Titanic risk & eco-morality: two excellent essays

I was recommended two articles that I found excellent.

First, Aaron told me about the text in the New York Times called

In Nature's Casino

by Michael Lewis. It is mostly about John Seo, a hedge-fund manager who was incredibly ready for the hurricane Katrina. The article is full of wisdom about risk management. For example, it mentions how PhDs often turn out to have naive opinions about the ideal strategies based on textbooks that often fail. You can't beat the market but it doesn't mean that the market is perfect.

Aaron has chosen one particular idea from the article. It is about risk estimates of very unlikely events and the Titanic plays a key role. Recall that Feynman has used the case of Challenger to show that when our experience is insufficient, we tend to underestimate the risk. But let's return to the Titanic. It had 16 chambers and they could normally be considered as independent. If you want the ship to sink, you must destroy many of them and it is just unlikely. However, they made a mistake and started to turn around which is why the ship finally sank: the chambers were no longer independent and the risk simply increased. The message is that even though many people think that action lowers the risk, it is more often the case that action increases risk.

Surprisingly, action is exactly what Lawrence Summers now recommends to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As we agreed with Gene and others in the discussion about the credit crisis, the people who have made wrong decisions must burn themselves, otherwise the system will slowly lose its self-correction ability and get worse. This kind of development in the market is exactly the risk that the players should have expected and regulation in these mundane cases is counterproductive.

Back to the story about the Titanic. Those who know general relativity can confirm that if you want to have the longest possible life after you cross the black hole event horizon, you should stop your jets and do absolutely nothing: the geodesic is the longest path between two points in the spaces with Minkowski signature. Hysterical alarmists would fail both in the case of the Titanic as well as inside the black hole.

Brian has sent me another wise article.

Josie Appleton

argues in Spiked that eco-morality is a new brand of conservatism that is sucking the fun out of life. She compares this new kind of morality with other ethical standards. The main differences are that in the new system of ethics,

1. one is supposed to reduce her impact: the footprint is now counted everywhere; previous systems of morality wanted people to live more and better, whatever it meant
2. one doesn't care about the meaning of her actions because everything is counted in CO2 molecules: a flight to see sick relatives is equivalent to a flight to visit a prostitute
3. one doesn't have to make a choice: it is enough to blindly follow a list of instructions what to do with your washing machines and all other things.

Socially, eco-ethics is meant to define lives for consumers as well as missions for institutions. The institutions have recently started to massively embrace eco-ethics. Most politicians seem to prefer to have a simply describable goal to protect the flat Earth's climate over the difficult goal to represent their unpredictable electorate: they no longer have to worry about their democratic legitimacy. It is a more convenient topic than the war on terror because the approach to the latter is actually tested by actual events.

The real reason why Appleton wants everyone to discard eco-ethics is that it leads us to stop thinking about the purpose of our lives.

And that's the memo.

P.S. Did you know that ecology as a science was founded in 1895 by Mr Warming? :-) He should have changed his name. The name was the first bad sign for his new discipline. Today it seems that ecology as a science has started with Warming and it is ending with warming. ;-/

Ecospot: win a Toyota

All US, UK, and Irish residents who read The Reference Frame have a chance to win a Toyota Highlander as long as they will hide that they read this blog.



What do you have to do? Before September 12th (twelve more days to go), you must submit a 15-second, 30-second, or 60-second videoclip showing how normal activities cause climate change: a "very short video message that will drive your friends, community or government to get involved in solving the climate crisis." See the rules at the

Ecospot home page

The contest was also discussed at CNBC.

Rae's entry with two attractive prophets

The judges will be Cameron Diaz and her 19 colleagues and later the public. What kind of videos have a chance? Al Gore who sponsors the event has answered this question in the New York Times:

He cited as an example of an effective spot a 45-second ad known as “Black Balloons” that illustrates how normal household tasks like brewing coffee or watching television contribute to global warming because they are powered by the burning of fossil fuels. The spot culminates with a thick cloud of black balloons representing carbon dioxide emissions swirling into the sky.

Feynman has reacted to the textbook that asked the kids: What makes it go? Energy. What makes it go? Energy. He said: Suppose it's wakalixes (or fossil fuels) instead. Wakalixes makes it go. The children don't learn anything, he insisted.

But Al Gore's disciples do learn something. Their brains are full of these black balloons.

Nevertheless, the rules are clear: create a clip how drinking coffee, watching TV, or opening a bottle of Coke causes global warming and an SUV is yours! A good idea might be to replace black balloons by sleazy snakes or something like that. You can check that this whole story is real and not a parody. I've spent quite some time trying to find a catch showing that this whole thing is just a prank. It's not. Save your time.



Barbora Špotáková of Czechia just became the world champion in javelin. Why is it in this article? Look at the T-shirt.

It reminds me of the joke about a young couple that didn't have money to buy diapers for their baby. So instead, they bought a house in the suburbs of New York and cleaned the buttocks with the grass on their new garden. ;-)

Incidentally, I forgot to tell you why it's completely OK from a moral viewpoint to earn (and drive) an SUV for an ad against coffee that contributes to global warming: the SUV is a hybrid which means that one-half of the black balloons are created in the power plant! :-)

I am serious. Someone should create a good, extraordinarily powerful ecospot of this kind, submit it so that one can't find that the creator is a skeptic, and when he or she wins the SUV, it may be announced that the ecospot was a hoax. John Howard is already working on his new SUV. ;-)

Hayden, Preskill: fast information retrieval from black holes

Patrick Hayden and John Preskill, a leader in quantum computing and a winner of a bet against Stephen Hawking, use their knowledge about computer science, qubits, and error-correcting codes to say something quantitative about the retrieval of the information from the black holes. Patrick Hayden is a boy who is also the Canada Research Chair for the Physics of Information. ;-)

Well, yes, this is what I call a very good general paper about the black hole information puzzle!

These Gentlemen consider Alice and Bob. Alice wants to destroy her sex diary irreversibly. Their main conclusion is that "k" qubits of information about the initial state are retrieved as soon as "k+epsilon" qubits of the information are carried away by the Hawking radiation - which means a timescale comparable to the black hole radius. That would be really fast, indeed. Instead of acting as a perfect erased of diaries, the black hole is essentially a mirror. When the black hole size - as measured by the entropy - decreases to one-half, much more than one-half of the information is already out.



Their assumptions about the ability of black holes to deal with the quantum information at the same moment could be exaggerated and the real retrieval could be slower. And of course, the technological tricks necessary to decode the information will probably remain unrealistic forever. But their estimate could actually be parameterically exact.

