it is just a useful tool to quantify how unexpected the values of numerical parameters within a certain framework are.

Doomsday argument

The doomsday argument is an example of the mediocrity reasoning that is even worse than just an unjustified prejudice: I think that in this case, the conclusions of a mediocrity argument are manifestly flawed.

The argument assumes that you should be a generic observer. Because the number of people on the Earth grows exponentially, most people during the history live right before the collapse of the civilization. That's why the doomsday argument leads many people to predict that the humankind will collapse pretty soon. Jehovah's Witnesses as well as Anthropogenic Global Warming bigots, among dozens of similar groups, surely consider the doomsday arguments to be a general weapon that strengthens their predictions about the judgment day.

Are they right?

We can't be quite sure whether their particular predictions are going to be right - except for the predictions that have already been falsified - but we can be absolutely sure that the method with which they have reached their conclusions are completely irrational. Why? It's because we actually know the laws that will decide about the collapse of the civilization. More precisely, we know them partially but well enough to falsify certain oversimplified doomsday calculations.

Whether or not men will be around in 2100 and whether or not the future civilization is going to be stronger than ours will depend on the success of our fight against Islamic terrorists, North Korean communists, environmental terrorists, diseases, political correctness, shrinking fossil fuel resources, mutated viruses, left-wing nutcases who want to cripple the world's economy just for the sake of it, dangerous asteroids, or dozens of other potential threats you could think about. When you understand how these things work, you may offer qualified estimates of the probability that all of us will be screwed by 2100.

Even though we are clearly not able to make perfect predictions about the world in 2100 - not even good predictions - it seems clear to me that the method of looking into particular threats and their internal mechanisms is much more rational and reliable a way to deduce the future of mankind than some general doomsday arguments. I believe that if we understand the microscopic mechanisms of the dangerous processes in depth, we can make essentially accurate predictions of certain phenomena.

There is absolutely no reason to think that such predictions calculated from an increasingly detailed and accurate microscopic description of these phenomena will agree with some simple stochastic predictions based on the doomsday arguments or the mediocrity arguments. And if the two approaches to make predictions disagree, be sure that your humble correspondent prefers the microscopic analysis of the terrorists, asteroids, or viruses.

Such a contradiction means that one of the frameworks to predict has to be wrong. It is the mediocrity framework that is wrong. The only acceptable reason why a mediocrity argument should be right is a causal mechanism that is included among the laws of Nature. Such a mechanism would have to be somewhat analogous to thermalization: thermalization is a process that naturally makes all microstates with the same values of macroscopic parameters equally likely.

But as soon as we find out that the answers to various questions are actually decided by mechanisms different from such generalized thermalization or as soon as we find out that such hypothetical thermalization mechanisms would contradict causality and other well-established principles, these thermalization mechanisms that were invented to produce uniform distributions are simply falsified.

In the case of the doomsday arguments, we simply know that the answer to the question "When will the last humans die?" manifestly depends on other questions than those that enter the doomsday argument calculations.

Another recent example have been the Jovian citizens - those who live on Jupiter. Should the number of Jovian beings predicted by a theory influence our confidence that a particular theory is right before we actually count how many people live there? I have argued, together with Hartle and Srednicki, that the answer is "No". Theories become more acceptable or less acceptable once we compare their predictions to phenomena that we can already check and once we see an agreement or a disagreement. This is the right method to refine the probability estimates that a theory is correct. Predictions that we are not yet able to test - confirm or rule out - can't influence our confidence in a theory as long as we remain rational.

Analogously, if someone believes that the world should collapse because of some mediocrity argument, he or she is just a victim of another irrational prejudice. This prejudice might have the opposite flavor than the typical prejudices imposed upon our ancestors by Christianity. But this opposite flavor doesn't make these prejudices correct. They are equally irrational as the Christian dogmas.

Moreover, there exist methods to use the mediocrity arguments that lead to very different conclusions. For example, a mediocrity argument may be used to argue that the present can't be a special moment in the history of the Universe (or mankind) because all moments are created equal. Such a conclusion sharply contradicts the gloomy predictions of the usual doomsday arguments.

Summary

If you allow me to summarize, I view all kinds of mediocrity arguments to be nothing else than a very rough method to decide about your expectations long before you know anything about the system you study. Once you start to understand how various systems work, you may instantly realize that the expectations based on the mediocrity principle were just wrong. There exists no God-given rule that an egalitarian viewpoint based on uniform distributions is closer to the truth than the viewpoint of someone who avoids the mediocrity arguments.

Also, if you can prove that there can exist no mechanism that would be creating certain uniform distributions but that would still be consistent with other well-known facts about the Universe, the mediocrity argument is ruled out, too. Various types of thermal equilibrium of intelligent observers who live in different parts of a huge multiverse and at different moments are probably incompatible with the rest of physics we know.

We should carefully avoid unjustified dogmas about the special nature of our environment or our species or ourselves but we should also avoid unjustified dogmas claiming that these things can't be special.

And that's the memo.

Some trips

During the last two weekends (and some days around them), we have been away to see The Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Niagara Falls (boats, caves), Thousand Islands, Salem (105 km on bike in 34 Celsius degrees), New England Aquarium, Navy Yard so I apologize for the silence.

Among the six movies in the bus, I would recommend you The Princess Diaries 2 (2004). A princess of Genovia finishes her college but can't become a queen unless she's married. So she eventually agrees to find and marry a perfect-on-paper husband within weeks. Opposing political forces try to prevent the wedding. Needless to say, the guy whose task is to stop the wedding falls in love with Mia and she loves him, too. Eventually she is able, in the middle of the wedding ceremony, to abolish the queen-must-be-married law, becomes a queen, but marries the real lover anyway later.

My #2 choice is What Women Want (2000). Mel Gibson is a creator of commercials for cosmetics products. A serious incident with a hair dryer (electrical shock) allows him to "hear" what women really think but can't say. He becomes a sex god & successful creator of the commercials by reading his blonde colleague's thoughts. She finally forgives him and a happy end follows.

Why are there gravitons in string theory

Sean Carroll has written a text for Nude Socialist. It has an optimistic name

• String theory: not dead yet. ;-)

After I read the full text, it looks fair even though I am flabbergasted by the very observation that some people apparently think that physicists can suddenly change their opinions about theoretical physics because of a campaign organized mainly by two crackpots.

If an activist such as Al Gore organizes such a campaign in climate science, he can scare all sane people and everyone starts to twist the numbers and publish higher, catastrophic estimates of the future warming. It is hard to figure out that what the scientists produce is a biased pile of nonsense because every number a priori seems as good as every other number.

But in theoretical physics, this is simply not possible. If someone scares you into studying a theory of quantum gravity that differs from string theory, it simply won't work. Ingredients won't fit together. When you're ordered to work on such an inconsistent theory, you will feel like an idiot after you write down the second equation. Rightfully so. The whole machinery will collapse just like if you replace gasoline in your Chrysler by used toilet paper.

Gravity in string theory

But back to the main topic. Some people ask why string theory inevitably predicts spin 2 massless particles that moreover interact as gravitons.



Let me explain. Consider a closed string - a loop of energy - that oscillates in a spacetime. There exist functions

• X^m (sigma,tau)

that describe the embedding of the two-dimensional worldsheet, a history of propagating string, in this spacetime. The laws controlling the oscillations may be described by a two-dimensional field theory defined on this worldsheet - a two-dimensional manifold with a spatial coordinate "sigma" along the string (X^m have periodic conditions in sigma, to make the string closed) and a temporal coordinate "tau".

Its equations of motion are essentially wave equations for the scalars X^m.

For every background geometry (and possibly other fields such as dilaton and gauge fields), there exists a two-dimensional action on the worldsheet. But only some geometries lead to a consistent string theory. In fact, the worldsheet theory must be invariant under conformal transformations - transformations of the worldsheet coordinates that preserve angles - because the internal geometry on the worldsheet and the choice of coordinates on the worldsheet must be unphysical: if they were not, we would introduce new, unwanted degrees of freedom (essentially new spacetime coordinates). Scaling is the most important conformal transformation.

How does the theory on the worldsheet change under scalings? A quantum field theory - and the theory on the worldsheet is an example - has various coupling constants. The change of a "running" coupling constant under scaling transformations is generally encoded in the so-called beta-function. For each coupling constant, you have one beta-function.



At the beginning, we mentioned that for every background geometry, we have one theory on the worldsheet. All numbers describing such a geometry, namely all components of the metric tensor

• g_{mn} (X^k)

as functions of spacetime coordinates, are thus coupling constants of the theory on the worldsheet. How much do they run? What are the beta-functions? It is not hard to see that for every value of a component of the metric tensor, there will be one beta-function. Consequently, the beta-functions will depend on X^k and they will carry two vector indices. Moreover, they can be seen to include second spacetime derivatives of the metric tensor. When you think about the "manifest" spacetime diffeomorphism symmetry, it is not hard to see that the full answer for the beta-functions must actually be proportional to

• R_{mn} (X^k).

If the worldsheet theory is consistent as a string theory, it must be scale-invariant, and the spacetime geometry must thus be Ricci-flat! We have just derived Einstein's equations from scale invariance of a two-dimensional theory. Or at least we have sketched the derivation. If we considered backgrounds with other fields (matter fields), they would also contribute to the beta-function. We would obtain Einstein's equations with the correct right-hand side.

State-operator correspondence

Strings can only propagate consistently on backgrounds that respect the laws of general relativity or its generalizations. Does it mean that there are gravitons? Yes, it does.

Take the worldsheet action for a particular spacetime geometry, and make an infinitesimal (epsilon) change of the spacetime geometry so that the geometry remains Ricci-flat (for example, add a gravitational wave). Look at the difference of these two actions (and divide by epsilon). In other words, differentiate the worldsheet action with respect to the spacetime metric. You will inevitably get another integral over the worldsheet coordinates:

• integral d sigma d tau V(sigma,tau)
  

Any infinitesimal variation of the spacetime metric is thus associated with an operator V(sigma,tau) on the worldsheet. We can make something even more interesting. Cut a very small disk from the worldsheet. The new, short boundary of the worldsheet will look like a closed string. The actual length of this boundary is actually unphysical, because of the scaling symmetry of the worldsheet theory. For every wave functional on this closed string - a possible state in the Hilbert space of states of a single closed string - there will exist a local operator, and vice versa.

This one-to-one map is known as the state-operator correspondence.



Inserting the operator V(sigma,tau) at the point (sigma,tau) of the worldsheet is therefore equivalent to cutting a small disk around (sigma,tau) and integrating over all possible initial conditions on this circle weighted by an appropriate wave functional. For every local operator V(sigma,tau), there exists a state.

But previously, we have found an operator V(sigma,tau) for every possible infinitesimal variation of the background, e.g. for every gravitational wave. When we combine this old result with the most recent one, we see that for every gravitational wave, we discover one state of the closed string. In other words, closed strings will always have a state in their Hilbert space that is canonically associated with a change of the spacetime geometry.

Because closed strings in the Minkowski space - the simplest example (that approximates very well any background whose radius of curvature is much longer than the string scale, a typical distance scale associated with string theory) - are really described by a pile of ordinary harmonic oscillators, it is not hard to see that the states associated with the operators V(sigma,tau) corresponding to an infinitesimal perturbation of the spacetime geometry are spin 2 particles.

The operator V(sigma,tau) for a gravitational wave looks like

• exp(i k.X(sigma,tau)) partial_+ X^m(sigma,tau) partial_- X^n(sigma,tau)
  

It depends on a spacetime momentum vector "k". The complex exponential is multiplied by a holomorphic derivative of one "X" and the anti-holomorphic derivative of another "X". The two free indices "m,n" give it a spin equal to two.

Do the corresponding particles - closed strings with a particular vibration on them - interact as gravitons? You bet. When you deduce the interaction rates among these spin 2 particles composed of a vibrating closed string, the state-operator correspondence guarantees that they will respect the overall equations of motion given by Ricci-flatness - a condition that we have derived from the conformal symmetry.

There are other ways to see that the interactions of the string-theoretical gravitons must exactly respect the rules of general relativity. Every consistent gauge-invariant theory of spin 2 massless particles must inevitably have the diffeomorphism symmetry built in it which essentially guarantees that the theory is a version of general relativity.

You can indeed check that the spin 2 particles obtained from the vibrating closed strings are massless, gauge-invariant, and their interactions are consistent. That assures that the scattering amplitudes will coincide with those obtained from general relativity (in the long distance limit). You may also verify this conclusion by explicit calculations.

AdS/CFT

There are other approaches to string theory that have been shown to describe the same laws of physics. Holography in anti de Sitter spaces is a popular example. In this picture, there is a non-gravitational theory defined on the boundary of the anti de Sitter space at infinity and the key statement is that this theory is equivalent to a theory in the bulk.

The bulk theory is inevitably a gravitational theory. In other words, it is a consistent theory of quantum gravity, also known as string/M-theory. How can you see that there must always be gravity in the AdS bulk?

Well, the reasons are somewhat similar to the worldsheet arguments above. A particle that can go to the boundary of the AdS space corresponds to a local operator on the boundary. In this case, we are interested in the stress-energy tensor on the boundary, a rather special kind of a local operator. For every component of the stress-energy tensor of the boundary theory, there must exist a physical particle in the bulk. Once again, one can prove that the interactions of these particles must be consistent with the diffeomorphism symmetry: they must be gravitons.

There are other reasons why the bulk theory is always a gravitational theory. In non-gravitational theories, the entropy stored in a volume V is proportional to the volume. In gravitational theories, however, the maximum entropy you can squeeze into this volume is carried by a black hole and the black hole entropy is only proportional to the surface area. Gravitational theories secretly carry a small number of degrees of freedom than what you would naively think. This is a key fact that makes holography possible.

Matrix theory

In the BFSS Matrix theory, only highly supersymmetric backgrounds are well-understood. The origin of gravitons in any Matrix theory is always analogous to the case of the maximally supersymmetric, 11-dimensional background of M-theory.

If you have 32 supercharges, you can prove that there are states that preserve one half of the supercharges, namely 16. The broken generators can be combined into 8 complex pairs - 8 creation plus 8 annihilation operators in a fermionic harmonic oscillator. Each such an operator raises or lowers the spin by 1/2. They're exactly enough to climb from

• j_z = -2 ... to ... j_z = +2

because there are (+2 - (-2)) / (1/2) = 8 steps in between. 32 supercharges thus guarantee, once again, that the spin j=2 is the highest spin included in the simplest supermultiplet. Supersymmetry - one of the symmetries that can also be proven in Matrix theory - also implies that general relativity must be included in the effective action, by spacetime arguments.

There are other approaches to string/M-theory that can be proven to describe the same local physics in spacetime. In all cases, one can also explicitly show that the graviton is a part of the story. The methods to find the gravitons that we sketched above look very diverse but in overlapping situations, they are related.

A reply to Gina

Unsuccessfully linked elsewhere: Falsifiability in physics (direct link here)

Gina is one of the more sensible participants of the laymen's discussions about string theory. While the majority of others who think that Smolin's and Woit's comments make any sense are deeply confused people incapable of a rational manipulation with ideas related to theoretical physics, Gina at least sometimes tries to use his or her brain a little bit.

As we can see in this new text, this positive appraisal certainly doesn't hold universally.

Weakest link

Joe writes that a chain of reasoning is only as strong as its weakest link. You would think: what an obvious fact. Gina conjectures that there are cases when it's not true because the weakest links are strengthened by the stronger links. Well, I happen to think that if this occurs, we can be pretty sure that the person is doing something very different from a rational analysis.

Many links can make a lot of sense but if a whole argument depends on a link that cannot be replaced by another link and if this link is weak, the whole argument is weak, too. I simply can't imagine how a rational person could ever disagree with this fact. Weak links can only be ignored if there are other links that can be substituted instead of them into the logical chain and that can play their role, either completely or at least partially.

Gina also writes:

• Certainly Joe’s line is not so positive when it comes to string theory. Some of the links (or steps) are not only weak but yet non-existing.

Well, I think that this pair of sentences is thoroughly incompatible with a scientific mode of thinking. There are two basic problems with these sentences:

• It is not explained what statements are actually being discussed in these sentences: "string theory" is not a statement
  
• The statements are really untrue as long as the actual subject is any important and generally accepted well-known insight of string theory: how can someone be so "certain" about a statement that is demonstrably incorrect?
  