Why? Hayden and Preskill also discuss the apparent violation of the no-cloning theorem, normally cured by the complementarity principle. They quantitatively show that their model how quickly the information is retrieved is barely, at the level of order-of-magnitude estimates, compatible with the no-cloning theorem: Bob probably can't quite prove that the theorem was violated and the information was doubled even though he's close to it.

Well, as you can see, I actually guess that black holes are indeed on the "edge" of being able to violate the no-cloning theorem, and because their calculation seems to confirm such a saturation, it is a great reason for me to trust them. In some sense, I feel that it is likely that there won't be any further revolutionary papers that would make the mechanism of the retrieval much more transparent than it is today.

Recently there was another preprint about the related issues:

Gary Horowitz: black hole mysteries

A light, popular review of the black hole information puzzles and the way how string theory answers at least some of the questions.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Sean Carroll asks the famous question due to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and offers a few answers and non-answers such as the non-answer "Why not?", the main result of 116 years of work of the Stanford philosophy department.

Let me admit that as a kid, I used to be asking this kind of philosophical questions, too. However, these questions turned out to be so much less interesting than other questions that I threw them away. One may also argue that the question is ill-defined as well as contradictory.

On the other hand, one may also refine the question, give it a well-defined, quantitative meaning, and simply answer it from the first principles. Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, it's because of any of the following reasons ;-)

• nothing doesn't allow intelligent life (I actually find it OK to use the anthropic principle to answer Leibniz's question and similar qualitative questions whose information content is tiny)
• the worldsheet conformal anomaly wouldn't cancel for D=0; note that string theory is actually capable to answer these old questions
• nothing violates a basic rule of physics that can be derived from string theory, namely the existence of gravity in the low-energy limit; this fact is related to the previous one
• nothing violates the second law of thermodynamics because if there were nothing, the entropy couldn't increase
• nothing violates relativity because one can't equivalently describe the phenomena in nothing using different reference frames
• nothing violates unitarity; a Hilbert space that allows both something and nothing to exist is at least two-dimensional while the nothingness Hilbert space is one-dimensional or zero-dimensional and can't be related by a unitary transformation
• nothing violates the uncertainty principle because if there were nothing, all observables would commute with each other (0.0=0.0) and there would be no uncertainty
• the entropy of a zero-dimensional Hilbert space is minus infinity and violates the finiteness of entropy
• while nothing is simple, it violates Einstein's rule that things should be as simple as possible but not simpler
• last but not least, there is also an experimental reason: the existence of nothing has been ruled out experimentally because you have just made an observation of this sentence; let's admit that you were not the first one who has made an observation of something and every previous observation of anything has falsified the nothing hypothesis

As you can see, the question is actually well-defined and the answer is easy to find. It is much harder to answer more detailed questions about the something that exists, for example what is the topology of the compact dimensions in which our world is more weakly coupled than in all others.

Are you dissatisfied with most of the explanations because I had to assume some laws of physics or even string theory? Well, indeed, I have done so. And from a scientific viewpoint, anyone who tries to answer these deep questions while ignoring physics or string theory or while putting some metaphysical prejudices above the laws of physics is a crackpot. He can call himself a President of the Philosophy Division, too. It's a matter of terminology and social conventions, not science. ;-)

There exist other answers to the question that I believe are incorrect, for example:

• nothing would violate the scientific consensus because no one would agree with it
• nothing would violate the catastrophic global warming theory: if there is nothing, there can't be any cataclysm either
• nothing discriminates against women because if there were nothing, there would be no women in physics
• nothing is a bad theory according to Lee Smolin's criteria because if there were nothing, no new breakthroughs in science could be fully completed for more than five years
• nothing violates the newest versions of loop quantum gravity because there are no stinky octopi that can swim in nothing
• nothing disagrees with doubly special relativity because if there were nothing, there would be no proof of the inequality defining the soccer ball problem either; that would contradict the rule that all doubly special relativistic researchers only study theories where soccer balls can't exist
• nothing would still suffer from the soccer ball problem because there would be no soccer balls
• nothing is wrong because God is great and if He had created nothing instead of something, He would have been a loser which is a contradiction
• nothing is not even wrong
• people who believe in nothing are deniers who are paid by oil corporations

Some of these answers are flat out wrong because they are based on incorrect assumptions and invalid equivalences while others don't answer the question "Why is there something rather than nothing" but instead attack the person who asks the question or fill the readers with sociological and religious propaganda or emotions that have nothing rather than something to do with answering of the question.

And that's the memo.

Sweden: record low temperature

Southern Sweden has seen a freezing August weather for the first time in recorded history.

Tommaso Dorigo: a sexist scandal

Frequent and beloved members of the Reference Frame community may join the chat box if the fast comments are too slow

Tommaso Dorigo sometimes acts like a Peter Woit Lite, if you kindly allow me to avoid expletives. If you prefer Italian terminology, Dorigo is a kind of woitino. But you should have no doubt that certain situations instantly reveal that we share the same European cultural context. He wrote a

report about Lisa Randall's talk at CERN.

There are many layers of topics in his report: women and science, detailed phenomenology at the TeV scale, and relations between theorists and other scientists.

The first topic turned out to be explosive. It has led Clifford Johnson to write a politically correct sermon called

Still so far to go

What has driven Clifford up the wall? Well, Tommaso has described her clothes, haircut, and her athletic looks.

Ms Kea dislikes political correctness, too (and so does Ms Louise Riofrio and Mr Moshe Rozali). Sabine Hossenfelder doesn't seem to be excited by the CosmicVariance hardline either.

Well, let me start by saying that I know Lisa Randall much more than these two guys. I think that if you take everything into account, she is actually an unusually modest person. She is attractive and she is an exceptional athlete. Her two major climbing accidents haven't changed anything about that.

Does she enjoy to be admired for diferent things than being the most cited particle physicist between 1999 and 2004? Do other female scientists like different kinds of attention? That's of course a subtle question.

There are surely contexts, acts, gestures, and expressions that are unpleasant, especially from a certain kind of people (for example the ugly ones: meeting Tommaso on the street if you have a sexy skirt could be very unpleasant). But does Lisa or other special women in science like to ignite interest and emotions in general? I think that I know enough to figure out the answer and the answer is Yes. You won't learn any details from me but I just find the general answer important.

Clifford attacks not only Tommaso but also Ira Flatow who has made some comments on CosmicVariance in 2005. Clifford thinks that Flatow's comments had to be horrible for Lisa. I was actually speaking to her many times and she has greatly enjoyed Flatow's interview and his human attitudes. If I remember well, I liked the interview, too.



Video 1: MIT nuclear physicist Paige Hopewell (publications) and her collaborator explain calculus. Please don't get distracted by irrelevant things. The most important part of the talk is a proof that the x-derivative of 3y^2 vanishes.