Let me explain a little bit. If science is done properly, we don't reduce all questions to the question "string theory Yes/No" that would be discussed with the help of oversimplified sociological pseudo-arguments: physicists leave this job to the crackpots and journalists.

Instead, physicists are talking about much more concrete, less ambitious questions that can actually be grasped and studied by the scientific method. It is nice if someone is ambitious but if he can't find any chain with strong links that makes any sense, the ambitions are useless or worse.

In junk sciences, things are very different. For example, the "climate change science" tries to transform every observation to an argument showing that "global warming is true", and the statement "global warming is true" is then used to justify any favorite assertion or policy of the people who like this particular junk science.

The similarity with God - something that always sits at the center of all arguments - is obvious. This new kind of God always plays a role in any system of ideas that the climate change "scientists" and their fans produce. Moreover, the links between this new kind of God and the actual observations or predictions are usually weak and sometimes they are upside-down.

But high-energy physics is not another junk science. High-energy physicists actually talk about concrete chains of arguments and facts and their relationships - relationships that usually circumvent the "big questions" and God - and they must very carefully realize that the chain is as weak as its weakest link. It is much more reasonable to connect two things by a chain if these two things are close to one another in which case the chain can often be extremely strong: we don't need to connect A and B by a long chain from A to God to B. When these things are done properly, we can demonstrate things like

• local quantum field theories of the known types can't lead to a predictive theory of quantum gravity at the Planck scale
  
• black holes inevitably have thermodynamic properties such as entropy and temperature
  
• string theory is finite to all orders of perturbation theory and probably beyond
• huge classes of theories at a comparable level of complexity as string theory are much less consistent than string theory
  
• a conformal field theory is equivalent to stringy quantum gravity in the anti de Sitter bulk
• experimentally established physics of gauge theories is connected with - in fact, equivalent to - gravitational physics in higher-dimensional spacetime that includes stringy phenomena
• vacua of string theory are connected
  

and thousands of others in such a way that all links are strong. Whoever thinks that the physicists are so stupid that they are consciously using chains where links are weak has been manipulated by factories producing fog and lies such as Peter Woit and Lee Smolin. Their statements are simply not true and every good theoretical physics grad student knows why.

The fact that many people repeat Woit's and Smolin's stupidities doesn't make these stupidities less stupid. The fact that it has become fashionable in certain communities to say these things doesn't make them intelligent either. Whoever repeats all these silly comments about divergences of string theory, doubts about Maldacena's duality, comments about the heresy of believing a large number of solutions to the fundamental equations of quantum gravity, or speculations about a hypothetical weakness of the string-theoretical picture in general is just an overly simple-minded person whom I assertively encourage to realize his or her severe intellectual limitations.

The weakest link in the string-theoretical image of the world is a direct experimental evidence. Everyone realizes that this is a weak link. It is not easy to get experimental data about quantum gravity. This unsurprising fact is a real difficulty for everyone who actually tries to think about these things and find answers, as opposed to a "critic" who only wants to spread hatred and lies.

No string theorist would dispute that the absence of a direct experimental proof is one of the weakest links in the chain of reasoning that leads us to think that string theory describes the real world at the most fundamental level. It is probably the weakest one. One can try to replace this weakest link by other, more theoretically flavored links, but everyone knows that the replacement is not perfect.

It is extremely important to realize and acknowledge what the weak links actually are. It is extremely important not to hide weak links. It is however equally important not to create the impression that some additional weak links exist if they don't. It is illegitimate to spread lies about weak links, even in the context when you make loads of dopes happy by spreading these lies.

Maldacena's duality

Gina tells us that he or she sees nothing wrong with a research program aimed to find weak points in or counter arguments to the strong Maldacena’s conjectures. Well, there are only three wrong things about this research program:

• this research program is demonstrably wrong because it contradicts things that have been established by careful analyses
  
• the very motivation of the research program is biased
• there is nothing such as strong and weak Maldacena's correspondence.
  

Whoever tries to think that there simply must exist weak links of the AdS/CFT correspondence and is not ready to change his or her opinion even when robust calculations show that the whole duality is unbreakable is a bigot. Moreover, the very approach trying to selectively look for weak links shows a prejudice of the researcher. The scientific community - and in most cases even individual scientists - should try to find out whether a statement is true instead of selectively trying to look for negative or positive arguments only. Gina's recommendation is just another example of a lack of scientific integrity. It is shocking if he or she doesn't realize that.

Needless to say, when things are done properly, we can see that there exist no weak links in the chain of reasoning that leads to the AdS/CFT correspondence, at least in the backgrounds that have been widely studied such as the N=4 gauge theory in four dimensions. Indeed, to falsify Maldacena's duality, it would be enough to find one calculation that would demonstrate that the AdS/CFT correspondence doesn't work. No such calculation exists.

Gina claims that Polchinski has argued that finding errors in a duality is a priori misguided. Polchinski has never claimed so. It is misguided to be looking for errors in "strong" Maldacena's correspondence and it is misguided to talk about "weak" Maldacena's correspondence but it is only misguided a posteriori, after the checks have been carefully made in thousands of papers, checks that imply that no such weak links exist and no available definition of a "weak" Maldacena's correspondence can survive a scrutiny.

Temptation of rigor

Gina shows us that he or she has completely misunderstood the facts about rigor being useless or worse when the assumptions are physically wrong. He or she asks:

• If there are scientific reasons to reject the argument based on “Rehren duality” that is fine, but what does it have to do with rigor in general?

Well, the reason why these two questions are closely related is that Lee Smolin, among many others, is trying to oversell physically meaningless constructions such as the Rehren duality by claiming that the Rehren duality is "rigorous". It may be rigorous but from a physics viewpoint, it is a naive tautology about non-holographic theories, a tautology that has nothing to do with the actual non-trivial content of holography in quantum gravity. Joe only gives his explanations because he has finally noticed that some people misunderstand that by formulating some ideas in a "rigorous" framework, they don't become physically valid.

As our understanding of the laws of physics expands, we are becoming more familiar with the importance of different characteristics of scientific hypotheses. We learn which characteristics eventually decide about the validity and consistency of a physical hypothesis or a framework, and which characteristics are superficial and physically irrelevant clothes.

The Rehren approach is an approach that tries to be careful about superficial characteristics that are physically irrelevant - the approach cares about the shape of the wooden earphones that you know from the cargo cult sciences - while it completely ignores the things that are essential for physical theories. The standard particle physics and string theory approach is the opposite one.

• But, in my opinion, it does not come across very well when (even justified) weaknesses are portrayed as advantages.

No one has ever claimed that a weakness is an advantage. Joe has just explained the obvious fact that having the Rehren style of rigor is not a physical advantage because it is not. And the lack of the Rehren style of rigor is not a physical disadvantage. The actual physical arguments ultimately boil down to an indirect analysis of observations and after the dust is settled, they imply that Maldacena's duality is profound and true while the Rehren duality is a vacuous and silly tautology. The validity of physical theories has nothing to do with the beauty of the fonts in which the equations are written or with the Rehren style of rigor.

Retractions

Gina is surprised that we hardly see any retractions - statements like "I was wrong on this point". Well, Lee Smolin has had more than 25 years to understand why his ideas from 100+ of his mutually incompatible papers are wrong and make these retractions because many leading figures whom I know as well as many other physicists such as your humble correspondent have spent quite a lot of time with explaining him his mistakes in detail.

I fear that if he hasn't listened to rational arguments for more than 25 years (or if he has never remembered the discussions after they ended), he will never do so. Physicists who understand their science probably won't think that Lee's comments and papers make many sense but millions of confused laymen and thousands of journalists will and that is apparently what Lee Smolin really cares about.

And that's the memo.

Record cold temperature: South Africa

South Africa has seen the coldest temperatures on Monday: 3.2 Celsius degrees in Jamestown. At least 21 people died.

Southern California has experienced near-record low temperatures yesterday, too. The seawater temperatures on the Central Coast are currently almost 1 Celsius degree below the normal. Parts of China, parts of Canada, places in Australia, Oregon, Wyoming, and Colorado are under snow.



The picture above shows the current El Nino vs La Nina conditions (it will be updated). It seems as rather neutral conditions closer to La Nina. Idealized El Nino (left, December 1997) and La Nina (right, December 2000) look like this (South America):





The red color represents temperatures above the average for the given place while the blue color are colder temperatures.

Polchinski & science vs Smolin & sociology

A temporary linker-not-thinker recommends you to read Polchinski's answer to Smolin's answer to Polchinski's review of Smolin's book at

Cosmic Variance

Thanks to Charles Tye!

.....

Well, I actually don't like too much when evil, dishonest, and hypocritical people are treated with pink gloves but Polchinski's text is a very good one despite the gloves because Polchinski clearly demonstrates that he has no problems with his shoes. ;-)

Polchinski tries to re-focus the discussion on physics. He first explains that there is no sense in which Smolin's mysterious "catastrophic predictions of a non-positive cosmological constant by string theory" could have been fully logical.

Supersymmetry breaking & vacua

Polchinski continues with evidence that well-known string theorists have always correctly judged our actual knowledge about the vacuum selection problem, both in the literature as well as in their talks. The moduli stabilization is an example where Smolin interprets a major success as a failure.

Existence of gauge theories & burden of proof

Joe explains that when someone like Smolin is making one of his bizarre statements that gauge theories don't exist, in sharp contradiction with explicit constructions (especially by Wilson), he should have an argument that goes beyond the proclamations that "they are an evil mafia", ideally a rational argument. Well, that's about 123 orders of magnitude above what Lee Smolin can offer at this moment. ;-)

In this context, Polchinski analyzes one of Smolin's hundreds of untrue theses, namely that Horowitz and Polchinski have ignored Smolin's conjectured "non-existence of gauge theory." Polchinski politely explains that Horowitz and himself have thought about it much more profoundly than Lee Smolin and all of his fans and allies combined.

Validity of AdS/CFT, rigor, and background independence

Joe repeats that it seems impossible to define Smolin's "weak form of Maldacena's duality", a nonsensical rhetorical sleight of hand that Smolin has borrowed from the creationists who divide evolution to good microevolution and bad macroevolution. ;-)

Polchinski tries to explain Smolin some basic facts about science, e.g. that scientific results are only as valid as their weakest links. Joe reviews some arguments about the temptation of rigor, especially in the context of the so-called Rehren's holography.

To show a bug in Smolin's "paradox" about causality in AdS/CFT, Polchinski mentions his paper with Nick Toumbas and Lenny Susskind. Joe emphasizes that the translation of imprecise words to precise equations is a crucial step in theoretical physics; being unable to make this step is correlated with the tendency to replace scientific arguments by sociological ones.

AdS/CFT is a major example showing that we know how to describe physics that locally looks like very diverse backgrounds - including black hole mergers, evaporation, graviton scattering, and wormholes - which invalidates Smolin's opinions that we can only describe tiny perturbations of certain fixed backgrounds and that string theory is incompatible with background independence.

Constraints vs physical Hilbert spaces

Polchinski explains that only the physical Hilbert space is physical. A larger space including non-physical states (and constraints) may be useful but it is in no way necessary. The Reference Frame has discussed this topic recently in the context of myths about quantum gravity. Smolin apparently tries to sell his confusion about the "necessary" unphysical space to be a "conventional wisdom".

Assorted technical topics: ion physics, cosmology, and unification of concepts

Joe talks about the successes with cosmology, RHIC and heavy ion physics, and warns that analogies are rarely perfect. He also explains why Smolin dislikes the AdS/CFT correspondence so much: it's because according Smolin's point of view, gauge theory is pursued by mere craftspeople while quantum gravity is studied by the real seers - and the AdS/CFT correspondence seems to be a heretical statement that the seers are equivalent to the craftspeople! ;-)

More precisely and less entertainingly, the distinction between certain concepts has really been erased, much like quantum mechanics has erased the gap between particles and waves. Those seers who don't appreciate this progress may be backward-seers but surely not forward-seers. :-)

Polchinski explains what must be done to replace the S-matrix in time-dependent backgrounds and what problems it inevitably brings.

Ultraviolet finiteness

Concerning the discussions about the UV finiteness, Polchinski settles it with another one-line proof. UV divergences always admit an IR interpretation. Zwiebach's decomposition of the moduli spaces is, according to Joe, the simplest framework to see why it is so.

Final comments about ethics

Polchinski shows why Smolin's claims about his ethical high ground are "ironic", given the poor standards of Smolin's intellectual integrity. He praises the diversity of experiences and perspectives that string theorists have and appreciates the "interdisciplinary" topics as a method to avoid excessive specialization.

Noisy picnic and political correctness

On May 12th, two groups organized a noisy picnic on the Quad's public lawn. Harvard students were everywhere around. Many of them were studying: it was a reading period. Many of them are sensitive and can't concentrate well if there is noise around.

It shouldn't be unexpected that someone called the police. If it were a party I couldn't effectively attend and if there were people around me who would also think that the noise is just too much, I would call police, too.

Police has checked whether the people have had any right to be there. The participants were asked to keep the noise down and the picnic continued. You would think that this story ends up with an acceptable compromise.

Except that there apparently exists a whole official foundation at Harvard whose very goal is to guarantee that peace is not what follows after such picnics. The foundation is called

• Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

Its director, S. Allen Counter, has made the following breathtaking remarks:

• This ["I Am Harvard" campaign] is an important step to take in what is clearly a racist community, in which police are allowed to use South African apartheid techniques to harass our students. If there had been 60 white students on the lawn, would police ride up on motorcycles with dark shades to make them show their IDs?

Wow. If someone makes a huge mess in front of the buildings where some of the smartest young people on the planet are supposed to study, it is illegitimate to call police because it is a black people's party and everyone - the whole community of Harvard students - is instantly accused of racism and the director of the "intercultural foundation" is black, too.

Counter's "foundation" is clearly meant to be a tool to intimidate students and other members of the community, politicize all questions, and make sure that a pathetic hypocritical ideology is more important than a tolerable atmosphere during the reading period and other values that used to be associated with the world of Academia.

I apologize but under normal circumstances, being black hasn't allowed one to make a huge mess in the middle of Harvard. In the past, everyone would understand that if someone didn't know why the previous sentence is true, his proclamation that "I am Harvard" shouldn't have been uncritically accepted.

These days, the Academia - universities as well as their individual departments - are literally flooded with similar distasteful foundations and committees whose only purpose is to overfill the community with propaganda and fear and to impose very unbalanced, politically biased code of a certain flavor.

We have a lot of committees for diversity and various departments for women's studies, among others. I think that the very name of these institutions is constructed to guarantee that only one type of ideas, one sex, and one race is being "protected" by these institutions. Feminists have a monopoly in the questions about the women's role in the society. Radical blacks have a monopoly in the questions about the interracial relations. Environmentalists have a monopoly in the committees that are dedicated to the questions of the environment.

Everything is designed to protect the totalitarian influence of one ideology and no one seems to care.

Show me a single influential scholar in a department of women's studies who understands the very basic insight about that discipline, namely why virtually all of scholarly feminism is intellectual garbage. Show me a single director of a foundation for diversity who would protect a white person against a black person. Show me a single chair of a deparmental diversity committee who understands that the lack of conservatives at the universities is much more serious a problem that the lack of a certain skin color.

The very structure of these institutions and foundations is designed to help to indoctrinate, intimidate, and radicalize the members of the academic community. The only good sign here is that Lucy Coldwell and other Crimson staff writers realize that something is wrong here, too. They ask Dr. Counter to apologize. I doubt he will.

In a previous incident, S. Allen Counter "accused" the Crimson that some of its writers were active in Hillel. At Harvard, it must apparently be a crime again - or at least is no longer kosher - to be a member of the largest campus organization of what is arguably the smartest nation in the world.

Outrageous institutions producing fear and tension - e.g. the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations - should be abolished as soon as possible unless the society wants the political correctness to reach the same level of madness as a certain ideology did in the 1930s.

And that's the memo.

Special theories: good and bad

There has been some confusion about the question whether we want theories to be as special as possible or as general as possible.

Costs and benefits

Well, profound theories should ideally maximize the number of diverse yet correct and accurate predictions they make while they should minimize the number of independent and a priori arbitrary & unjustifiable assumptions and the number of other parameters because this kind of freedom allows the theory or the framework to adjust its answers to agree with reality which makes any agreement, even if it occurs, less spectacular and less convincing.