I actually don't think that these questions are too different for men and women. A few years ago, a well-known classmate of Lisa was giving a talk and one of the 14-year-old girls who attended it told another one: "Wow, this guy is hot!" Now, I know this story from a famous Massachusetts string theorist whose name will be kept in secret and the story is about Brian Greene. Note that the latter name can be revealed because Brian must face all advantages and disadvantages of being a public figure. ;-)

Just to be sure: I think that this is another advantage. :-)

Is there really any serious difference here? Does Clifford want to say that male physicists can never be attractive and they can never make their audiences - female AND male - excited? I happen to know that the answer is that they can. And it was never too irritating for me. The desired person is almost always in an advantage over the person who has some desires. It is such an obvious observation that you really need the Academia to invent a whole ideology based on the opposite assumption.

If I return to the comparison of men and women: doesn't Clifford realize that his assumption that men can never be attractive is the real discrimination that is going on here and it is him who is doing that?

I am sure that Lisa Randall or any other woman could dress very differently if she wanted to suppress ideas similar to those at the beginning of Tommaso's report. It follows that they don't really want to suppress them. I find it hypocritical and, to a certain extent, absurd to pretend that such an admiration is extremely unpleasant for attractive women. It contradicts what I know about psychology, biology, and evolution. I guess that most readers of the Reference Frame will agree that it is good to feel as being attractive.

If you ask how my compassion works, I would be much more worried about the women - or men - who are viewed as less attractive. Do you have any doubts that it is more convenient to be attractive than to be unattractive? There exist hundreds of stories showing how huge advantages attractive women have that I am simply stunned that someone is still able to deny this fact or even to turn this situation upside down.

For example, there used to be a blog called Libertarian Girl. It contained a lot of tough conservative comments and was apparently written by a sexy blonde young woman. The links pointing to that blog were skyrocketing until it was pointed out that the photograph was taken from a Ukrainian or Russian website featuring Slavic women looking for Western partners. The guy who was writing that blog estimated that the attractive face on the blog has multiplied the traffic by a factor of ten. And he was probably right because after he renamed it to Libertarian Man of Mystery, the traffic decreased to 10% again.

I would like to urge the politically correct preachers such as Clifford Johnson or Sean Carroll to stop with all this nonsense that they have been spreading for years or decades. Women will always be women much like men will always be men. People in science will always have different characteristics than those that are directly related to their work. These characteristics will always influence lives of physicists in somewhat asymmetric ways. Many of the scientists like to have these characteristics, and if these unphysical things help anyone, they help exactly to those who are described as the discriminated ones.

In other words, political correctness must die unless we want to sacrifice the scientific community instead.

And that would be the memo except that I want to say a few more things.

First, Tommaso has written another text,

Am I a sexist?

Second, he has described some scientific topics in his first report - about the unlikely expectations of black holes at the TeV scale.

Third, Tommaso has pointed out that Lisa was essentially speaking in a hostile atmosphere and he correctly argues that this is what most theoretical physicists face these days. They are being intimidated. He is very correct. I am a rather peaceful speaker but if an attendant were trying to pollute my seminar with a Swolin-like garbage, I would return the crank to the mantinels where he or she belongs. I am afraid that other theorists prefer masochism in similar situations.

What Tommaso doesn't tell us is that this thoroughly irrational and deeply unpleasant atmosphere hasn't been created just by Peter Woit and Lee Smolin but also by dozens of appendices of those two jokes - like himself - which is why I call him Peter Woit Lite. He is a part of the problem. These people are driven by analogous goals as the global warming jihadists: they want to promote science that has politically interesting applications and that can become a subject of a broad "consensus" over the science that is done carefully and that actually works.

How does Tommaso Dorigo justify his comments that were classified as "sexist" comments? Well, he says that the internet is full of child porn, home-made bomb manuals, neo-Nazi sites, and climate change skeptics. The last term is equipped with a link pointing to the Reference Frame: thank you. ;-) I essentially agree with him except that he has made a lot of sign errors. Indeed, you can find many things on the Internet such as child porn, political correctness, global warming jihadists, neo-Nazi sites, home-made bomb manuals, and mathematics-hating crackpots.

And that's the memo.

Ralph Alpher died

Ralph Alpher, a nearly forgotten co-father of the Big Bang, died at age of 86.

The Telegraph about his life and work

In 1948, he published papers about the primordial soup in which elements were created. In the same year, they essentially predicted the cosmic microwave background. In 1955, he left the Academia for 30 years: he worked in General Electric.

One paper he co-authored is famous also because of the names of the authors: Alpher, Bethe, Gamow (Alpher's advisor). While Bethe was only included for aesthetic reasons, at that time, Deltoid wasn't invited because it wasn't yet fashionable to collaborate with environmentalist nutcases.

At any rate, cosmology is unfortunately losing one of its icons, the first one in the Greek alphabet.

Two anniversaries

When I talk about the Greek alphabet, I should also mention that on August 30th, 1871, Ernest Rutherford was born in New Zealand. He discovered the atomic nucleus and classified radiation to alpha, beta, gamma. Around the nucleus, you may find electrons. Electrons were discovered by JJ Thomson who died on August 30th, 1940.

Radiation and health

John Gofman was a physicist who has argued that radiation was 20 times more unhealthy than the government said (can't check the numbers now). Nevertheless, he died of heart failure two weeks ago.

George Monbiot: zero emissions by 2030

Many people in the global warming movement have lost their minds. For example, we have seen that Al Gore and James Hansen predict 82-feet rise in the sea level. There's a huge competition between these folks.

George Monbiot wants to promote his new book "Heat: how to stop the planet from burning" so he doesn't want to stay behind. Instead, he wants to remain the number 1 "moonbat" as some people outside his movement call him. What can he do to achieve this non-trivial goal and beat his tough competition?

Well, some crazy politicians have been talking about a 80% reduction of CO2 by 2050 and similar kinds of silliness. The "moonbat" easily beats them. How? He simply wants

zero emissions by 2030.

He announced it on a blog that wants to go beyond zero emissions i.e. that wants to replace all emissions by absorption. ;-) Let us look whether this could be sane in any sense.

Whether CO2 reductions will be easy or not will undoubtedly depend on technological progress. For example, thermonuclear fusion - something that not only Monbiot considers unlikely by 2030 - could help to produce all energy using this new source. But even with thermonuclear fusion, Monbiot's goal can't be realized unless the mankind is exterminated. Why?

For example, about 20% of the greenhouse emissions is associated with farm animals. If he really wants to reduce the CO2 emissions by more than 90%, his previous "modest" figure, all people must become vegetarians, among other things. Moonbat will have to convince six billion people to become vegetarians. I, for one, would definitely prefer to become a consumer of meat that used to be classified as homo sapiens (before the sapienity was carefully re-evaluated) and to hunt wild animals like Moonbat himself. I suspect I am not the only one who considers the right of six billion people to eat meat more important than the life of a lunatic.