You can view this counting as an analogy of the cost-benefit analysis although the precise quantitative character of these calculations is governed by something like Bayes' theorem.

Lower costs and higher benefits

The more obvious consequence of the rules above is that if you have two theories with the same amount of arbitrariness and assumptions and parameters, the more accurate one and the more generally valid one will be preferred. That shouldn't be controversial.

However, the rules above also make it clear that if two theories predict equally large classes of phenomena with the same accuracy, the theory with a smaller number of independent assumptions, objects, basic concepts, and parameters will be preferred. The situation may look complex but we should realize that parameters, assumptions, and independent building blocks play the same role. They are the "costs" in the cost-benefit analysis.

Independence of the assumptions and inevitable assumptions

Also, we should notice that it is only the independent assumptions that should be counted as costs. If two assumptions can be proven to be equivalent (or at least almost equivalent, or almost certainly equivalent), they will be counted as less than two assumptions. If an assumption can be proven to be mathematically inevitable, it is not a real assumption and it contributes nothing to the "costs".

Random guesses

On the other hand, there surely exist many examples of assumptions that are not inevitable. Some people may believe that all theories should be consistent with the validity of the Old Testament. Other people may believe that theories should confirm egalitarianism, feminism, political correctness, special role of the white race, or an increasing role of the United Nations in the future. A third group of people may believe that a text encoding the theory should look like pi. A fourth group may think that all theories should be fundamentally discrete in character and there should be no way to understand the theories as continuous ones.

Neither of these assumptions that people want to impose upon theories has been rationally justified. Neither of them is inevitable. These assumptions simply pick a random subspace in a larger space of theories that are equally reasonable given the facts we know today.

Instead, these assumptions are just random guesses. They are arbitrary and they were probably formulated because of some unscientific reasons. It doesn't mean that these assumptions must be inevitably incorrect. But they are not inevitably correct. In the counting of costs and benefits, all of them are certainly "costs".

For example, if you consider the discreteness assumption, it is not hard to see that pure logical and rigorous arguments are unable to prove that a discrete theory is better, more consistent, or more valid than a theory with a tiny contribution of continuous physics. This is why the assumption is arbitrary. It is why it is a liability. You are picking a very small subset of possible theories.

Robust theories

On the other hand, the situation is completely different if you think about theories with a small number N of adjustable parameters. In this case, it is possible to prove, logically and/or rigorously, that theories outside the N-dimensional space don't have the same degree of consistency (which may include some kind of essential symmetry).

For example, only the relevant and marginal deformations of a local quantum field theory should be considered as elements of the same narrow class of theories. This characteristic feature of such a theory makes it much more likely that it will be abruptly falsified if it is wrong. Because falsification is expected to be easier, if such a theory survives, the survival is more spectacular and convincing evidence that the theory is on the right track. If there is no room for curve fitting, a detailed agreement of a curve is a huge argument in favor of the theory's validity. Even if the amount of data you can use to check your theory is relatively low, it may often be enough to give extremely strong arguments in favor of the validity of your theory simply because it can often be extremely unlikely that even such a small amount of results is reproduced by a really compact and robust theory.

String theory

String theory has no adjustable continuous parameters. Instead, it has a large configuration space. The existence of this configuration space is not an independent assumption. It is an inevitable conclusion. The whole "landscape" exists somewhere in the multiverse or at least in the abstract space of allowed solutions.

But you would surely protest that a huge, dense landscape is effectively equivalent to a large number of parameters. Is it?

First of all, it is not true that all conceivable theories can be well approximated by string-theoretical vacua. Despite their large number, string-theoretical vacua imply certain general predictions. This kind of predictions is discussed in the swampland program.

Even the predictions about the quantities that are relatively adjustable by a choice of the vacuum may be highly non-trivial simply because the set of vacua is far from being dense as far as some parameters go.

But imagine that the discrete space of solutions is approximately dense and it covers the same set of possibilites that may be more or less covered by a less sophisticated theory. Once you could determine the exact vacuum and make much more accurate predictions that you could make with the effective field theory, there would be no reasonable doubt that the theory predicting discrete possibilities is more complete and that it is closer to the truth. But should you believe that it is better before you determine whether string theory can give the accurate numbers?

My answer is probably No. If string theory were only able to cover a similar parameter space by discrete points, I would think that it would not be progress a priori, before you check whether the more detailed predictions are valid. Of course, even before you make the test, the stakes become higher if you have a more predictive theory (string theory with a discrete subset of the parameter space, in this case).

Reducing independent assumptions

But the structure of the parameter spaces is not the only difference between string theory and effective field theories. String theory reduces the arbitrariness - it reduces the costs - in many different directions. In Lagrangian effective field theories, the existence of different fields with different values of spin represents a lot of independent assumptions. In string theory, these fields and particles - including gravity - are unified which reduces the number of independent assumptions.

You might argue that the existence of the typical gauge theories with spin-0 and spin-1/2 particles is inevitable because one can prove, in some sense, that nice, interacting, but weakly-coupled theories must always look like that at low energies. You would be right. Indeed, at the level of effective field theories, we know what the right description is. The gauge theories with matter are kind of inevitable and some experimental tests have been sufficient to determine the fields and interactions.

But the question really is: What is there beyond these effective theories? Any step to reduce the arbitrariness must be considered seriously. One possible answer is that there could be another local quantum field theory. But except for grand unification and supersymmetry, we don't know any method to reduce the degree of complexity and arbitrariness that would still agree with the Standard Model. Moreover, the framework of effective field theory almost certainly breaks down in the case of gravity.

String theory is the only structure we know that is not equivalent to local quantum field theory but that is nevertheless able to reproduce all of its physics (including gravity at the quantum level).

A priori, we shouldn't have expected that a randomly chosen framework would correctly predict the existence of spin-0, spin-1/2, spin-1 particles with spin-2 gravity and the right interactions and the right incorporation of the quantum effects. However, string theory is able to do that (and no other theory can), besides dozens of other successes. I think that this result itself is already such a non-trivial confirmation of the theory that it is unreasonable to believe that string theory could be wrong.

Of course that there exists much more evidence in favor of string theory and physicists would prefer to have much more still. But imagine that you are not an aggressive fanaticized crackpot who only wants to criticize - like readers of an infamous blog at Manhattan - but instead, you are a balanced person who is trying to evaluate the probabilities, as accurately as you can, that a given set of ideas is right or wrong. I am convinced that even with the very basic list of predictions above, you would already have to conclude that it is very unlikely that string theory could have passed these tests by chance and that it could still be wrong.

Other things in the list of top twelve results decrease the probability that string theory is wrong further.

It is hard to design a quantitatively accurate scheme to calculate the confidence levels in such complex situations. But if you correctly compare the ability of string theory to confirm the well-established principles and objects of physics with the ability of a generic theory at a comparable level of complexity, I am sure that you must conclude that the probability that string theory is wrong is very low.

Errors

I am afraid that too many people are making serious mistakes in this general kind of appraisal. Some people, for example, confuse inevitable facts from random assumptions. Well, inevitable facts are not the same thing as random assumptions. Random assumptions are costs; inevitable facts are not. The fact that quantum mechanics can't be modified or deconstructed in various ways is a fact; the opinion that all degrees of freedom should be discrete is not.

When we look at the benefits and successes, people are making a lot of similar mistakes, too. Some people confuse direct or indirect verification against experimental well-established facts with an agreement of their favorite theory with some other random unjustified preconceptions. Well, these are, once again, very different things.

Real physics vs constantly repeated propaganda

The source of our confidence that string theory is correct is based on its ability to reproduce, with a much smaller number of independent assumptions, the outcomes of real experiments that depend on quantum field theory, gauge theory; interactions of spin-1/2 fermions, related phenomena including running couplings, confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, spontaneous symmetry breaking; tested results of general relativity; and largely inevitable conclusions of semiclassical gravity such as black hole thermodynamics.

All of these criteria are positive because the statements that have been reproduced are experimentally settled or they are settled by a combination of experiments and a very robust reasoning and calculations. Such an agreement is thus a huge benefit.

On the other hand, if someone assumes that a theory should be discrete or spacetime-free, he or she is increasing the costs because these adjectives, much like dozens of others, are a matter of unverified religion and ideology, not facts. As long as we are rational, there is nothing a priori good about a theory that agrees with these adjectives. Reducing your attention to a small class of theories that are consistent with all these arbitrary assumptions makes the work of a scientist more likely to be worthless. Indeed, if a scientist is unable to transcend prejudices some of which (or all) are almost certainly incorrect, he may be viewed as a narrow-minded zealot.

I am convinced that this wrong approach isn't included in string theory because the theory builds on assumptions that are either demonstrably true or inevitable given other assumptions that have been shown to be extremely likely to be true. There is no circular loop here and, more importantly, the individual steps can be trusted. Conclusions are inevitable or almost inevitable consequences of each other.

This situation strikingly differs from the situation in various kinds of sloppy thinking such as loop quantum gravity where every new work adds new arbitrary assumptions and makes it increasingly unlikely that the conclusions of a paper are right.

Of course I can still imagine that despite its rigidity and its non-trivial agreement with the basic well-established principles of physics, string theory will be shown to be wrong. But such a moment would be similar to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. It would be a spectacular event if such a robust structure could be destroyed.

On the other hand, a collapse of loop quantum gravity and hundreds of other similar proposals that would like to claim to be competitors are more similar to erosion of those sand houses in North Africa that must be re-built twice a year. It doesn't really make any sense to ask whether such buildings can stand or not because the identity of these buildings is not well-defined.

And that's the memo.

Prague Mayor Pavel Bém on top of Mount Everest

Two days earlier, first purely Czech female scaled the peak

Klára Poláčková (29), a consultant born in Prague, became the first Czech female citizen to conquer Mt Everest on 5/16. Congratulations!

She went there together with Tashi Tenzing, the grandson of Tenzing Norgay who got to the top with Edmund Clinton in 1953.

Pavel Bém MD, the neo-liberal mayor of Prague who was allowed to go despite some controversies in Prague followed by other controversies in China that didn't give him the permission (so he switched to Nepal), was one day from the top when Poláčková already got there.

He was lucky enough to become the 10th Czech to defeat the peak today (on Thursday, the weather was bad). He has also become the second mayor to reach the tip - and Joe Quimby has only gotten there in the form of a sticker. In Bém's case, the victory was without oxygen, unless the plans were changed in the final stage.



Technical comment: I need to go to New York to welcome my father now. Sorry for the moderation.

NYT about Cimrman: memo from Plzeň

The New York Times have an article about Mr Jára da Cimrman. The article about the greatest Czech of all time who has made his greatest achievements at the beginning of the 20th century is titled a "memo from Pilsen" which is my hometown where I will return in July.



Cimrman was born around 1870 in Vienna and he became the greatest playwright, poet, composer, teacher, traveller, philosopher, inventor, detective, and athlete of his era. An asteroid is named 7796 Jaracimrman and hundreds of places in the Czech Republic remember the moments when Cimrman visited them.



Zdeněk Svěrák (left) and Ladislav Smoljak (right) have been two leading historians who have studied Cimrman for decades: they are still the supreme cimrmanologists. More precisely, they became the founders of the Theater of Jára da Cimrman. Their humor is a wise and fine brand of Czech humor even though I find the NYT's description of their humor as "anti-communist sarcasm" to be somewhat misleading because I think it has mostly been apolitical humor.

While it seems rather likely that Jára da Cimrman has never existed, which is why he was disqualified in 2005 from the "Greatest Czech contest" even though he has otherwise clearly won it :-), let me admit that there exist rumors that either Václav Klaus or your humble correspondent might be Jára da Cimrman, after all. But for obvious reasons, I can neither confirm nor deny these rumors.

And that's the memo from Pilsen.

Klaus: a green "revolt of mobs" scares me

Today, "Hospodářské noviny", a Czech counterpart of the Financial Times, published an interview with Czech president Václav Klaus.

The Associated Press, AFP, DPA, Czech radio, Czech TV news (WM in Czech), and Czech Press Agency report, too.

Could you please tell our readers who obviously haven't yet read your book why you wrote it?

Because I am very worried about some people's far-reaching attempts to reconstruct the world and revolutionize the behavior of the society. These people use some highly questionable data and hypotheses to deduce what is happening today and what will be happening in the world. And I view it as a threat for freedom. It is not a marginal topic for me. It is not just my wilful act or an attempt to penetrate into media with a novel opinion.

In your book, you distinguish between ideological environmentalists and scientific ecologists. Which people in Czechia belong to these categories?

Environmentalism is a general tendency, a conglomerate of opinions, which is why it is so difficult to identify it with one person.

If we compare it to Marxism, we see that Marx was transparent as he has summarized his ideas in his key manuscripts. A great opus by an author who would describe the theses of environmentalism at the highest level of consequentiality doesn't exist. I don't see such a readable enemy at the ideological level. Of course that I have my enemies on the media-political level. In the global context it is undoubtedly Al Gore; in the Czech context it is the Green Party that is currently represented by its chairman.

It thus seems that the "green movement" is a spontaneous direction, isn't it?

On one hand, it is spontaneous: there surely exists no grand network that would connect all these people into one Internet server. On the other hand, it is a community of people who are connected by their membership in various institutions where they communicate with each other and organize things.

What else do they have in common? Is it some world view or their interpretation of certain problems?

If they share something, it is primarily their huge ambitions and a complete lack of humbleness. It is an attitude that history keeps on bringing us under diverse flags and slogans. It is an attempt of those people to become the center of all events and to change the world according to their visions. And I fear that this issue has the capacity to mobilize larger groups of people: that's why I say that environmentalists are able to initiate a "revolt of the mobs".

This topic is likable and understandable for most people. Catastrophes are always sold well and the extrapolated catastrophicity is now even higher than it used to be in the context of Marxes. I don't think that the goal of these people is to reduce freedom deliberately. When I am going to talk to Al Gore, he will deny it. But I insist that what he proposes does suppress freedom. And it is sad he is not thinking about the consequences.

Doesn't the capacity to mobilize result from a change in the important values - namely that the protection of the environment has become more important a value than anything else?

I understand this idea but I don't think that it is a dominant issue. It is more about these people's ambition to look for any topic, any flag, or any umbrella under which they can hide. And I simply don't believe that they have an authentic interest in nature.

We were more interested in the resonance with the society. Do you think that the protection of the environment only resonates with the society because it is a likable and populistic topic?

No. The resonance in the society is obviously given by the fact that the wealth of a majority of the world has increased well above the level of subsistence. And I believe that similar problems are going to be solved spontaneously, by free acts of Man. We don't need a prophet who thinks that he sees things infinitely more luminously than the rest of us, a prophet who wants to pull the brakes.

In your book about environmentalism it is argued that the discussion about climate change is as unfair as the preparation of the new building of the national library at Letná. What do these two cases share?

They are two almost identical phenomena. Last week I was reading Quadrant, an Australian weekly that I have been following for a long time. There was an interesting essay asking whether obesity is the greatest problem of mankind. I would write an identical text as the author.

The argumentation is the same. Our goal should be to avoid taking things out of their context; to stop looking at isolated effects; we should always see its positive and negative consequences. Both discussions should follow the same model or template, both methodologically and structurally. In reality, the discussion about the national library looks very different. That's the real source of my presidential feeling that I should help to initiate serious discussions about these topics.

What are exactly the similarities between the discussions about environmentalism and about the new library?

I am not sure whether we should expand this debate too much ...

... at least one characteristic feature.

I think that the primordial motivation resulting from a lack of humility and from arrogance is something that these two topics share.

Your contributions to the climate debate are exclusively focusing on economics. You view economics as a general science about the human interactions: you even think that it is the queen of sciences...

... yes, it is a science par excellence.

You say that economics helps us to understand that the value of entities doesn't exist per se because it is always a human being who determines it. Is it also true for ecosystems and the diversity of species? Cannot diversity be a value that transcends the economical methods to evaluate things?

Biodiversity is arguably a value but, again - it is a value for a human being. Without man, it has no value. Biodiversity or the aesthetic beauty of rocks on Mars isn't a value per se. It makes no sense to say the word "value" without a man. There is no value "an sich". There's no criterion that would be independent of existing people. An eye must observe the diversity. Otherwise it makes no sense.

Economics is nothing else than a rigorous analysis of any human problem from this vantage point. In this sense, economics is the most general social science. Economists are being criticized for their effort to promote economics to an imperial science that dominates over others. But I am convinced that economics is indeed the most advanced social science as far as its methodological depth goes.

Economics studies relationships and interactions between people. Each interaction has a character of an "exchange" and in every case, "something is changed for something else". That's why economics may be applied to numerous kinds of relationships that have nothing to do with the words such as market or profit. The perspective of economics is much wider. It is a breakthrough that dramatically opens the horizons to the mankind.

At the end of the chapter "What we should do", you recommend that instead of fights against the greenhouse gases, we should be building standard economic mechanisms because the economic rationality (including thrift) also implies environmental rationality. It looks like strong coffee.

My interpretation of economic rationality is broader than a trivialized, short-term effort to maximize the profit of one firm or another. We have already talked about it a few minutes ago. I even think that there is nothing above economic rationality. It doesn't mean that this rationality can't ever be consciously abandoned. But it is clear that instrumentally speaking, it is a very useful hypothesis to grasp the world.

If I imagined for a while that I would be more friendly towards environmentalists and switched to their mode of thinking, I still can't envision how I could ever define and refine the notion of "environmental rationality". The term is vacuous as it stands. Surely it can't mean to leave nature in the same random state where it was in a random minute of its history. Could something like that be a norm, an ideal, a reference point, a benchmark to determine everything else? Nothing like that makes any sense.

Recently I walked through the Průhonice park in Prague and I enjoyed the beauty of the place. I was thinking that if someone started to demolish it, he would be ruining nature. But what kind of nature? The park didn't exist two hundred years ago. It is likely that there were even no trees over there. You see that the only good benchmark is a human perspective.

Does it mean that you understand environmental efforts at the local level?

The environmental care and thrift is something I endorse and I always will. My colleague Mr Jakl may confirm that I am upset whenever the lights in his office are on even though no one has been in the room for two hours. I have always looked at these things in this way although some pundits will surely try to caricature this attitude.

At the end of your book, you offer an example that is similar to one by your predecessor, Václav Havel, who has complained about the useless trips of butter through Europe. In Japan, you were offered the local mineral water. But in the following day during a lecture, you were given French Evian and you were thinking about the environmental expenses it required -what it takes to import Evian to Japan. Isn't it a typical example showing that the environmental and economical rationalities are incompatible?

I don't believe that it may be profittable to import Evian. It may be profittable for a very particular subject that exports water from France. But it can't be economically profittable from a broader perspective, especially from the consumer's perspective because the price of Evian exceeds the price of the Japanese mineral water.

I also scowl at Czech restaurants that immediately bring me San Pelegrino. I would always tell them No, I want Matonni, a mineral water from Carlsbad, Bohemia, because it is x-times cheaper. Someone may think that if he's caught on a photograph drinking Evian in Japan, it gives him or her a certain stature in the society.

In the 1970s, Fred Hirsch wrote a nice text about luxurious goods and economically perverse behavior. The text is actually about the "positional goods" theory - a theory about goods that give people a certain social status which makes it profittable to consume it.

I don't think that this phenomenon confirms a conflict of economic and environmental rationalities. Instead, the theory about it is a neutral description of what Mr Jakl describes as a "collision of environmentalism with a snob".

But the contemporary, very rich Western societies are indeed controlled in this "perverse way", as you say, increasingly more frequently and this behavior is becoming a norm. It is the brand that sells, not the real value and usability.

As an economist, I don't believe that the people's needs are bound from above. The needs will always be ahead of what is available. A la longue I don't have a feeling that we have already approached a "stop moment" after which people can do nothing else than silly things. The history of our civilization doesn't show anything like that.

Economists strongly controvert concepts that argue that people actually don't want the goods but they are just confused and manipulated by advertisements and marketing. Not even you are so saturated that you wouldn't know "what to do with your pinworms", as we say, that you would have to go to buy the shirt into an ever more expensive shop. I don't believe that this phenomenon occurs.

But you are right that there exists a different point P (perception) at which we start to notice things such as wasting and ecology. I am not denying that because it would be childish.

A strong theme of your book is your belief that men will always have some new ideas how a new, previously unknown or unused resource can be exploited. Aren't you afraid that this progress must inevitably end somewhere or that this creativity will be diminished e.g. by politicians?

I have two comments to say about it. First. Yes, it is a belief: it is a belief in Man. It is an optimistic belief in Man and so far we can see no ends of his ability to invent. On the contrary, people have a feeling that their abilities will keep on growing. There doesn't exist a tiniest reason to abandon this belief.

In fact, even the wisdom about the "knowledge society" - something that is otherwise completely incomprehensible to me - says the same thing, doesn't it? Environmentalists and the "knowledge society" promoters are often the very same people and they live with this gigantic contradiction.

The second comment I want to make is about the interests. People can have myopic economical or political interests as well as interests resulting from imperfections of the markets. In the short term these factors may act negatively but from the viewpoint of eternity, these effects become uninteresting.

You say that environmentalism is a new religion, a new belief. But you have just used the words "belief in Man". It also penetrates throughout your book: it is a belief in invention and technical progress whose factual support is speculative in nature. Aren't you offering just another kind of belief? Moreover, a belief in a man who has been, as a concept, killed in social sciences decades ago?

I don't view the words "belief" and "religion" to be forbidden words that can't be pronounced. I am not ashamed of these words and much like the word "market", I may often use the words in a much more general sense. I don't abominate these words.

You write that even God is no longer around and human rationality is the only thing that remains. Is your "belief in Man" a belief in human rationality, a belief in reason?

The collocations "belief in rationality" and "belief in reason" have connotations that could be misleading. I would prefer to say that my belief is a belief in the standard human behavior.

So is it a belief in "human naturalness"?

Yes, that may be better than the rationality in a certain caricaturable interpretation.

But that already looks like pure metaphysics...

Yes, it is metaphysics par excellence. All of us are metaphysicists.



Václav Klaus II and other members of Greenpeace explain the new book "Pancakish, not round planet".

Michal Růžička, Petr Fischer, Hospodářské noviny, 5/16/2007.

Additional often climate articles on this weblog

• Viscount Monckton & global warming
• Naomi Oreskes & claims about consensus on global warming
• Temp rises before gas concentrations, not the other way around
• IQ2 US duel: skeptics beat believers
• Relations between the solar activity and cosmic rays & cloudiness
• 2006: a year of setbacks for climate hysterics
• 2006: coolest average temperature since 2001

Blue, not Green Planet: climatologists react

Václav Klaus's new book will be released tomorrow. What is endangered? Climate or freedom? Of course, your humble correspondent feels honored to be referred to. The party celebrating the book will be broadcast on the CT24 TV channel and online at 4:30 am EDT.

Czech climate scientists respond. Mr Jan Pretel thinks that Klaus puts economy above the scientific ecology. However, he agrees with the Czech president that mankind shouldn't make enormous investments into emission reductions without thinking carefully about them.

Despite some disagreement with certain portions of the book, the text has been praised by Mr Radim Tolasz, another climatologist: "The only thing he has done is to stand firmly on the other side and offer many diverse counter-arguments which balances the whole discussion. And that could be useful."

This comment by the professional could have been more useful than my whole recommendation of the book that probably appears on the cover... ;-)

Nevertheless, both climatologists agreed with each other that even though 0.6 Celsius degree change of temperature can be negligible for Václav Klaus and for mankind, it is not negligible for Earth. That's apparently another result of a consensus of Czech climate scientists. :-)

However, you can see that there are no hysterical emotions associated with the book. I think that this lobby doesn't really exist in the Czech Republic. In the early 1990s, there were many articles in Lidovky about global warming. At that time I thought it was a cheap scientific topic that overshadowed serious sciences and those intellectuals who kept writing about climate were superficial but I think it is fair to say that they have never become influential in the Czech Republic.

The book includes a picture of Klaus as a burning heretic: do you already believe global warming?

Klaus: a real defender of the environment

Don't imagine that Klaus wants people to waste energy and resources. Quite on the contrary. He also defends mass transportation that shouldn't be called "socka" (socialist transport). We shouldn't reduce our wealth to having a maximum number of things imported from a maximal distance.

He also mentions the story from Japan where they offered him Evian, the French mineral water, in one of the most famous Japanese spa. I've heard this story during his talk at Cato. One of the most powerful arguments for the natural character of the warming according to Klaus is global warming on other planets.

Happening (update)

In the Slavia café where the book was "christened", Klaus mentioned that his book is not really about temperature measurements since he doesn't want to "go into the climatologists' cabbage". It is about an extrarordinarily serious attack against freedom. In front of the café, Greenpeace held their own happening. They had a duplicate Klaus in a rubber mask who preached that the Earth was flat and no geographer can say anything else. They were promoting their own book called "Flattish, not Round Earth: What Is Endangered: Climate or Common Sense?"

Klaus has explained that this movement was an example of those who profit from the current fashionable wave while many politicians and scientists are motivated by political or financial benefits. The book should promote a rational debate about the issue, he said.

Some elementary myths about quantum gravity

A freshman talks how excited he is about Carlip's lectures at angryphysicist.wordpress.com. There is some confusion in the text that comes from various sources. Because I keep on hearing some of these opinions from physicists who are often much older than freshmen, including new grad students, it may be a good idea to mention them explicitly.

Myth: The right theory of quantum gravity may be completely non-local

Well, in reality, the correct theory must be very accurately local because the local effective theories have been verified experimentally. Locality means that we can't send signals faster than light and different regions of space can't influence each other immediately: it is an important part of the relativistic description of reality.

Quantum gravity is almost certainly somewhat non-local when processes like black hole evaporation are taken into account: this feature seems to be necessary to preserve the information and almost certainly follows from string theory. But a correct theory must always explain why these non-local processes have a tiny impact on the usual observable phenomena otherwise the theory is dead.

Myth: Quantization of gravity implies that spacetime is discrete

This myth, much like many other myths, arises because their authors use certain words whose meaning they don't understand well and they only use the methods of comparative literature - a manipulation with fuzzy words instead of sharp equations - to derive their conclusions. In this particular case, it's important to realize that the word "quantization" is really used in two inequivalent albeit related ways.

Quantization of a physical theory is a method to construct a quantum theory whose classical limit agrees with a given classical theory: the classical observables are promoted to operators and a Hilbert space is found. Such a process implies that the spectrum of some observables becomes discrete but it is not true that the spectrum of all observables is discrete. For example, the spectrum of both position and momentum remains continuous in quantum mechanics unlike e.g. the energy of the harmonic oscillator.

Discreteness of allowed values - another meaning of "quantization" - can sometimes follow from the rules of quantum mechanics but sometimes it doesn't. More concretely, it is extremely unlikely that quantum gravity in 4 dimensions or higher has any useful description in terms of discretized geometry because such a discreteness would violate certain important symmetries of the laws of physics - and more generally, it is simply an unjustified, extremely constraining assumption. It is a random guess that is unlikely to be true much like when you conjecture that Elvis Presley will be found alive on the Moon. Theories without any continuous description form an unlikely, infinite-codimension subclass of possible theories.

Myth: Quantization of gravity makes no sense at all

If we apply the standard rules of quantization to general relativity, we end up with a theory that works pretty well, until we study it very accurately. At the crudest qualitative level, there is no real difference between electrodynamics and general relativity. Both of them imply that waves are composed of particles and their interactions are calculable by Feynman diagrams or related devices. Photons have spin one while gravitons have spin two. But it's a difference in technical details.

Problems with naively quantized gravity only emerge if we study it at a multi-loop level and discover infinitely many types of divergences, or if we look at situations where the causal structure differs from the causal structure of empty space. In perturbation theory, gravitons are thought of as infinitesimal perturbations of the background whose causal structure is respected. On the other hand, one can see that this fact doesn't mean that semiclassical gravity can't be used for other curved backgrounds.

Myth: Gravity may be classical

It is impossible to couple a classical system with a quantum system consistently. According to quantum mechanics, the positions of objects are quantum observables that can have different probability amplitudes for having different values. Because these positions influence the right-hand side of Einstein's equations, it follows that the metric tensor is an operator with a probabilistic interpretation, too. It can't be otherwise. If something depends on a "random generator", everything else that is influenced by it depends on this random generator, too.

Myth: Only expectation values of operators follow their equations

The angry physicist writes something like the expectation values of Einstein's equations, claiming that maybe, no other laws can be valid. This is a misunderstanding how quantum mechanics works. Quantum mechanics implies a linear equation for the time evolution of the wave function, if I use the Schrödinger picture. This picture is equivalent to precise laws for the evolution of all & whole operators in the Heisenberg picture.

If only some expectation values followed the laws and others would not, one could show that the laws of physics either don't determine some probabilities at all - in which case they wouldn't really determine almost anything, if you think about it - or they would be equivalent to a non-linear Schrödinger equation because the expectation value, for example, is bilinear in "psi". It is very likely that any attempt to formulate such new laws for "psi" or the equivalent laws for the operators must be (very) non-local if it is (very) inequivalent to a standard linear Schrödinger equation.

Myth: Gravity waves could have continuous energy

The existence of classical gravitational waves, predicted by general relativity, has been indirectly verified by observations of pulsars and awarded by a Nobel prize in the 1990s. Some could still argue that the energy of a gravitational wave doesn't have to be a multiple of the graviton energy because the gravitational field is different from the electromagnetic field.

That's not really possible. A monochromatic gravitational wave is a classical solution that is periodic in time. Because such a classical wave must be allowed to have a somewhat fuzzy value of the ADM energy, we see that the different quantum microstates contributing to the classical configuration must have energies that differ by a multiple of "E=hf". If the differences were different, the quantum time-dependent phase "exp(Et/i hbar)" wouldn't be synchronized for different microstates and some observables in the classical wave would thus be aperiodic.

To summarize, "E=hf" is a universal law for the quantum of energy carried by any kind of a wave in a quantum theory. In other words, gravitons must exist.

Myth: Quantum stress-energy tensor isn't conserved

I don't exactly know why but the angry physicist argues that the covariant divergence of "T_{mn}" is not zero in the quantum theory. Well, the quantum equations should follow the classical ones with a hat. The only new subtlety are ordering ambiguities that can be rephrased as higher-derivative operators generated by quantum loops. But surely one wants to construct a theory whose effective description reproduces the normal continuity equation. This continuity equation follows from Einstein's equations and Einstein's equations follow from the defining formulae of the theory - such as the action in the path integral. There can't be any contradiction here.

Myth: The only task is to add nice hats

In the semiclassical approximation where only the terms proportional to the first power of Planck's constant are considered, quantum gravity is analogous to quantum electrodynamics and other quantum field theories. It produces a Fock space and can be used to calculate interactions in the same approximation. However, when we study the theory more accurately, this picture is spoiled by new divergences and related problems.

Nature doesn't guarantee and cannot guarantee that the right description of the theory will always involve the metric tensor. Actually, it is almost certain that above 3 spacetime dimensions, such a pure-metric quantum theory of gravity is impossible. Some people want to mimic the cargo cult and invent nicer shapes of their headphones - the hats above the operators in this case - but they are not ready to modify their fundamental assumption that the metric tensor is everything there is.

The known facts make it extremely unlikely that the metric remains the correct degree of freedom at the Planck scale, in the heavily quantum regime. The known facts include the non-renormalizable UV divergences of gravity - analogous to those in Fermi's theory where a more UV complete theory was later found (gauge theory). They also depend on the decades of failures to make any sense out of multi-loop pure gravity in 4 dimensions or higher, and the complete consistency of the analogous calculations that has been observed in string theory. I think that only a bigot could fail to learn a lesson here.

Myth: In the context of singularities, the only goal of quantum gravity is to make things look finite

This myth is shared by most of the loop quantum gravity and arguably by some string theorists, too. The real problem with a singularity is not that it looks infinite. The real problem with a singularity is that it cripples the predictive power of your theory. When things are infinite, you can't safely subtract them from each other. You don't know how much infinity minus infinity is. That's why you don't know what will happen which is the bad thing.

You can regulate a theory with singularities in many ways but generically, the result will depend on the details how you regulate them. This means that you have made no progress whatsoever. The dependence of your physical predictions on the cutoff is just another way of reformulating the unpredictability resulting from the singularity. It is, once again, just a superficial method to paint an ugly face by pink color but it doesn't change the essence of the problem.