All industry and traffic will have to be converted to a new kind of energy that either doesn't exist today or looks economically or socially unacceptable. Agriculture, transportation, and industry represent significant fractions of the greenhouse emissions and the basic nature of all of them will have to be radically changed. That won't be enough because even breathing and BBQs produce carbon dioxide. These processes will have to be banned, too, much like alcohol fermentation, cement production, and dozens of other processes.

Monbiot wants to introduce egalitarian carbon rationing for all people on the Earth. In the fast comments, several people explain how brutal this idea is, even in comparison with rationing that existed in various war and post-war periods. Monbiot doesn't plan to return us to the Iron Age or the Bronze Age because people were using fire to refine metals but directly to the Stone Age.

How is this nearly complete destruction of our civilization justified? Well, those people think that this radical step will lead to a flat Earth's climate (thanks, moptop). Of course it won't because many other natural phenomena will be changing the climate by comparable or greater amounts than the man-made sources above. But those activists simply don't care: the flat Earth's climate is their ultimate moral and religious value.

In comparison with ideas from people like Moonbat, the plans of the former German chancellor in the 1930s were modest suggestions for a subtle reorganization of some details of the human society. And believe me, I don't use this comparison too often.

Mark Lynas offers a very different analogy: global warming skeptics are just like the advocates of slavery and blacks are just like fossil fuels. Well, in reality, the end of slavery didn't lead to an economical collapse because the same work could have been done and was done by people covered by new, more dynamical job contracts. Elimination of fossil fuels is analogous to extermination of all blacks and everyone else who could work with muscles, rather than the end of slavery. Mark Lynas should try to use his brain and design his analogies more accurately.

And that's the memo.

The Australian Warming Swindle debate

Climate-related: a recent talk by Fred Singer
Also: less than 1/2 of published scientists endorse AGW theory

Martin Durkin is not necessarily 100% saint, his documentary wasn't 100% free of errors, and his answers are not quite 100% perfect. But look how he was treated in Australia after his The Great Global Warming Swindle was aired by ABC, the Australian TV station, on July 12th:



He was treated like a heretic or a criminal even though he was at least 90% right in these big questions. I am sure that the professional yet aggressive journalist who talks to Durkin would behave towards mujahideens in a much more friendly way. All the well-known blogospherical criticism is raised in a very dramatic, prepared way and nothing else is invented. Durkin had to answer on the spot. I've heard that the "debate" that followed the screening of Durkin in Australia was bad but I didn't imagine it was that bad. Was an alarmist movie ever analyzed on TV in a comparable way?

Felicity McMahon has argued that it was time to privatize ABC. She wrote:

In the recent airing by the ABC of the Martin Durkin’s polemic documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle the ABC sealed its own fate. It showed that even after Mark Scott took the helm of the National Broadcaster, its leftist agenda would remain. In what was lambasted by ABC Director, Kim Dalton, as the best evidence of the ABC’s priority of “allowing principal relevant viewpoints on matters of public importance to be aired” (see “ABC should air dissenting opinions”, May 25, 2007, The Australian), The Great Global Warming Swindle, was far from that.

The airing of the documentary was supposed to give an opportunity for Australians to hear arguments opposing the existence of global warning. Durkin’s documentary featured criticism of the science and indeed the business surrounding climate change. It was interesting, through-provoking and challenged the climate change orthodoxy which has taken a strangle-hold of the Australian thinking on the subject.

But the ABC failed in its aim, as Dalton alleged, “to be Australia’s town square where people can debate, hear alternative views and learn from each other”. Instead, it was nothing more than a hand-holding experience. The ABC could not just air the program and leave the concepts and ideas with Australians to mull over themselves. Instead, the ABC’s Tony Jones (usually the host of Lateline) conducted a panel discussion after interviewing Durkin that essentially blocked out any anti-climate change opinions. Whatever has been said about the performance of the climate change sceptics in the discussion, it does not change the fact that Jones’ approach to the “discussion” was completely biased.

Jones even blocked the opinion of the ABC’s own highly-respected conservative voice, Michael Duffy. Duffy could not get a word in, having made it clear that he would not tow the ABC pro-climate change line. Early on in the panel discussion, Duffy had queried why there was such organised criticism and deconstruction of Durkin’s documentary, and no such treatment of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.

A valid question indeed. Why did the ABC feel the need to aggressively deconstruct Durkin’s documentary? Why did it feel that Al Gore’s documentary deserved no criticism?

The answer of course, was simple. The ABC has a particular agenda to push. It remains accountable to no one. Its revenues are secured. The taxpayers will continue to be forced to pay no matter how biased the coverage is or how enraged the voters are.

This environmental agenda is pushed further by other programming choices the ABC makes. In Carbon Cops the ABC is really on to you - invading your home and checking to see if your carbon footprint is bigger than it should be.

Before I saw the scary video, these were just words for me.

If you have strong nerves, you may watch all eight parts of the "debate". The first two parts contain the aggressive interview and the remaining six parts resemble the Council of Constance where Mr Jan Hus was convicted and eventually burned at stake.

Patrick Moore about trees and carbon

The Vancouver Sun has a thoughtful essay written by Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, about wood and carbon. Old trees contain a lot of carbon but the rate of their growth is slower. Younger trees are small but are able to capture more CO2.



Victorian furniture

If our goal were to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, we should cut and use more wood, not less. Old furniture still keeps carbon from ancient CO2. Patrick Moore also uses the article to criticize the recent rant by Leonardo DiCaprio and some very stupid things done by the current officials in his organization.

Hat tip: Marc Morano.

Václav Havel: Leaving

Václav Havel, the last Czechoslovak and first Czech president, has written his first play since the Velvet Revolution. It is called "Leaving" ("Odcházení").

I haven't seen it but it is supposed to be a funny variation of King Lear by Shakespeare - about a king who becomes insane after he loses power. This king was turned into Mr Vilém Rieger, a chancellor who leaves politics. Rieger looks like Havel himself. ;-)

A demo:

"Do you know what I heard from Molotov during a cocktail party?" asks Mr Vlastík Klein, Rieger's foe resembling Václav Klaus.

Well, I hope the rest won't be too insulting. ;-)

The play was expected to appear in the National Theater but Havel has blocked it, mostly because the theater didn't want to hire his wife, and it was moved to the Na Vinohradech Theater.

Josef Tošovský nominated to lead IMF

Incidentally, a Spanish boss of the International Monetary Fund has resigned. The European Union nominated a French social democrat. But the following move by Russia looked like if they play chess. Russia nominated Josef Tošovský, the silent former boss of the Czech National Bank and the former Czech prime minister in a caretaker government after the "Sarajevo assassination" that unjustly removed Václav Klaus' government in 1997.

The Czech socialists instantly supported Tošovský's nomination while the government and the Prague Castle oppose it. It's being speculated that Russia wants to earn political points in the Czech Republic because of the radar controversy. Moreover, there are rumors that Tošovský, a former communist, has been a KGB agent. Russia's proposal is not completely hopeless because Putin's people argue that Tošovský has already won the backing of unspecified developing nations.

Well, the U.N. is not quite the same thing as the EU and things may become interesting.

Defending ideas we don't believe: string theory is a waste of time

Sean Carroll started an interesting game, collecting

the best arguments for things he doesn't believe.

While I also frequently find arguments supporting wrong ideas even weaker than they should be, I wouldn't be good in playing Sean's game. For example, if you ask me what good arguments I could give you to support the opinion that the society should "fight against climate change", I would have no idea.

If I knew such arguments, you would have already heard them from me. I am not trying to hide any good arguments that I am aware of. The proponents of the "dangerous global warming" theory often use really silly arguments but I think that the main problem is not that all of these people are silly; the main problem is that no good, defendable, rational arguments supporting their position exist.

Nevertheless, Sean wrote a collection of arguments for the first statement he doesn't believe, namely that

string theory is a waste of time.

The punch line is: the best argument that string theory is a waste of time is that the theory is simply too hard and right now we don't have any good reasons to think that all remaining big questions will be solved soon.

I couldn't agree more. It is indeed the best, and probably the only good argument supporting the statement above. String theory is hard and the recent progress doesn't suggest that it will be completely solved by the end of this summer. But the challenging character of the open questions and string theory itself is also the reason why it is attracting and why it has been attracting some of the smartest people on the planet.

As Sean correctly suggests, all other arguments that are being routinely offered to support the thesis are pure garbage - garbage that is good enough to influence many uninformed people. I will explain that the remaining arguments that Sean has fabricated are untrue or nonsensical, too.

Best science usually results from a close collaboration of theory and experiment, right?

Well, first, I don't really think that this assertion is true from a historian's viewpoint. I think that some of the best experiments in the history of physics were made by pure experimenters who didn't care about the theory much. And most of the best theories in physics were found by theorists who didn't think about doable experiments every day when they woke up. The latter group includes most of the theoretical giants of the 20th century, including Einstein, Planck, Dirac, Pauli, and dozens of others.

Of course that both kinds of research must eventually be linked as long as they refer to the real world. But the idea that this exchange must occur on a regular basis as well as the idea that there should be a fixed and prescribed percentage of experimenters and theorists that study every individual question in science is a childish silliness. It is an example of quotas and political correctness run amok. The analogy with the quotas for men and women couldn't be more obvious. Many key experimental discoveries in science remained purely experimental for quite some time and many key theoretical discoveries were found by purely theoretical means. Any attempt to systematically alter the composition of the naturally evolved research is bound to be counterproductive.

As Sean correctly says, the reason why people study quantum gravity i.e. string theory despite a very low probability that it can be directly tested by experiments is that they have a lot of sharp theoretical tools that largely compensate (or even overcompensate) the shortage of experimental tools.

I have already learned that this basic concept behind theoretical physics is next to impossible to grasp for virtually all laymen - a category that manifestly includes chairs of the mathematics departments at U.S. schools - because most people just don't understand how complex calculations or thinking may ever be relevant for the real world. They have never done a complex calculation leading to the right result and they think that no one else can do it either.

I assure you that it is not only possible to figure out things about the Universe by very complex theoretical thoughts and calculations that don't need to do experiments in the middle - but it has been the dominant strategy of theoretical physics for approximately 350 years and it is getting ever more powerful.

Ancient Greeks, alchemists, and the present

A Cosmicvariance commenter named Solipsist argues that the ancient philosophers used to think all the time and all their theories were ruled out in the age of empiricism. Well, not all of them (atoms were not) but more importantly, these ancient people were not thinking about the deeper origin of theories that have already been empirically verified. String theorists do. That's a huge difference.

Otherwise, one could offer analogous hostile comments about experimenters, too. Alchemists were doing experiments for centuries and they have never found the elixir of life. The modern theory even explains why they couldn't achieve their goals using their methods. ;-) Only very stupid people might want to generalize these episodes and think that "all experiments are rubbish" or "all theory is rubbish".

There are too many vacua i.e. solutions, right?

It seems that there exist very many maximally symmetric solutions of string theory - different kinds of vacua or Universes where someone could potentially live. Does it mean that string theory is less likely to be true?

I think that it should be completely manifest that such a conclusion is entirely irrational. We can't experimentally measure or count the number of Universes where the particle spectrum and fundamental constants differ from ours. Because we don't know the right answer, we must be equally open-minded about all possible answers. If experimental data about this question are absent while theoretical arguments imply that 10^{500} is the most likely estimate for the number of quasirealistic vacua, then it is the most likely estimate for the number of quasirealistic vacua. Period.

The theory is, more directly or less directly, based on observational data. Claiming that we don't like its answers to a question that can't be experimentally decided and we prefer to rely on our prejudices is a textbook example of an unscientific approach. Even if someone doesn't realize that string theory is almost guaranteed to be correct, it is the only scientific framework we have that has the capacity to answer similar questions. If someone prefers preconceived dogmas or metaphysical traditions over precious calculations, he's just not a scientifically minded person.

Another question is how to find the right spot in the landscape and whether we should be looking for it at all. No solid arguments exist here. But the very counting is a matter of doing science right.

A large number of universes may mean that it will be harder to make progress. It can mean that the final results won't be as uniquely cool as many have hoped. But the large number cannot influence our ideas about the validity of the theory. When a 19th century theorist predicted that the number of atoms in a bottle of milk would have to be around 10^{26}, the number was larger than the numbers that most people knew. But this fact certainly didn't mean that the atomic theory became less likely. It was a legitimate prediction of the size of the atoms - even though these atoms couldn't have been seen for another century. Only unscientific people could have doubted that the prediction was legitimate. And it was the right prediction, of course.

String theory isn't a theory, right?

A lot of misconceptions about this question follow from confusing terminology. What do we mean by string theory and M-theory?

In the 1970s and 1980s, people discovered the Feynman diagrams for this theory, generalizing diagrams in perturbative quantum field theory: they have realized that the fundamental objects in perturbative string theory looked like strings. They thought that everything one could learn about the theory would always be formulated in terms of strings and their properties.

In the 1990s, it was realized that this old paradigm was too narrow-minded. Some of the previous general facts - the key role of strings - were downgraded to mere artifacts of an approximation. The full theory also contains black holes, branes of diverse dimensions, and all these entities are able to get transformed into each other. Moreover, it was realized that the strongly coupled limit of ten-dimensional type IIA string theory is an eleven-dimensional theory. Because one couldn't say anything specific about this eleven-dimensional theory - except for its low-energy limit (supergravity) - it was mysteriously named M-theory.