The only way to really solve the problem is to replace the singular theory by a theory that only requires us to determine a finite number of parameters to make the predictions that the theory is supposed to make. Any other procedure to make things smooth or discrete is a physically worthless sleight of hand. This conclusion, of course, applies to bizarre statements such as the statement that loop quantum gravity solves some ultraviolet problems of quantized general relativity. It doesn't. It only looks at these problems through too strong eyeglasses.

Myth: The Hilbert space of black hole microstates is universal

This is really Steve Carlip's myth but it naturally fits into this text. In string theory, one can calculate the entropy of huge classes of black holes and other black things with charges, angular momenta, and diverse topologies in various dimensions. The calculation typically reduces to the Cardy's formula: the microscopic machine to get the right exponential degeneracy of states boils down to the same method of counting of states in a conformal field theory.

But the nature of this conformal field theory may depend on the context. In various backgtrounds, it has a different spectrum of operators, it has different degrees of freedom. Steve Carlip doesn't like it and he would prefer if all black holes had the same degrees of freedom. Well, I think it's obvious that his conjecture that the degrees of freedom are universal has been falsified. There are different CFTs that describe black hole microstates in different backgrounds. Even the local spacetime description has different degrees of freedom because the metric is coupled to different kinds of matter fields in different contexts.

The only statistical-physics thing shared by all the black holes is the leading Bekenstein-Hawking estimate for the entropy. It is shared because all the black holes live in theories that share the metric tensor and the Einstein-Hilbert term in the action. All other terms and degrees of freedom in the action depend on the context which is really why the details of the entropy counting depend on the situation, too.

Myth: The problem of time means that everyone must work with non-local observables all the time

General relativity in a generic background has no gauge-invariant local observables. Local observables should be associated with points but there is no way to select "the" point: coordinates don't have a direct physical meaning in general relativity. We can only identify a point by its position relatively to other point which requires us to deal with an extended region of space: such an approach is non-local.

But it doesn't really mean that the majority of physics must be reduced to a proper way to define and manipulate with non-local gauge-invariant quantities. It is a myth spread primarily in the algebraic quantum field theory community that one is never allowed to work with observables that are not gauge-invariant. In reality, it is only the final physical predictions that must be gauge-invariant. But the intermediate calculations don't have to be gauge-invariant.

The main advantage of gauge-dependent degrees of freedom is that we can use them, after all. This simplifies many calculations. Additional auxiliary degrees of freedom and symmetries make many theories more elegant and they make the calculations more efficient. There is nothing wrong with unphysical degrees of freedom as long as the final results are physical. Insisting that gauge-dependent degrees of freedom are banned is an irrational denial of a successful technology that grew increasingly more important in the 20th century.

Myth: We don’t know how to renormalize wave functions, and thus cannot really know how to get probabilities

Probabilities are always obtained as squared absolute values of probability amplitudes and there is never a problem with the normalization of the thing that is properly called a wave function - the state vector. It can simply be defined to be normalized to one. What we call "wave function renormalization" in quantum field theory is actually a renormalization of the field operators, not the actual wave function. The word "wave function" is only used for these operators because they may be thought as arising from single-particle wave functions by the second quantization.

Myth: "We don’t know if quantum gravity is generally covariant" is a meaningful sentence

As argued above, gauge symmetries are a useful technical tool to formulate many theories in an elegant way and make calculations more straightforward. Nevertheless, gauge symmetries aren't a part of the real physics. The question whether a theory has a gauge symmetry is not a physical question. There are ways to calculate physical quantities such as the S-matrix without a gauge symmetry - e.g. string theory in the light cone gauge - but it doesn't mean that there aren't other approaches. Moreover, I think that every theory that deserves to be called "quantum gravity" must respect general covariance in any context in which the metric tensor is a good degree of freedom. If one formulates or tries to formulate a theory with the metric tensor, we thus know, by definition, that quantum gravity is generally covariant.

If someone looks for a theory where it's not, he is really solving a very different problem and he can't use the usual justifications of general relativity to promote his ideas. People should try to be careful before they declare their assorted ideas to be relevant for quantum gravity. Gravity is associated with concepts such as Newton's law, general covariance, and gravitons. If neither of these objects is present, the idea is not connected to gravity.

Myth: The Hamiltonian is 0 in any Hamiltonian formulation of classical general relativity

The Hamiltonian is only zero in a compact space. However, whenever one can define asymptotic quantities such as the ADM energy, the Hamiltonian has additional boundary terms that make it nonzero and identical to this ADM energy. The vanishing of the Hamiltonian in a certain situation is not a problem of a theory of quantum gravity; instead, it is a proof that we have asked a wrong question. If we want to fix the problem, the solution is not to look for a different dynamical theory but rather for a better question.

Myth: A major task for quantum gravity is to find a nice field redefinition

Field redefinitions should be viewed as technicalities. A correct field redefinition can be useful to find a solution to a problem. But it can't allow one to find the right theory if it were impossible without the field redefinition. Every ambiguity in certain coordinates or degrees of freedom can be translated to an analogous ambiguity formulated in terms of the redefined degrees of freedom. Every inconsistency or other problems may be translated as well.

Myth: Ordering ambiguities are an independent problem of a local quantum theory

If one wonders what's the right ordering of operators replacing a classical expression, such a question is already included in our ignorance about the higher-dimension operators. Various possibilities to change the ordering are equivalent to a subset of possible higher-derivative terms that can be added to the action or other defining equations of the theory.

But the list of the higher-derivative terms in the action can be more extensive. If we define a theory using an action, all terms that are consistent with certain symmetries and general consistency criteria must be allowed whether or not they can be simply written using some form of deformation quantization or non-commutative geometry.

Simplicity defined as compactness of formulae may be a good strategy to guess the right laws of physics but it is not a fully rational argument. When the theory is understood more completely, the argument about compactness of formulae is replaced by more solid arguments. For example, the reason why we neglect curvature-squared terms in general relativity is not to make the equations short which is what Einstein essentially thought. Instead, the rational reason is that we can show that the curvature-squared terms only influence physics at very short (ultramicroscopic) distances, not the long (astronomical) ones.

Similar principles such as the renormalization group often lead to the conclusion that the right equations describing reality indeed look simple but in a fully rational approach, the argument of simplicity must always be replaced by a more solid one.

Myth: Perhaps we could abandon this notion of the graviton and *gasp* move forward?

The existence of gravitational waves has been proven by the pulsars so that even the Swedes are satisfied. And the existence of quanta of energy carried by these waves is essentially proven at the beginning of the text. When quantum gravity is defined at a technical level, the scattering matrix for gravitons is not only the most important set of observables we have but, in some sense, the only one.

Also, any simple attempt to show a contradiction about the existence of gravitons is a result of sloppy thinking. Gravitons neither violate laws of thermodynamics nor they create infinite recursion, and the first somewhat technical analysis one can make shows that they are philosophically analogous, with almost all details, to photons.

Myth: We should quantize the curvature instead

When the metric tensor is quantized in the semiclassical framework, the Riemann tensor automatically becomes an operator, too. There is no way how to promote the Riemann tensor to an operator without making the same thing with the metric as long as we want to avoid a dramatic increase of the number of degrees of freedom. Such an increase would prevent us from calling our theory a theory of quantum gravity.

Myth: Gravity must be treated as geometry, not a field

The metric tensor is usually associated with a rather special gauge symmetry but the difference between general covariance and e.g. Yang-Mills symmetry is a purely technical one. At a general level, the metric tensor is just another field. Whether or not we like to use the word "geometry" is a matter of taste: this question has no testable consequences.

On the other hand, it is completely irrational to try to promote the metric tensor to a "higher" type of a field that should be treated with more dignity. All degrees of freedom that exist in a given theory must be treated using the same, proper, general methods of physics. Any attempt to divide fields to different groups that are treated completely differently is a quasi-religious silliness that is irrational and biased almost by definition and that contradicts the unity of the laws of physics.

Myth: But a geometric approach is better, isn't it?

In physics, the primary way of dividing theories is into correct theories and wrong theories. A general attempt to divide ideas and tools into geometric ones and non-geometric ones is typically ill-defined - it depends on the definition of "geometry" which is a matter of historical and social coincidences in mathematics rather than a matter of well-defined differences. Our understanding what geometry is has been evolving for centuries. More importantly, the approach that is labeled "more geometric", whether or not the reasons behind this terminology are rational or not, doesn't have to be "more correct".

Physics of string theory can be defined to be the right "generalized geometry". At this level, it is just an empty word.

The basic dynamics of general relativity admits a geometric interpretation whether or not we like to use the word "geometry" more often than "fields" or less often. Arguing how often certain words and dogmas should be repeated doesn't belong to physics.

Myth: Something's wrong with the weak-field expansions because they're against the philosophy of GR

There exist some important differences between physics and philosophy. In philosophy, one may decide to believe in dogmas or promote the thinking of a philosopher one likes.

Physicists prefer to believe things that can be demonstrated to be true by observations, experiments, with a help of solid calculations that can make our reasoning and decisions more indirect than ever before while they remain solid. Whether something agrees with some philosophy is a very different question than the question whether it is true. It is the latter question - whether it is true - that matters in physics. All other types of arguments to debunk ideas are at most secondary.

I have no concrete idea what kind of philosophy those weak-field haters have in mind. I doubt it is a good philosophy - it must be some misarrangement of the wheels and gears in their brains - but I am sure that it is very bad physics. A proper physics analysis implies that one can get the right answers - qualitatively and quantitatively - by weak-field expansions from the right theory. These right answers include, among other things, virtually all experimental tests of general relativity that have ever been made.

Einstein himself relied on the weak-field expansions intensely. That's how he derived the Newton's potential - even though he may have been able to find the exact Schwarzschild solution, too. And Einstein has also derived the existence of gravitational waves from the weak-field expansions, even though he used to love Mach's principle that disagreed with the existence of gravity waves.

Perturbative expansions are among the paramount tools of physics and, indeed, all of science. Whoever denies their critical importance shows that he's not really interested in the true answers to well-posed physical questions. Don't get me wrong: I think that the full non-linear equations of general relativity are prettier if printed on a T-shirt than some particular calculation in the weakly curved regime. Well, it's because detailed calculations are almost always uglier than the fundamental laws. But the real importance of Einstein's equations as well as other fundamental laws is to allow us to make calculations in concrete situations - and the weak-field situations dominate.

The fact that a weak-field calculation looks less elegant than the equations you started with doesn't allow you to say that there's something wrong with this calculation. Only simpletons could say that something is wrong - or not even wrong - because of these irrational reasons. And they, in fact, do. As Einstein has said, only two things are infinite - human stupidity and the Universe - and we're not sure about the latter.

The role of these expansions grows even more important in any quantum theory of fields.

The weak expansions give us important and correct qualitative answers to important qualitative questions and they may be used as a systematic method to obtain extremely accurate - and, in many cases, exact - quantitative answers. Whether someone likes their philosophy is much less important than the fact that they're critical to find the true answers.

Myth: All the components should be first quantized in isolation

This is what not only the angry physicist but whole communities of people think. They fail to realize that their statement is based on the assumption that the different components can exist and make sense in isolation. In science, statements can often be wrong. String theory actually does show that this assumption is incorrect - the different low-energy fields and particles can't really be separated from each other: they're inseparable manifestations of more fundamental laws. But even if we didn't have string theory, the assumption would be unjustified.

The whole history of physics is flooded with examples of concepts that were thought to be independent but turned out to be closely related and inseparable. This unification is not just a fact about physics but it is arguably one of its most fascinating features. The interconnectedness of the concepts may be one of the most faithful criteria to measure the depth of our understanding.

Motion of apples and planets can't be separated. Electricity, magnetism, and light have been unified for 150 years. Relativity has showed that magnetism must exist if electricity does. Mass can't be separated from momentum, momentum can't be separated from energy, and mass is really identical to energy. Quantum mechanics showed that the energy is always associated with a frequency. W-bosons and photons must also be unified and quarks can't exist without leptons (or vice versa) because anomalies wouldn't cancel. I could give hundreds of other examples.

The purest three-dimensional AdS gravity you can get is probably inseparable from the monster group.

The opinion that some phenomena or components of the laws of physics are disconnected from each other is an artifact of an incomplete understanding of these laws. Quantum gravity is clearly another example: probably the best one. In the Planckian quantum gravity regime, all kinds of matter, fields, particles, geometry, and effects influence each other as much as they can - this situation in fact maximizes the amount of interactions among any objects - and any attempt to separate the phenomena into decoupled clusters in the context of quantum gravity is bound to be wrong.

It is wrong as a description of the real world around us because we kind of know that electromagnetism and other forces don't get turned off at the Planck scale; but it should also be expected that such an attempt to divide in this heavily interacting regime won't lead to any mathematically solid or interesting theoretical insights. The messy and entirely unimpressive history of the attempts to quantize gravity in isolation beyond the semiclassical level seems to confirm this prediction spectacularly well. This shouldn't come as a surprise: quantum gravity is obviously inherently linked to unification of forces and matter and this statement would be quite obviously true even if we didn't know string theory.

One can try to think about all possible ideas inspired by physics but such ideas don't lead to new and deeper descriptions of reality or profound mathematical insights too often. If they do, we can usually see something special about these ideas that justifies that these ideas were worth our attention.

And that's the memo.

Marshall plan: 60 years later

In summer 1947, George Marshall, Condi Rice's predecessor, has initiated a gigantic plan to aid Europe.



In 1953, he was awarded the Nobel peace prize. Around 1946, Czechoslovakia and Greece were the only two non-communist countries in Eastern Europe. However, the degree of servility towards Stalin was breathtaking. The Czechoslovak minister of foreign affairs, Jan Masaryk - the son of the founder of the country later thrown away from the window by the communists - was chastised by Stalin personally in Moscow. It became clear that due to the growing communist influence, Czechoslovakia couldn't join.

The Marshall plan has however become a huge project. About USD 13 old billion - or USD 130 current billions - has been sent to Europe. The policy was viewed as a gigantic subsidy for American exporters. In the 1950s and 1960s, America was a gigantic export powerhouse: can you imagine that? I think it's partly because the responsible people cared about these issues. The Marshall plan was a natural method to help the world, increase the role and prestige of America, and increase its trade surplus. Wouldn't it be a good idea to create a few packages of this kind today? If you don't want to call it another Marshall plan, call it the Motl plan. USD 130 billion in aid in goods for various troubled regions of the world today: it might be more useful than some of the less lucky wars.

John Snow buys Chrysler for $7.4 billion

Cerberus Capital Management whose current chairman is John Snow, the former treasury secretary, bought 80% of Chrysler for $7.4 billion.



In 1998, Daimler-Benz bought the brand for $37 billion but a decade of losses followed. Meanwhile, the Chrysler building remains the tallest brick building in the world.

Stringfest in Israel: video

Stringfest in Israel: video. Windows & Media Player required. General fans of physics are especially recommended to watch David Gross' "Perspectives". But it's also fun to see Lenny Susskind's evolution of opinions about the dangerous ideas he's promoting except that the evolution he describes could be a result of Intelligent Design - at least this is my illusion.

I like Susskind's comment about Wolfgang Pauli's objection to Dirac. Pauli said: "But listen, Dirac, just because the cosmological constant is calculated to be infinite doesn't mean that it's zero!" :-)

Gross, a fresh member of the American Philosophical Society :-), shows cartoons about string theory 20 years ago and today. The better one is a discussion of Quantum Bush with Karl Rove about Intelligent Design and funding of string theory. ;-)



The less good one is the cartoon about the lecture "Is string theory bullshit?" Gross asks: "Have Smolin and Woit had such an impact?" Welcome to the real world, David! ;-) Half of the public scientific discussions is now controlled by the cranks if not more.

On the other hand, Gross - a true believer in sexiness of string theory - also shows a commercial printed in the New York Times and elsewhere: String theory - when physics gets physical. :-)

Gross clarifies his statement that we don't know what string theory is - a statement that has previously been misinterpreted by the stupid people. He sketches the structure of string theory as a manifold of patches, with a special emphasis on holography and Matrix theory, something Gross views to be an amazing duality.

Gross says that some wise guys sometimes ask him: "I have just read a book mentioning loop quantum gravity. What can I do to kill string theory?" Gross always answers correctly: "You can't kill string theory because the Standard Model is really string theory. And even the Swedes have agreed by now that the Standard Model is correct." :-)

Gross talks about cosmology, cosmological constant, GUT, supersymmetry, LHC, and everything else. He says that we must take very seriously those classic insights that have answered difficult questions even though they were not constructed for that purpose. I couldn't agree more. Gross exactly agrees with my 50:50 probability estimate for SUSY to be found very soon.

Happy birthday to Eliezer Rabinovici and Shimon Yankielowicz.

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

... a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope ...

Google Analytics

Anyone with a web with many visitors may want to analyze the records. It can be done with a new version of

• Google Analytics

It takes 1-2 days before the data appear after you register.



There are many formats - much more detailed reports than Sitemeter. Microsoft Corp. is going to answer with something that is called

• Project Gatineu

which is a city in Quebec. The program is still in alpha.

Czech PM vs 4000 feminist NGOs

Mr Mirek Topolánek, the Czech prime minister, gave a speech at the opening of the European Year of Equal Opportunities. He said that because women can decide whether they want to have children or not, they have the same opportunities as men. He also mentioned that assimilation of foreigners is more beneficial than multiculturalism.

The European Women's Lobby (EWL), an umbrella organization for four thousand European feminist organizations, demanded an apology. They also wrote Mr Vladimír Špidla, a former prime minister and the current European commissioner for welfare. They complained that even though Špidla was present when Topolánek gave the speech, he failed to vomit. ;-)

The difference between Harvard University and the Czech Republic, however, is that the Czechs - both men and women - agree with the prime minister and they will send an unpublishable F. O. greeting to the 4,000 NGOs. The news about the feminist demands have appeared in the media once or twice and they will probably never appear again. And I think that after this self-humiliation of these ludicrous feminist NGOs, they will be more careful next time before they try to dictate someone what he should think about the role of the gender in the society.

LHC: girls from the CMS

Our previous videos from CERN kind of focused on the ATLAS experiment. Whoever has 10+7 minutes should see videos by the

• CMS experiment I (10 minutes)
• CMS experiment II (7 minutes)

CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid. If you see a muon, you know that someone more important has been around. You will have to watch to see more details. :-) You may also see how YB0, a 2000-ton main part of the CMS detector, was lowered (32 seconds). Another experiment is

• ALICE: voyage inside the core of matter (7:35 minutes)

The fourth major experiment, LHCb, only offers a slide show without a scientific content.

Sustainable development: U.N. edition

How does the ideal sustainable development look like according to the United Nations?

• GDP growth: minus 4.7 percent (worst on the continent)
  
• Inflation: 2200 percent (highest in the world)
  
• Unemployment rate: 80 percent
• food: accute shortage
• hard currency: accute shortage
• medicine: unavailable
  

Congratulations to Zimbabwe for its presidency of the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development. It will allow them to spread their great results in the whole world. This country, previously known as the breadbasket of Africa and now led by an old anti-capitalist Gentleman of questionable intelligence, is a great symbol of the true nature of the international movement for sustainable development, environmentalism, and similar kinds of ideological waste.

Recall that the most recent catastrophe in the formerly thriving colony of Rhodesia started in 2000 when the leader of the country began to violently steal farms from white owners. The United Nations are currently led in such a way that this kind of criminal entities have the maximum power not only in their own countries but even at the international level. Under normal circumstances, a "leader" like Mugabe should be promptly removed by a more or less human intervention. But it's apparently not politically correct these days. Instead of saving the people of Zimbabwe from his disastrous policies, the United Nations act as a leverage to extend his influence abroad.

Richard Feynman: 46 videos (lectures)

The following

• 46 videos

contain four 1979 lectures of Richard Feynman in New Zealand:

1. Physics 1 chunk 1-10:
   Quantum electrodynamics
2. Physics 2 chunk 1-12:
   Answers to Newton's queries about light
3. Physics 3 chunk 1-12:
   Electrons and their interactions
4. Physics 4 chunk 1-12:
   New queries about light

Each piece has about 8 minutes. These 6 hours of Feynman can also be seen in RealVideo.

Carbon cuts: first world vs third world

The previous posting was dedicated to the second world. Without a loss of generality, let us omit this world in the text below.

The Kyoto protocol was crazy but it was based on the idea that the burden must be born by the rich nations. This subtlety guaranteed that its megalomanic anti-civilization plans would never become true. It's not hard to see that carbon cuts made in your country are useless if the source of the carbon dioxide - an essential gas that has been called a "pollutant" by thousands of enemies of carbon all over the world - can simply move elsewhere. The policy that only the rich nations "pay" has been enough to reject the deal in the U.S. and other developed countries.

But the situation may be changing. As Václav Klaus explained in the last paragraph of his letter to the U.S. Congress, the environmental movement will try to extend its influence wherever it's allowed. We may already be seeing that it's happening.

Imagine for a little while that an increased level of CO2 is a bad thing. Who should bear the burden? Well, from a moral viewpoint, I find it obvious that the third world has the moral right to go through the same era of industrialization as the developed world did about 100 years ago. Who says anything else is a racist and bigot who wants to deny basic rights to others, rights that his nation has probably enjoyed, rights that are really paramount. You may sometimes notice that it is the very same 19th-century-style leftist people whose mouths are full of human rights and equality. But when it comes to the right to be as rich as others and to build factories and to move from one place to another, everything changes.

The right doesn't mean that the most polluting technologies from the past will be incorporated to the newest factories and gadgets. The engineers and managers in the third world are not completely silly and if there is a more efficient technology available, they will use it instead. However, they have the right to do the same things as we did in the past.

Nevertheless, the climate terrorism - as it was called in the leading Chinese daily - is becoming more ambitious every morning. These people literally want to control life and civilization - nothing less than the whole ciculation of carbon - in the whole world. And as you can read e.g. on Andrew Revkin's NYT blog, the third world starts to realize what the activists want to do to them. Revkin quotes Botswana's environment minister who explains that the West wants to use them as Guinea pigs. India still wants the West to pay. If we're lucky, the post-Kyoto (post-2012) talks may simply collapse.

Angela Merkel is from the old school and urges the rich nations to lead. However, she wants the poor countries to "decouple greenhouse gas emissions from the economic growth". This is like asking the Earth to stop orbitting the Sun. As a person with some science education, Merkel should know that her "decoupling" would violate very basic laws of physics.

Meanwhile, the global CO2 emissions of course continue to surge and they will do so or at least stay constant for decades unless a global military junta for carbon regulation, envisioned by Tim Flannery, will be established. ;-)

Also, Roger Pielke Sr argues that the IPCC's SPM doesn't accurately present the recent temperature trends: for example, there has been no statistically significant warming of the troposphere since 2002 and no statistically significant cooling of the stratosphere in the last ten years.

Spiegel explains that some warming would be very cool. They show pictures of girls and suggest that the climate in Germany could resemble Italy which surely sounds attractive. They also link to Hans von Storch's article that says that people must abandon fear of climate change.

The Movement for Extermination of Mankind, officially called the Optimum Population Trust, argues that having a large family is an eco-crime. According to OPT, a baby is equivalent to 620 round trip flights from London to New York as far as its "footprint" goes. That's how the MEM looks at a human being.

Via Benny Peiser.

North Korea celebrates its glorious leader

Click to get thirteen pictures by Mr Jan Zátorský from the MF DNES Czech daily. He has tried to find out whether the people really believe the communist orthodoxy or whether they just perfectly play it, driven by fear, but he has failed. It was impossible to find out anything. No foreigner can freely move in the country or ask questions to locals. Foreigners are not allowed to hold won, the local currency.

So what currency do you think is normally used by visitors and others in this country that looks just like the Stalinist states in the 1950s? It must be a sufficiently influential but sufficiently leftist currency. Yes, it's called the euro. ;-) The people in Pyongyang are grateful that they were allowed to live in that great city. Everyone looks serious and obedient. The pictures:

1. Subway in Pyongyang: the deepest in the world
2. Celebrations of the leader: a more impressive counterpart of Spartakiáda
3. Crowd in the capital
4. Visit of a Czech journalist
5. Both leaders: the late father and son
6. Streets of the capital
7. Two women in the capital
8. Agriculture
9. The skyline of the capital
10. Celebrations of the leader
11. Celebrations: doves
12. Celebrations: three-colored men
13. Bikes on the street: cars are very rare

Half-empty avenues. Revolutionary slogans. 20-meter tall statue of Kim Ir-Sen with new flowers from excited worshippers. Billboard with a worker whose fist is directed against invisible enemies.

Icon's story

When you go to bed at night and forget to shut down your computer, I think you ought to know what actually goes on. It's 2 AM and do you know where your icons are and what they are doing? Click on this site and you will see what happens when you leave the computer on during the night. Turn up sound and click here!

Some numerology

Imagine that you numerically calculate

• exp(pi*sqrt(67)).

You get some large number. Remove the integer part of it. What's left? Let me tell you that it starts with a couple of digits "9". How many? Well, the answer turns out to be six. Pretty close to an integer.

You say. This had to be an accident. Let's try another example:

• exp(pi*sqrt(163)).

Subtract the integer part. What would you expect? Well, the answer turns out to be

• 0.99999999999925

starting with twelve digits 9. Those who thought that it was an accident in the first example have suffered a heart attack after this second, much more spectacular example, and died away. Surely, it can't be a coincidence. Only six characters are needed to define the number and it gives you twelve times 9. Indeed, it's not a coincidence. It's because if you substittute an appropriate argument to the j-function, you may derive that the number is close to an integer with some polynomial tricks.

Spinfoam & art

Disclaimer: The embedding into 3D space, the colors, and the classical evolution has nothing to do with loop quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity has nothing to do with quantum gravity. But it's pretty, isn't it? ;-)

National library: is it pretty?

It shouldn't be shocking that this proposed new building of the Czech National Library in Prague - to be located in Letná near the Prague Castle (click) - is controversial. Some people dislike it. For example, the Czech president has announced that he will prevent the birth of this octopus with his own body. Others have compared it to the statue of Stalin that used to stand on the same spot. :-)

Do you like it? Do you like the

other buildings of the Czech-born architect Jan Kaplický?

Tony Blair takes over France

Tony Blair has made a speech addressed to the French people. As far as I understand, he said that the recent riots show that they are not able to control themselves so he has been kind to help them as well as the new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is Blair's friend and who decided to have some vacation now.

Blair has generously declared himself to be the ruler of France. The new leader recalled some painful moments of the history such as the Hundred Years' War and emphasized that Britain can't afford to lose again.



He noticed that his leadership shouldn't lead to any problems because his French is better than French spoken by most of the French citizens before the Anschluss. ;-)

Monstrous supernova & Eta Carinae

Figure 1: Picture via FoxNews (click).

NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory and terrestrial telescopes have detected the king of all supernovae, SN2006gy with mass estimated to be 150 solar masses, in September 2006. It was 240 million l.y. away and the brightness of the star was like 10 galaxies. The whole show took 70 days. Supermassive stars emit gamma rays before they die.



Figure 2: Eta Carinae, the doomed star (click).

Also, Eta Carinae, the most luminous star in the Milky Way, is expected to explode soon. It currently radiates as 5 million Suns and the eruptions may be isomorphic to what happened on SN2006gy before it went monstrous supernova. Eta Carinae could be the most spectacular explosion in the history of modern civilization, they say. Well, they probably mean the not-so-modern civilization 7000 years ago because this is when those things we are just observing happened. ;-)



Figure 3: SOHO looks into the Sun.

If you care, the g-mode waves have been finally detected by SOHO on the surface of the Sun. I suppose that the term "g-mode" actually refers to "l=4" in the terminology of spherical harmonics where "l=012345" is called "spdfgh". Unless it stands for "gravity": anyone knows the answer? Although the strength of these waves whose origin is gravitational seems to be smaller than predicted theoretically, such a discovery could indicate that the core of the Sun is spinning and our star resembles a supernova. A similar conclusion could influence our counting of solar neutrinos as well as our ideas about the possible solar influence on the climate. See FoxNews.

E11 and the mother of all supergravities

Peter West and Fabio Riccioni argue that the probes in lower-dimensional supergravities and/or the antisymmetric tensor fields - objects that are normally derived from supersymmetry - can also be equivalently derived from the more-than-hyperbolic E11 symmetry in 11 dimensions. They think that it means that all components of the complicated E11 representations have a physical meaning, and finally speculate about a possible link with the mysterious duality.

Monstrous symmetry of black holes: beauty and the beast

We have known about this cute IAS idea for several months but because Edward Witten has just given a talk about it whose content has leaked anyway, it has become public so let me say a few words about it.



Consider the monster group, the largest representative of the sporadic groups in the classification of simple finite groups. It has nearly 10^{54} elements. It's such a mind-boggling number, in fact, that most critics of physics lose their mind when they see such large numbers.

Please believe me for a while that mathematics continues to be consistent even if the numbers are large! ;-)

The irreducible representations of this finite group have been linked to the expansion of the modular j-function, a unique map from the SL(2,Z) fundamental domain to the complex plane (up to a conventional SL(2,C) transformation that you must choose correctly). In fact, the expansion of the j-function,

• j(tau) = 1/q + 744 + 196884 q + 21493760 q^2 + ...

where q=exp(2.pi.i.tau) has the property that all coefficients starting from 196884 are dimensions of rather simple representations of the monster group. For example,

• 196884 = 196883 + 1

decomposes into the smallest faithful representation and a singlet. Similarly, the following coefficients are almost equal to the dimension of some large representation, plus much smaller ones. At any rate, the j-function is modular invariant - invariant under SL(2,Z) - and it can thus be the partition sum of a perturbative string theory. Below, this string theory will only be used as a boundary CFT.



The mysterious link between the modular functions and the monster group is referred to as monstrous moonshine.

Can you find the correct CFT? You bet. Open

• The beauty and the beast

which is written in a no-nonsense, string-theoretical jargon. The j-function is the partition sum of a chiral worldsheet theory of 24 bosons. Because of modular invariance, these bosons must be compactified on an even self-dual lattice. But don't expect a 24-dimensional counterpart of the E8 x E8 or SO(32) lattices that would give you an SO(48) symmetry.

There exists another, very different even self-dual lattice in 24 dimensions, the Leech lattice. It may be used to define the densest packing in 24 dimensions and it has the remarkable feature that the "l^2=2" sites - those that normally give you roots of a non-Abelian symmetry - are completely absent. Consequently, the compactification doesn't produce any enhanced symmetry whatsoever.

A basic introduction to the Leech group may also be found in the article under the first link ("monster group") in this text.

If you read the paper about the beauty and the beast, you will see that they define the compactification of the chiral bosons on the Leech lattice whose partition sum is the third power of the E8 lattice partition function, divided by the 24th power of the Dedekind eta-function. The following sections of their paper are dedicated to a construction of a Z2 orbifold. In fact, the only role of this orbifold is equivalent to an additive shift of the partition sum by a constant - a special example of an SL(2,C) transformation. The new partition sum becomes the capitalized J-function

• J(tau) = j(tau) - 744 = 1/q + 196884 q + ...

That's great. We have a partition sum of a two-dimensional CFT - a CFT that admits a natural action of the monster group. Well, whenever you see a CFT, you should wake up and scream "AdS" unless you want to look like a moron. ;-)

Fine. So what is the dual three-dimensional theory in an anti de Sitter space of this CFT? Note that by removing the constant term "744", we have eliminated all states with L_0=1. This value of L_0 corresponds to the holomorphic weight of operators associated with massless particles. That's great because it means that there are no massless particles in the theory.

Great. So we see that the CFT constructed from the Leech lattice is dual to a three-dimensional AdS theory without massless particles. Is that possible? It might be. Every bulk theory that enters a holographic duality must be a gravitational theory but this gravitational theory seems to contain no massless particles. Is it allowed? Yes, it is allowed because three-dimensional gravity has no physical graviton polarizations. It's because both the Ricci tensor R_{ab} and the Riemann tensor R_{abcd} have three independent components. The vanishing of the Ricci tensor - the Einstein equations - is thus equivalent to the vanishing of the Riemann tensor i.e. flatness. No waves can live in empty three-dimensional space.

But still, it is a theory of gravity so it must describe black holes. In fact, the numbers such as 196884 describe their degeneracies. More precisely, one of these 196884 states is a Virasoro descendant of the vacuum. That's why exactly 196883 microstates of the black hole are primaries. In other words, the minimal black hole in this pure three-dimensional gravity transforms as the minimal representation of the monster group!