People thought that this eleven-dimensional M-theory was so mysterious and so special that once we understand the rules that control its eleven-dimensional dynamics, all mysteries of string theory would be solved, at least in principle.

This opinion turned out to be naive. Matrix theory became the first setup in which the eleven-dimensional dynamics can be exactly, non-perturbatively defined and studied. But Matrix theory is nevertheless unable to define dynamics of string theory in all possible contexts (even though type IIA and E8 x E8 string-theoretical vacua are among those that are completely captured by Matrix theory). Each vacuum requires us to define a new matrix model and the matrix description of most vacua is unknown.

With these insights, people realized that the eleven-dimensional vacuum described by M-theory is just another special limit of the full theory, much like ten-dimensional type I, IIA, IIB, HE, HO string theories. Each limit is useful to calculate results in its vicinity but less useful to calculate results in distant regions of the configuration space. The only difference between five string theories and M-theory is that M-theory has eleven dimensions instead of ten. But you should add it as the sixth supersymmetric background in a maximum spacetime dimension.

If you return a little bit, people thought that M-theory would explain everything about all string theories. That's why they were using the term "M-theory" in two ways that were non-equivalent even though many people thought that they were equivalent. One of the meanings of "M-theory", the narrow one, was the eleven-dimensional dynamics connected to type IIA string theory; the other, broader meaning was "the full theory unifying all wisdom of string theory".

Once people realized that these two concepts are not the same thing, they had to refine the meaning of "M-theory". Among the physicists in the field, the term "M-theory" is now exclusively used for descriptions of physical systems that are based on eleven-dimensional spacetime with supersymmetry. Nevertheless, the laymen still use the term "M-theory" to refer to the full theory that has "superseded" string theory, partially because they have not yet been told that the eleven-dimensional dynamics doesn't expose all secrets of string theory.

The laymen and journalists have been using the term "M-theory" in a wrong way for at least 10 years and I think that it is already time for them to learn that they misinterpret the meaning of "M-theory". In fact, you can see that Sean uses the term "M-theory" incorrectly, too. Physicists in the field only use "M-theory" for one of the limits of the full theory - the limit that has 11 dimensions - and for its compactifications where those 11 dimensions may still be seen. And they continue to use the term "string theory" (instead of "M-theory" or something else) for the full structure that connects all the limits (previously called "string theories") and that is studied by string theorists. It is a kind of misnomer because strings no longer play a qualitatively different role from other objects in this full theory. But nevertheless, it is terminology that stuck.

"String theory" now means the full theory studied by string theorists while, of course, terms like "type IIA string theory" are still used for the particular limiting descriptions.

So if you use the term "string theory" in the same way as physicists do, the assertion that "string theory is not a theory" is certainly incorrect. If you use the most refined definition of the word "theory" that theoretical physics can offer today, string theory is a perfect example of a "theory". It only has one kind of dynamics even though the set of phenomena that follow from it is very rich. If you imagined that it can be described by a local Lagrangian much like quantum field theories, the Lagrangian would be unique. It has many fields and degrees of freedom and a complicated configuration space. But its structure is uniquely determined.

We can't write the full Lagrangian that covers all aspects of string theory and we actually think that the theory is not defined by the old-fashioned spacetime Lagrangians. But if we ask any meaningful physical question about the dynamics, we may always derive an unambiguous answer just like we can do whenever we have the full Lagrangian in a quantum field theory.

The complete definition of the full string theory that would transform every question about the set of vacua and their dynamics to a fully rigorous mathematical problem isn't available at this moment. But a full definition is available for many subsets of the string-theoretical configuration space and moreover, all the right qualitative (and some quantitative) answers may be found in virtually all corners of string theory. This is a highly non-trivial fact that implies that string theory almost certainly exists as a unique, rigorously definable mathematical structure. If it didn't exist, it could have broken down in hundreds of corners and under hundreds of extreme circumstances. So far, it has never broken down.

We don't have the exact equation that defines the shape of America but you can try to walk around the continent and convince yourself that the continent exists anyway, despite the absence of the U.S. equation that could be printed on your shirt. The people who say that America doesn't exist are simply wrong. String theory is in the same situation except that you must replace walking by calculations.

String theory has no universal predictions, right?

This is another common misconception. People like to say that "anything goes" in string theory. But that's complete rubbish. If you actually look at the physicists who haven't yet understood string theory and analyze what they think about many kinds of questions, you will find out that their answer to virtually every question is wrong.

Some believe that the information is lost in black holes. Others believe that there are no degrees of freedom besides the metric tensor. Pretty much the same people believe that geometrical quantities are well-behaved observables at the Planck scale and they usually have a discrete spectrum. Similar people believe that the Planck scale physics eliminates the need for anomaly cancellation. There exist hundreds of qualitative questions that are clearly and unambiguously answered by string theory even though most people who can't follow the correct arguments would end up with wrong answers.

From this viewpoint, the differences between the different solutions (or vacua) of string theory are negligible technicalities. The qualitative facts how physics works are completely unified and some of the quantitative facts are unified, too.

Sean correctly says that some facts about the spectral density and the asymptotic behavior of scattering amplitudes only hold at weak coupling and don't extend to the full string theory. That's of course correct. Some of them don't. But some of the features of string theory do. You could say the very same thing about QCD or any other theory in physics. For example, QCD predicts various power laws that only work at weak coupling i.e. high energies but they don't imply anything at the hadron scale.

It is not the main goal of a physical theory to produce easy slogans that are easily memorizable, verifiable, and that can be used to impress and mislead laymen in books and newspapers - even though this is exactly what people like Lee Smolin think. The actual goal of a theory such as QCD or string theory is to correctly predict the results of a whole class of phenomena. Most of these phenomena require one to understand what's going on at the technical level and will be either boring or impenetrable for laymen and journalists. But that's simply how Nature works. Get used to it.

And that's the memo.

Al Gore's traveling global warming show

I wonder whether the author likes Al Gore or not. He or she might be one of those rare cases who don't care. ;-)

Regional climate forecasts

Rasmus Benestad wrote a long article about the predicted impact of a hypothetical climate change on individual regions. In the context of the IPCC, this question is discussed in chapter 11 of the report of the first working group. Rasmus argues that it is very hard for the existing models to predict regional changes but he overwhelms us with a lot of unreliable information collected from random modelers at random places anyway.