Note that this literally monstrous discrete symmetry of the black hole arises exactly in the compactification of quantum gravity that has a minimal amount of low-energy fields. I feel that this might be a general principle: the less low-energy fields your vacuum has, the greater hidden discrete symmetries you might expect. It would be interesting to make a "new uncertainty principle" of this type more quantitative. It is plausible that a very large discrete group replacing the continuous symmetry is necessary to circumvent some unpleasant features of "pure gravity".

The central charge of the 24 bosons is "c_L=24". I suppose that one wants to consider a more general case of several - namely "k_L" - copies of the left-moving Leech CFT and several copies - namely "k_R" - of the right-moving Leech CFT. The corresponding partition sum will probably be

• J^{k_L} times Jbar^{k_R}

times the correct powers of "q,qbar" so that the expansion starts with the universal pole "1/q.qbar" unless the higher-k partition sums are completely different. ;-)

Note that the first subleading, constant term will still vanish if you take these powers. Witten shows that the integrality of k_L, k_R may be seen if you write the SO(2,2) connection in a Chern-Simons description of the bulk gravity (where SO(2,2) is the isometry of AdS3) as a combination of two SO(2,1) connections, and use separate levels for the two chiral Chern-Simons theories.

However, it's my understanding that the monster group is completely invisible in the gravitational and/or Chern-Simons description. Note that this factorization into the left-movers and right-movers is obviously a special property of AdS3/CFT2: in higher dimensions, nothing factorizes into two pieces. For example, SO(3,2) is simple.

Black hole with a monster symmetry

At any rate, the idea that the black hole in the "simplest" compactification of quantum gravity has a monster symmetry built in it is fascinating if it is true. In the quasinormal era four years ago, I was thinking about finding something like ln(248) in the quasinormal modes of 11-dimensional black holes, to confirm discrete-like counting of the black hole entropy that would moreover support the relevance of the Diaconescu-Moore-Witten E8 gauge field in the bulk. We could calculate that it was ln(3) that is actually associated with the Schwarzschild quasinormal modes in any dimension while other black holes have different numbers.

In some sense, the monstrous construction above is a working realization of the concept except that the unit of entropy - more precisely, the entropy of a minimal black hole - is ln(196883) instead of ln(248). ;-) The largest exceptional Lie group had to be replaced by the largest sporadic finite group. You should realize, however, that the counting of the entropy of larger black holes is not simply additive. More complicated representations of the monster group that describe heavier black holes can be found in the decomposition of powers of 196883 but many of them are rather small pieces in such decompositions. The degeneracies are not simple powers of 196883.

If you like numerology, note that "ln(196883)" is equal to "12.1904" which is extremely close to "4.pi = 12.5664", namely to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the black hole with the same mass. (The values of simple black holes with quantized charges and masses in string theory tend to be simple multiples of 2.pi.) You can see that the higher-order corrections modify the entropy of this "tiny" black hole by a few percent only.

Olaf Dreyer done right

If you allow me to go a little bit further with heuristics, you can view the equation

• ln(196883) / (4.pi) = 1 + stringy corrections

to be a working realization of the loop quantum gravity concept arising from the Immirzi entropy discrepancy, namely

• ln(2) / (sqrt(3).pi) = 1 + loop quantum gravity corrections

except that the group SU(2) had to be replaced by the monster group M, the dimension of its fundamental representation 2 had to be replaced by the dimension of the smallest non-trivial representation of the monster group, 196883. Also, the really silly factor of sqrt(3) had to be replaced by 4, and loop quantum gravity had to be replaced by the correct theory of quantum gravity. ;-)

Note that the corrections in the loop quantum gravity case would have to be ten times larger than the leading contribution.

Monstrous monodromy

One should also ask whether the monster group is a local discrete symmetry or a global discrete symmetry. A lore says that every symmetry in quantum gravity is a local symmetry. That should mean that one can find counterparts of the cosmic strings - in 2+1D, they are cosmic particles - that exhibit a corresponding monodromy. In this theory, the monstrous black holes are the only particles.

How many of such objects would you expect? 8x 10^{53} which is the order of the monster group? Not really. I think that the right number of the cosmic strings/particles for the monster group should only be equal to the number of conjugacy classes of the monster group which is 194 (two of these 194 classes are classes of involutions if you care); it is also equal to the number of inequivalent irreducible representations, of course. ;-)

Homework: construct these 194 objects out of the black hole microstates or prove that they don't exist. ;-) Hint: the required cosmic strings/particles are not guaranteed to be unique.

Is this three-dimensional pure gravity a part of string theory? If it's consistent, it must be, by a definition of string theory. But it seems to me that there's no manifest way how to decompactify the 7 or 8 compact dimensions, to get to 10 or 11. In this fashion, the three-dimensional monster vacuum is the ultimate island - a compactification of M-theory on a generalized manifold we could call the Monster Manifold.

And that's the M(emo).

Czechia vs Canada 3:4: enough

Ice-hockey world championship.



Czechia vs Canada. 1:0, 1:1, 2:1, 2:2, 3:2, 3:3, end. It turns out that this tie in the standard time was enough - despite the 3:4 loss afterwards - for the Czech team to continue. They won all matches in the basic group B but lost to Germany and Slovakia afterwards which is why a loss to Canada wasn't an option. ;-)

As expected, Americanada and Czechoslovakia go to the quarterfinals group from the group F to play against Russfinns and Swederland from the group E.

Sarkozy beats Royal

In 1789, Louis XVI, the French king, was removed. 218 years later, the Royal family had a chance to return to the Élysée Palace even though this socialist version of the Royal family was only relatively attractive visually, not politically. ;-)



However, it didn't happen and Nicolas Sarkozy has defeated Segolene Royal, approximately by 6 pct points in the polls that saw a huge 75 percent turnout. Segolene Royal has already called for riots to celebrate the victory of Sarkozy, a "dangerous choice."

Michael Mann vs Alexander Cockburn

Michael Mann didn't like Alexander Cockburn's essay in which Cockburn correctly compares carbon permits and indulgences - well, your humble correspondent might have been the first person who called the permits "indulgences". At least, it was an independent invention :-) because I had to find the word "indulgence" in a Czech-English dictionary. What is the real reason why Michael Mann considers Cockburn's text illogical? Well, here it is:

• As if to drive the point home further, pundit Alexander Cockburn, known generally for his progressive views, has perplexingly disputed the existence of any link between CO2 emissions and rising CO2 concentrations...

Michael Mann tells us that it is completely unexpected from a progressive pundit to write something wrong about the global warming orthodoxy. It may be expected from conservative contrarians but if a progressive pundit writes something like that, that's a real sin! Well, such a comment reveals what are the primary ideas that drive Michael Mann's thinking and "science": it's pure politics. Everything else is adjusted to agree with his politics.

The infamous hockey stick graph, the only well-known result he has, is unfortunately another example.

Incidentally, global warming alarmism and leftism are correlated but they're not identical. I find it pretty reasonable if a progressive pundit is afraid of similar policies that existed under the Catholic Church - because progressive pundits are generally expected to dislike these religious policies, aren't they? There are many left-wing skeptics, for example Philip Stott. Many such people dislike the efforts to keep the third world poor. But good scientists must be able to separate science from politics.

In order to assure us that it wasn't just a typo, Mann makes this political analysis even more detailed. We learn that Cockburn is not allowed to write these things because they sound more skeptical even than the opinions of Patrick Michaels. Well, Patrick Michaels is probably considered to be the ultimate upper bound on the amount of skepticism that a human being can possibly have. ;-)

Well, I hope it is not a complete secret what I will tell you: I was sitting next to Patrick Michaels during a lunch in D.C. two months ago and he was the greenest person in the room. Even his shoes (combined with his suit) were green :-) and he has raised some arguably legitimate criticism of some of the scientific opinions about the climate held by the organizer of that lunch. ;-)

But let's get to the actual questions:

Cockburn claims that there is zero empirical evidence showing the CO2 impact on temperatures...

...and Mann doesn't like it, saying that even Patrick Michaels thinks that there is such a connection. But Patrick Michaels says something slightly different: he says that there is a convincing theory that shows that such an influence should exist. This influence is pretty close to the overall warming in the 20th century and the effect from every new CO2 molecule is smaller than the effect of the previous molecule which implies that even if the emissions of CO2 were accelerating, the temperature would only increase linearly or so.

Patrick Michaels, just like any sane person, realizes that CO2 is just one of many factors influencing the climate. In the Swindle documentary, it was him who explained that the people who think that CO2 drove most of the climate change in the 20th century haven't looked at the basic numbers.

I think that Cockburn is right when he says that there is no empirical observation that proves the relationship and the attribution. If such a paper existed, we would constantly hear its title - instead of vacuous and false comments about consensus. It would also mean that the value of the climate sensitivity would be known. It's not. How can we have empirical evidence for this effect if we don't know what its strength, after all feedbacks are included, is? It's like saying that we can observe a cat but we can't say whether it's bigger than an elephant or not.

Who has added CO2

Mann criticizes Cockburn for questioning whether the increase of CO2 is due to human activities. Well, I happen to think that if there were no industry but everything else were kept untouched, the CO2 increase wouldn't exist or it would be much smaller. But one can't say that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere is exactly the CO2 that was added by our civilization. There are many other sources of CO2 that are stronger, by orders of magnitude, than our production. But they're a part of the natural carbon cycle and this cycle would be close to equilibrium without our contributions.

But anyway, it's not correct to say that the extra CO2 "is" ours. You could equally well say that it came from some portion of dying vegetation.

Millions years ago, the concentrations could have been much higher. Note that the whole transportation produces less CO2 than farm animals, even today, and there could have been more animals around in the past. 450 million years ago the concentration of CO2 was probably around 3000 ppm, eight times higher than today - we can deduce it from the small number of stomata on the fossils of leaves.

Water vapor

The concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere is changing quickly and it arguably approaches some equilibrium value dictated by other quantities but it is a very rough approximation to say that water vapor is "a feedback not a forcing". In the real world, there is no strict separation to feedbacks and forcings. Every effect is influenced by others and it also affects others.

Water vapor in the atmosphere has a huge impact. Water is the #1 greenhouse gas and, more importantly, it is the material that creates clouds. Incidentally, in April, NASA has published a new finding that there exist "semi-clouds" (my term), a huge "twilight zone" (GRL) around clouds that covers about 60% of the sunny skies. In the existing climate models, these 60% of the sunny skies were described uniformly. The NASA finding makes it pretty clear that the existing climate models don't describe 60% of the clear skies quite adequately.

At any rate, the dynamics of water vapor is influenced by many quantities and water vapor also has a huge impact on many other things, and if you neglect one of the two groups of influences in this sentence, you are bound to end up with misleading results.

CO2 is a product, not a cause

Michael Mann also mentions the "tiny" problem that the Vostok ice core data show that the primary detectable influence was the influence of temperature on the concentration of many gases - CO2, CH4, and others. The 800-year lag is one of many ways to show the anti-Gore direction of the causal relationship. Everyone who still fails to understand that the ice core data don't contain any empirical evidence for the greenhouse effect reveals his or her inadequate thinking skills.

We have discussed this issue in detail, including some analysis of the hypothesis of a strong amplification of the initial temperature variations. Such an amplification is not only invisible in the data but it is very unlikely to be significant because it it were larger than the influence of temperature on the concentrations during the 800 years where a change of the trend could be seen, the climate would be a positive-feedback system that would have already exponentially grown out of the control in the past. The data make it much more likely that there are many negative, self-regulating feedbacks in the system.

In fact, I am sure that even most of the part of the public that has been exposed to arguments about this question from both sides has understood that the ice core data don't provide Al Gore with the argument he needed.

CNN viewers invited to make a Google search

Michael Mann also mentions that the viewers of Glenn Beck's special were encouraged to make a single, most important Google search. They were told to find about the

• CO2 lag behind temperature.

You can replace co.jp by com: I am just afraid that Google penalizes such links to their search queries and a smaller version of Google could be better.

Mann thanks CNN because the first hit is their blog. Well, my mouse can be defunct but when I click at his link (search for "Google that" at RealClimate.ORG), the first link shown on my screen is The Reference Frame. ;-) The pages of course depend on the details of the query but you can check that The Reference Frame is ahead of them in most similar queries you can write down, e.g. for the following queries:

• inconvenient truth ice core graph (#1)
• carbon dioxide correlation temperature (#1)
• al gore ice core correlation (#1)
• 800-year-lag (#1)
• ice core cause effect (#1)
• ice core co2 follows temperature (#1)
• warming or co2 first (#1)
• ice co2 concentration graphs (#1)
• or even: al gore's comments about global warming

and many others. Mann's statement that RealClimate.ORG is the #1 in "that" query is just another example of his manifestly biased treatment of any data and his cherry-picking.

Entertaining update: When Michael Mann noticed that the Google hit #1 was The Reference Frame, he changed the search query from carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide. According to "experts" at RealClimate.ORG, the global warming was caused by CO not CO2. ;-) The readers probably didn't like CO much so they returned "carbon dioxide lags temperature ice core" without quotes and The Reference Frame returned to #1. Later, Michael Mann finally figured out the easy solution: "co2 lags temperature" without quotes gives them #1. However, when you replace "co2" by "carbon dioxide" or add "ice core" or virtually any other relevant words, The Reference Frame returns to the top. ;-)

Nature's new blog

Finally, Mann has to mention a new climate change blog of Nature. I guess that this entry drives him up the wall much more intensely than Alexander Cockburn and Glenn Beck because one of the first postings on that blog is about the decay of his "hockey stick". But he can't quite say it openly because that would damage the illusion of consensus - so he just says that "first reviews [of the new Nature blog] are decidedly mixed."

It can't be too easy for a person like Mann to be entangled into an ever more complex web of untrue assertions.

And that's the memo.

Other popular climate change articles on The Reference Frame

• Viscount Monckton & alarmism about warming
• Dr Naomi Oreskes and fake consensus on global warming
• Temp drove CO2 parts per million numbers, not the other way around
• IQ2 US match: deniers win over alarmists
• Correlations of the Sunspots and cosmic rays - and temperatures
• 2006: a not too good year for panickers
• 2006: coolest average temp after 2001

La Griffe du Lion: Why most serial killers are white men

The brilliant La Griffe du Lion has another quantitative analysis answering

• why most serial killers - the worst kind of criminals - are white men.

If I understand well, it boils down to their higher variance again...

The decay of the hockey stick: who did it

Hans von Storch, a former chief of the German Donald Duck Society, is a pleasant person to communicate with and he has done important things in the climate science. But his and Eduardo Zorita's text in

• Nature's climate change blog

is simply a misleading presentation of the history of science. They explain that the methodology behind the hockey stick graph by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes - MBH98 and MBH99 - has been shown to be flawed - something that everyone except for Alexander Ač, Whole Life Times, and Michael Mann now knows to be the case.

AA and MM have different reasons, however. AA believes it because he is a naive Czechoslovak countryside green idealist. MM and Whole Life Times believe it because of a clash of interests.

They describe some details of the history - including the report of the National Academy of Sciences - but don't mention Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre (M&M) or the Wegman report that confirmed the work of M&M.



The picture above is wrong.

What used to be the main evidence of an exceptional character of the 20th century climate and consequently the strongest evidence for man-made global warming (especially in the third IPCC report in 2001) has been transformed into a bombshell, a climate scandal of the decade and a climatological counterpart of cold fusion based on flawed statistics. Nevertheless, Michael Mann - the supreme cold fusion guy - still has the stomach to spread his confusion and propaganda at a bizarre ideological blog called "RealClimate.ORG."

I happened to follow the fate of this particular paper and papers that were trying to reproduce it and validate it at least since 2004 which is why I know that M&M were by far the most important technical critics of the hockey stick papers. They studied the methodology in detail and localized its main problems in Energy & Environment 2003. Building on their detailed and constantly increasing understanding of the subject, especially in Steve's case ;-), they wrote an even more clear paper refuting the hockey stick graph in Geophysical Research Letters 2005 when they finally showed that the hockey stick shape is put into the algorithm itself.

Meanwhile, von Storch et al. did something that is more comprehensible for most of us - they have simply demonstrated in Science 2004 that the method of Mann et al. has underestimated the natural variability of the temperature in the past by a factor of 2-5. Well, if you remove 80% of natural variability, it becomes somewhat easier to argue that variability is due to humans.