The IPCC panel is an arbitrary conglomerate of local scientists whose work was sufficiently convenient to be included. There is not a single person in the world who has studied and checked the whole IPCC report and we shouldn't pretend that this particular conglomerate of statements and ideas is more valuable than it is. If you want to construct your own IPCC report, tear random pages from climate books on your bookshelves, throw away those that contradict a coming cataclysm, and ask your Marxist friend to write a summary of these pages. ;-)

There are some facts that are not stated too often even though I find them rather important. Let us start with a discussion of the importance and general expectations about the regional climate change:

1. The impact of a conceivable climate change, regardless of its origin, on individual regions is way more important than its impact on the global average. Unfortunately, current climatology is obsessed with global averages - a few quantities that are both ill-defined as well as largely inconsequential. For example, the climate in Canada will be much more important for Canadians than the global averages.
2. The fact that the existing climate models are not able to reliably predict regional climate change is a huge problem for these models. The Earth is not a zero-sum game. If a region is getting cooler, it doesn't mean that there must exist an equally large complementary region that is getting warmer. Dynamics of the atmosphere above individual regions and continents follows the same physical laws as the dynamics of the whole atmosphere of the Earth and if we don't understand the regional dynamics well, it is obvious that we can't understand the global dynamics well either which seems to be the case. This whole point turned out to be controversial for Alexander Ač and a more detailed discussion appears in the fast comments.
3. Regional climate offers many more quantities where models may be verified against reality and where the actual drivers of various changes may be isolated more clearly than if we use global averages. That's why the regional climate and the weather is a much more appropriate context in which our ideas and equations about the climate should be verified and refined. A similar comment holds for short-term weather and climate dynamics. It seems that there are way too many climatologists these days who want to avoid such a thing: they really don't want to know the right answers. They only want to talk about a few global numbers exactly because it is easier to adjust a few numbers and pretend that we have already understood them. If we look at the regional data, it is pretty clear that we don't understand the dynamics well, not even in the long term.
4. Whenever it is possible to divide the impact of climate change on various regions and forms of life into two groups, good and bad, it is extremely likely that about 50% of the influences will be good and 50% of the influences will be bad. Examples will be discussed later. This point turned out to be controversial for Prof Peter Shor who started a discussion in the fast comments.
5. Individual countries and their scientific institutes should be primarily interested in the conceivable changes that will occur on their territory because climatology is, whether you like it or not, an applied science and the local climate is simply more relevant than the climate in distant regions. The fact that the temperature and other quantities depend on the location should also influence the rational behavior of countries and the international definition of justice.

Winners and losers: counting

As we have stated above, for any conceivable kind of climate change, either natural or man-made, we can find approximately 50% of regions that will benefit and 50% of regions that will lose. This zeroth order estimate is a consequence of a Z_2 symmetry relating cold and warm weather, a symmetry that holds pretty accurately in economics because the current life is relatively well adapted to the existing conditions. About 50% of subjects would prefer a warmer weather and 50% of subjects would prefer a cooler weather. Analogously, 50% of subjects would prefer increasing precipitation (Sahara) and 50% of subjects would prefer less precipitation (Londoners?). By subjects, I mean nations, people, species, regions, animals, corporations, or anything else: the vagueness is deliberate.

However, if you think for a little while, you may see that warming is actually better than cooling in average. Why? It's because we know that when the Earth was a snowball if it ever was, there wasn't too much life here. On the other hand, when Earth was covered by tropical forests and when it didn't tolerate any ice sheets, there was a lot of life here.

If we believe that the average 21st global temperature will be slightly below 15 Celsius degrees, it is sensible to talk about the interval between 0 Celsius degrees and 30 Celsius degrees. I find it obvious that 30 Celsius degrees is better for life than 0 Celsius degrees. We deliberately talk about the interval that is 30 Celsius degrees long because even this interval is compatible with life. In reality, people will only be talking about temperatures between 14 and 17 Celsius degrees - an interval that is shorter by an order of magnitude - throughout the whole century.

Moreover, the impact around a stationary points goes as the second power which is why one order of magnitude mentioned previously translates to two orders of magnitude on the impact scale. Even if the 3 Celsius degree change of the temperature occurred instantly, its impact on life could be quantified as roughly "1 percent of life", assuming an appropriate measure. Because this change is distributed over a century, its impact will be much smaller.

Let us summarize: slightly more than 50% of the regions or subjects will benefit and slightly less than 50% of the regions or subjects will lose. Whoever wants to insert the assumption that much more than 50% of the regions will lose - an assumption that others are supposed to treat as an unquestionable dogma - is simply acting irrationally. The relative effect of the "good news" may be increased further as long as we can plan and adapt.

Winners and losers: examples

Fine. So who will lose and who will win? Rasmus admits that no one knows reliable enough answers. Their usual self-confidence about the global predictions goes away. They are only self-confident about the global predictions because it is much easier for anyone to fool himself into thinking that he understands something as soon as his only task is to "understand" one number only. When you see millions of diverse numbers with patterns that make some sense but you don't know how to derive them, it is much harder to fool yourself.

Because of this comment, all the examples that will follow should mostly be viewed as thought experiments that may turn out to be right or wrong.

So who are the winners? I find it extremely likely that if we assume that the average climate will be getting warmer, the civilized nations located in the cold regions are going to be clear winners. Large regions of Russia, Canada, and Scandinavia may become fertile. The plants grown in these currently frozen or cool regions will be able to feed millions of people who are not yet born. The Arctic region will offer its resources that will be primarily available to the nearby countries. New traffic routes may appear.

I would say that whoever lives in Russia, Canada, and Scandinavia and wants to fight against global warming because he or she thinks that it will harm his country is simply acting irrationally. These obvious thoughts make the hysterical behavior of Stephane Dion who attacks poor silent boy Stephen Harper even more illogical and alarming. (Dion's party seems to be really obnoxious.) The worst thing that can happen to Canada is that it will look much like the U.S. today. Note that the territory of Canada is greater than the U.S. territory. Why does Canada support 10 times less people than the U.S.? Surely it could have something to do with the weather, right?

We're not guaranteed that Siberia, Norway, or Northern Canada will become warmer and more friendly. But I think that common sense dictates that it is likely.

Winners and losers: rain and deserts

What will probably influence the friendliness of various regions much more than temperature will be precipitation. We have been to Sahara a few years ago. It's been fun but it's not a great place to live - except for the hotel located many miles from the borders of Sahara that had several swimming pools in it. ;-) The negative influence of Sahara is one of the main reasons why Africa is such a poor continent. I fully agree with Freeman Dyson's "heresy" that a wet Sahara is something that good people should prefer. And a wet Sahara is more important than some global temperature averages moving by half a degree in either direction.

I've seen a paper claiming that Sahara will get wet if we extrapolate the current warming trends. I don't know whether these predictions are true or whether the opposite predictions are closer to reality.