Other critics including von Storch may be viewed as people who followed M&M and who have used their advantage of being "mainstream scientists" to get more credit with less original effort. There exists clear evidence that both von Storch and Zorita have endorsed the important work by M&M a few years ago.

I join Steve McIntyre, William Connolley, and others who urge Dr. von Storch and Dr. Zorita to give M&M the credit they undoubtedly deserve.

Some additional frequently visited climate articles on The Reference Frame

• Viscount Monckton & alarmists about warming
• Dr Oreskes & non-existent consensus on global warming
• Temperatures drove CO2 ppm numbers, not the other way around
• IQ2 US duel: deniers beat believers
• Correlations of the Sunspots and cosmic rays - and temps
• 2006: a lousy year for little chickens
• 2006: coolest average temp after 2001

Solving the planar limit of N=4 gauge theory: press releases

Since the visionary discoveries of 't Hooft in the 1970s, it's been known that gauge theories with a large number of colors should simplify and lead to a new kind of classical limit. Whenever the number of some objects is large, physics should simplify. Statistical physics simplifies into thermodynamics if you deal with many atoms. If you investigate theories with many colors, you should expect a simplification, too.

Indeed, shortly after the relevance of QCD for strong interactions was appreciated, 't Hooft has figured out that the most important Feynman diagrams start to look like a discretization of a two-dimensional surface - something we would call the worldsheet these days - that describes a history of propagating one-dimensional loops of energy, strings. ;-)

Gerard 't Hooft found out that whenever the number of colors is large, the Feynman diagrams can be split into groups according to the topology of the corresponding worldsheet that they discretize. The simplest topology, namely the "planar" topology, dominates while the more complicated topologies with "handles" are suppressed by powers of 1/N^2. The strict large-N limit is equivalent to strictly continuous worldsheets replacing Feynman diagrams.

This discovery was important for conceptual reasons - gauge theories are theoretically important even if the number of colors doesn't match the real world. But it was also important for observable physics because for QCD, 1/N^2 is 1/9 which is a small number and the new kind of stringy expansion could thus be useful.

Some key details about the behavior of the gauge theory at a large number of colors remained unknown for more than 20 years - until 1997 when Juan Maldacena famously merged 't Hooft's ideas with holography and new insights about black hole thermodynamics: the string theory describing the large-N limit of gauge theories has one additional large dimension besides those seen in the gauge theory and it includes strings and all other objects in an anti-de-Sitter space. Conformal symmetry, including the Lorentz symmetry, translations, scalings, and special conformal transformations, is interpreted as an ordinary isometry of the anti de Sitter space.

Integrability and media

That's great but can we actually calculate how these strings interact in the large N limit? Can we solve the planar limit i.e. to find all possible excitations on the corresponding string and the interactions of these excitations? In recent years, this question has been answer Yes.

• A recent press release

of Princeton University has promoted the paper by Klebanov et al. that has numerically verified hypotheses of Bern et al. and especially integral equations by Beisert et al. about the behavior of the N=4 gauge theory in the planar limit, based on the concept of transcendentality.

See Juan Maldacena and integrability and links in that article...

Now, I think that the press release is an example of news that the journalists should propagate much more intensely than they do - and they should think how to make them more attractive than they sound in the present form. The press release talks about serious work that is actually viewed to be exciting by the actual big shots who are respected by some of the brightest people, not just by journalists and their least demanding readers, and it uses honest language to analyze its numerous aspects of the relation between gauge theories and string theory.

These relations between gauge theory - an experimentally well-established pillar of modern physics - and string theory, together with the unity of string theory itself, are the main reason why string theory can never go away in the future, and only people unfamiliar with the structure of theoretical physics could think otherwise.

Controversial terminology

The only bizarre feature of the press release is the formulation at the beginning that "string theory is both one of the most promising and controversial ideas in modern physics." A nice politically correct formulation to make many crackpots happy. Is any theory whose critic is able to impress dozens of journalists automatically controversial? If it is, isn't the adjective "controversial" somewhat vacuous?

Well, I don't think that any of these calculations that tightly connect physics of gauge theory with numerous concepts and equations of string theory are controversial. Most people who like to create controversies would probably find these papers rather boring. What is really controversial is the stupid caricature of modern physics that has been invented by a few evil people and promoted by their friendly journalistic jerks.

But once again, that's very different from the actual scientific results that are somewhat intimidating and, as far as I can say, almost certainly right.

And that's the memo.

PA: coldest April in 32 years

Pennsylvania and probably many other places on the Eastern Coast has seen the coldest April in 32 years and something like the 13th coldest April on record.

Canada has recorded the third coldest April since 1970 while Iowa and Ohio have witnessed the coolest April in ten years.

A proper ski season is getting started in Switzerland. ;-)

RSS AMSU have released their April data, too. Since the beginning of the year, the global temperature dropped three times more (0.21 Celsius) than the decrease that is expected to be caused by the Kyoto-like policies in the next 50 years (0.07 Celsius).

If you use the global warming believers' prices of temperature increments, nature has given us a gift of roughly 20 trillion dollars during the last three months - about $3,000 per person including Ethiopian newborns. Thanks, Mother Nature.

Meanwhile, because I use very different prices, I am happy that the temperatures in New England are now finally about 10 Celsius degrees higher than a few weeks ago. ;-)

Honda global warming amendment adopted

The IPCC, working group III (mitigation), has just released its summary for policymakers with crazy statements such as that the reduction of CO2 below the present levels will be cheap, and all this nonsense.

The whole original Kyoto plans were calculated to reduce the temperature by 0.07 Celsius degrees by 2050 while the production of CO2 is growing almost uniformly everywhere in the world - despite the current hysteria - and these people want to say that their megalomanic Lenin-Stalin-like five-year and eight-year and thirty-year plans won't cost much.

See www.ipcc.ch, news.google.com. I have given these particular not-quite-sensible people enough space already so let me keep it short. The only arguably positive random by-product of this madness is that the IPCC has recommended a modern nuclear reactor for every Greenpeace office in the world.

Mike Honda: an indoctrination amendment

This news is much less publicized but maybe even scarier. On Wednesday night, the U.S. lawmakers discussed an amendment to their bill about NSF - the final bill passed 399:17. The amendment written by Rep. Mike Honda (CA) asks NSF to fund special activities meant to introctrinate K-12 students with ideology about the man-made global warming. Honda even explains that "people normally can live without any understanding of science but AGW is an exception."

Wow. Your humble correspondent thinks just the opposite. Basics of serious, solid, and well-established science and methods that the students can actively and independently use in the future should be taught at these schools instead of ad hoc pre-boiled myths and shaky, ideologically polluted pseudoscientific results promoted by the morally and professionally lousiest segment of the contemporary scientific community. For example, if the education didn't fail so miserably a few decades ago, at least somewhat educated and critically thinking people could be members of the U.S. House instead of people such as Mike Honda today.

The despicable amendment passed 252:165 and attempts to guarantee that the education would be scientifically balanced have failed. Well, reasonable children will have to try to defend their intellectual integrity against some of the teachers with additional rubber bullets in the class. I wish the teachers who join this politically-driven brainwashing campaign an extremely hard time in the class.

Via David Legates and Willie Soon.



Figure 1: This particular Mr Honda of course has nothing to do with the famous motorbike brand. To damage the good name of the brand even more, he drives Toyota Prius. ;-) For visual reasons, I chose to add a picture of a real Honda instead of the ludicrous parody of Honda from California.

Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back

A new book by Václav Havel, the last Czechoslovak president and the first Czech president, will be out soon. It's called "To the Castle and Back".

See also The Economist.

Predicting the past

A detailed prescription for postdictions and an explanation why it differs from time-reverted predictions is given at the end of the article Myths about the arrow of time

One topic on the boundary between physics and philosophy that is never discussed too explicitly are the rules how to "predict" the past, i.e. how to use the information about the present together the physical laws to reconstruct the conditions in the past.

Arrows of time

Whenever you study macroscopic systems that interact with the environment, you seem to end up with some time-asymmetric phenomena. Friction always slows objects down: it never accelerates them. Heat is transferred in such a way that the temperature becomes more uniform, not less, and so forth. Differential equations for heat conductivity, friction etc. have a clear time-reversal asymmetry.

A related arrow of time is the logical arrow of time. You should always assume that you know the initial conditions in the past - or the present - and use the physical laws to predict the future. At least The Reference Frame tells you that you should never do it in the opposite way. Decoherence is a phenomenon whose origin is analogous to friction and it has thus an arrow of time, too. See

a lecture on entanglement and interpretation of QM.
(Bonus: quantum computers + relativistic QM)

It is, in fact, guaranteed that the logical arrow of time that is relevant for the interpretation of quantum mechanics must have the same direction as the thermodynamic arrow of time that is responsible for the growth of entropy. These two arrows of time must always be correlated in the same way as they are in the world around us.

Exchanging the cause and the effect

Many physicists seem to think that the laws of physics can be used to predict the past in the very same way as if you predict the future. You take the matrix element of the evolution operator between the two states and square its absolute value to obtain a probability that one of these two states evolves into the second state.

When you study microscopic systems with a full knowledge of all degrees of freedom and no friction or decoherence, there is clearly a full time-reversal symmetry, or at least a CPT-symmetry if you are a quantum field theory purist, and no one can protest, not even your humble correspondent.

However, if someone uses the same rule even for macroscopic objects where you have to trace over the environment in such a way that friction or decoherence become important, I happen to think that the prescription is simply wrong.

Start with a piece of ice immersed in water at t=0 - everything embedded into a perfectly isolated box - and try to predict the probabilities of different states at t=-1 hour. Many people think that the right prediction is that the ice is gonna melt during the negative hour exactly as it would melt in a positive hour. Experiments combined with memory show that this conclusion is clearly wrong: at t=-1 hour, the ice was bigger than at t=0, not smaller.

If you took all the degrees of freedom, including the environmental ones, into account and if you could moreover insert extremely accurate information about the state of the atoms of ice and water, surely you could evolve this state backwards to find that the ice was bigger at t=-1 hour. That's true both in classical physics as well as quantum mechanics. However, the required accuracy would be exponential because the non-uniformities in the diffusion equation decrease exponentially with time - or, in other words, non-uniformities increase exponentially if you go backwards in time.

It's clearly unrealistic and one must work with approximations of the states described by density matrices that don't provide you with the exponentially accurate knowledge about the atoms of ice. Is it still true that you should simply evolve this density matrix into the past in the same way as you would evolve it into the future and use the evolved density matrix to reconstruct the probabilities in the past?

No, no, no

I think that the answer is clearly No. If this procedure were correct, you would indeed deny the existence of the arrow of time. The entropy would be minimized at t=0 and it would grow in both directions. That clearly doesn't occur. Entropy is an increasing function of time both for t positive as well as t negative. Not only we remember it was the case: if it were not the case, our laws of physics would be incompatible with the time-translational symmetry because they would predict something special about an arbitrary moment t=0, namely the minimization of the entropy.

Another way to see a problem with the time-symmetric prescription is to look at the environment - and the environment is the real source of the asymmetry (both for friction and decoherence). A piece of ice emits things like thermal photons into the environment. These photons always travel from a warm piece of ice to infinity along a light-like trajectory. The number of these photons leaving a piece of ice is clearly greater than the number of photons that are going from infinity directly to the ice. That's why the piece of ice is able to transfer some heat to the cosmic microwave background, among other recipients of energy.

So the assumption that the evolution before t=0 should work just like the evolution to positive t is flawed. It's not surprising that the mathematical framework to predict probabilities sees a difference between the past and the future. If you recall some formulae for the Bayesian inference etc., you will realize that the probabilities of assumptions or initial conditions are treated rather differently from the probabilities of your predictions. The logical framework to deal with probabilities is not invariant under the interchange of the past and the future or the interchange of the causes and effects, or assumptions and predictions.

If you naively performed the time-reversal symmetric calculation, you would predict that the microstates corresponding to macroscopic configurations with a high entropy would be overwhelmingly preferred. That's not the case. You can say that the entropy in the past was lower than today because of a universal fact - the low entropy right after the Big Bang. That's what Brian Greene decided to say in The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Rules of postdiction are local

However, every sane person feels that the method how we use the physical laws to reconstruct (or try to reconstruct) the state of your lab - or the box with water and ice - one hour ago shouldn't depend on some details of cosmology. And indeed, it doesn't. I believe that even without assuming that there has ever been anything like the Big Bang, you may define meaningful rules how to try to reconstruct the past. Such rules will never be practical - exactly because of the exponentially increasing non-uniformities etc. if you go to the past that make all postdictions practically impossible - but one of the features of the rules should be, I think, that the low-entropy states that you find in the evolution backwards should be subjects to some heavy positive discrimination. Whenever you have some positive discrimination, it becomes an ordinary discrimination for others: in this case, the victims are high-entropy states in the past.

I think that you should assign an extra factor of exp(-S) to a candidate microstate in the past where S is the entropy of this microstate viewed as a representative of a family of macroscopically indistinguishable states of your physical system (without the environment). Of course, you should normalize the probabilities at the end so that they add up to one.

Something like that is necessary to avoid ludicrous conclusions that would tell you that eggs were unbreaking and dead people were becoming alive during the last hour. Many physicists are making a demonstrably wrong assumption that the predictions of the future and the past follows the same logical rules even if you consider subsystems and approximately defined states where dissipation and decoherence play a role. That's why they derive various wrong conclusions, e.g. that the young Universe should "naturally" have a high entropy.

There is no rational reason for a young Universe to have a high entropy and indeed, I think that even children are correctly taught laws that can be used to conclude that the young Universe had a much lower entropy than today.

Also, we should never think about the early cosmology as if we were evolving the present state backwards in time. We should always start to think about the past and try to figure out whether the present state of the Cosmos could have evolved from the past. The complex matrix elements of the evolution operator are identical, up to a complex conjugation, but the full rules to calculate the probabilities of subsystems interacting with the environment are not identical.

Those who pay more attention to reality know that the second law of thermodynamics will work not only in the future but it has also worked in the past: there is nothing special about the present. Those who carefully avoid theoretical errors and unjustified incorrect assumptions also know that the causes and predictions enter the rules of logical inference asymmetrically. When this asymmetry is appreciated, there is nothing inconsistent about the thermodynamical arrow of time in the real world and there is nothing unnatural about the low-entropy initial conditions of the Universe.

And that's the memo.

CNN: Exposed: The Climate of Fear: full video

The full AVI video (344 MB; 41:15 when played) is available at mirror 1, mirror 2. Please create your own mirrors if you offer to many others. Thanks to Frédéric...

Six parts of the program may also be found on YouTube or Google Video.

Tonight, on May 2nd, at 7 pm, 9 pm, and midnight Eastern time, Glenn Beck will try to deflate the media hype about the global warming on CNN. He will look at the physical basis, proposed policies, as well as the somewhat Adolfian methods to impose the so-called "scientific consensus".

Press release
See video excerpt by clicking here (WM)
Full transcript of the program
Beck's 3-minute promo
A 7-minute segment from the show
Other Glenn Beck climate videos

Some extra frequently visited climate articles on this weblog

• The Great Warming Swindle
• Lord Monckton & climate fearmongers
• Naomi Oreskes and her "consensus" on climate change
• CO2 lags temperature in the ice core data, not the other way around
• IQ2 US duel: sceptics stronger than alarmists
• Correlations of the solar activity and cosmic rays with temperature
• 2006: a weak year for the alarmist religion
• 2006: four previous years were colder

Wolfram: Mathematica 6

Wolfram has just released the most important advance in the 20-year history of his program,

Mathematica 6

Besides a new user interface optimized for Windows Vista and powerful editions of MacOS and Linux, the program has dynamic interactivity, knows all possible kinds of visualizations, understands many types of common file formats (including e.g. export to SWF flash!), and can automatically prove some theorems, optimize combinatorial and non-linear calculations automatically, scan pictures, besides dozens of other fascinating features, new special functions, and methods to deal with numbers and data.

It's apparently no longer Mathematica - it should be called Civilization II instead, except that it is a name of a famous game. ;-)

Look carefully how some of these features get packed (full screen):



Thanks to AA Torok.

See also: Stephen Wolfram's blog

Competition: Maple 11

In related news, Maple has released Maple 11.

Update 2008

Buy Mathematica 7.0.