But I find this question much more important than the questions about various one-degree global warmings. And I find it simply stunning that Rasmus' 24-kilobyte-long article about regional climate projections doesn't contain the words "Sahara" or "desert".



Why? Well, many people expect that China may become the world's #1 superpower in 50 years. Great changes in Africa could also hypothetically promote Africa to the leading region even though I guess that Africa would have to allow remaining races to participate in their economies. At any rate, the extent of Sahara used to be one of the main big questions about the climate and it is completely irrational that climate scientists such as Rasmus no longer think in this way. Or does he know that there is Sahara in Africa? Maybe he finds this fact unimportant for his climate models.

Rasmus' behavior is a part of a more general pattern.

The proponents of the global warming ideology want to talk about the climate at the centennial scale but what they really care about is how to influence politics in the very short run. If they were thinking about the long term political questions, they would know that their assumptions about the most prosperous regions of the world may become invalid by the end of the century.

In Europe, winters will get milder and wetter in the North and summers will get hotter in the South. I don't see any spectacular changes that could be classified as "very good" or "very bad". If there will be changes in Asia, they will be generally irrelevant. What can happen is that the type of life that exists in certain regions will be moved to the North or the mountains. Because one expects small changes distributed over a century and because the right answers are not really known, I don't think that this is anything that any blogger should analyze in more than two sentences.

Finally, some predictions argue that Southwest portions of the U.S. may get dry. It's very questionable whether they are trustworthy in any way but this scenario will nevertheless play a key role in the last section of this essay.

Non-local quantities and sea level

I emphasize that one should focus on the regional behavior of the climate because if there exists not a single location where climate change is expected to be harmful locally, it follows that climate change can't be harmful globally either.

Is the previous sentence robust? I think it is. There are no non-local influences that could damage your society even if your future local climate looks fine to everyone. One might say that the sea level is such a global quantity that matters. Yes, it is except that we kind of know that it won't change in any significant way. It's been increasing by 2 millimeters per year in the first part of the 20th century and 1.5 millimeters per year in the second part. It's actually slowing down. But even if the rate triples, it remains insignificant.

But even if you want to consider speculative scenarios of a huge sea level rise, it is still true that it will have both negative and positive consequences. For example, if the sea level rises by 100 meters as James Hansen is going to predict in his new paper, the Czech tourists won't have to travel as far to the sea for vacations as they have to do today. They will save gasoline, too. More seriously, even though some houses would have to be sacrificed if the sea decided to play Hansen's game, the houses that would survive and get closer to the sea would become more valuable.

Anyway, the set of the threatened buildings doesn't contain too many of them that were supposed to be serving people for centuries. It is irrational to impose international regulation just in order to prevent the natural redistribution of wealth. It is equally irrational to be afraid that a small percentage of people won't be able to run 10 meters away from ocean in 100 years.

Non-uniform climate change: justice

Fine. So believe me for a while that regional changes are much more important for the people who live there than the changes of the global averages. Imagine that such changes will occur. How should the world react?

A priori, I think that no lucky nation has any obligation to compensate another nation whose climate became less friendly. But we have the United Nations and various other tools of international compassion. Let's imagine that the whole mankind is one huge family. How should we react if someone benefits and someone else loses?

Analogous thought experiments could be performed in many situations but let us consider a specific situation. Sahara will become a fertile land and some additional states in the U.S. Southwest will become a desert. Should Africa pay compensations to the U.S.? I don't know whether it should but what is clear is that it won't. No serious person will even ask for them. Even if Sahara gets fertile, it won't be richer than America for a long time. Moreover, a fertile land in Sahara is likely to be grabbed by foreign investors. ;-)

Now imagine that a poor country will become a desert and richer countries will relatively benefit. In this case, it is much easier to imagine that the poor country could be compensated, financially or territorially. All kinds of emotions, laws, conventions, and political arguments would play role if such things were ever being decided. At the end, such a compensation would be just an addition to the existing aid to the third world.

Another thought experiment: imagine that the mankind can actually prevent a particular climate change whose regional impacts are more or less known or - analogously - it can artifically initiate such a change by technological means. Such a decision would create winners as well as losers. Should it be done? A rational decision at the level of the U.N. would clearly be a decision whose net benefits significantly exceed the net costs. If such a decision - to prevent or initiate a climate change - can be made and justified, its asymmetric impact on various countries may be compensated according to an international treaty.

There are many important scientific, legal, ethical, and especially economical questions associated with all these scenarios. My text was only meant to encourage people to think about these actual questions. In the current atmosphere controlled by intellectually limited, fanatical people who only talk about one global quantity, a quantity that is decorated by quasi-religious connotations and irrationally correlated with all of the evil in this world (the global mean temperature or climate sensitivity), it shouldn't be too surprising that a serious discussion about our attitude to climate change hasn't yet started.

Challenge: propose a fair system of rules

I encourage everyone to try to be more specific about what they consider a fair international reaction to various regional forecasts or actual regional climate changes that have either occurred, or are likely to occur, or can be artificially initiated.

And that's the memo.

RealClimate.ORG - previous replies. I haven't responded to two previous texts on that blog. One of them attacked FoxNews, Bush's response to Katrina, and Schwartz's calculation of the climate sensitivity (where James Annan's imported arbitrary comment was the closest thing to an argument: RealClimate.ORG wasn't able to manufacture a better criticism).

The other RealClimate.ORG article asked the journalists to call Schmidt and Mann because they have successfully predicted that the Atlantic circulation wouldn't stop. Congratulations to their extraordinary prediction! ;-) The previous text on RealClimate.ORG that deserved at least some reaction was about tipping points, sweet spots, and model ensembles.

Memoirs of an early string theorist

Pierre Ramond's memoirs

Ramond worked on String Theory over a period of five years during the First String Era (Zeroth Superstring Revolution), the most intellectually satisfying years of his scientific life. One of the early prospectors in the String Theory Mine, he was fortunate enough to contribute to the birth of this subject that retains, after these many years, its magical hold on our imaginations and expectations. That was Ramond's abstract.

My abstract

Ramond talks about his schools, early research, small head of Paul Dirac, his hero, Andre Neveu in pajamas at 8 pm, and the finding (from Nambu via Lou) that the dual models were models of strings. Scherk and Neveu did an important calculation that could only be done by French people. And after some time, Ramond started to produce results. The on-shell condition was derived from conformal invariance. Hippies were banned in Aspen. Ramond then derived the Dirac equation from superconformal invariance and discovered supersymmetry.

Don Weingarten who has earlier smoked cigars in the armchair of the president of Columbia University instantly knew that Ramond's finding was very important. An algebra professor Jacobson, on the other hand, has kindly kicked out Ramond from his office. ;-) Ramond preferred to visit Lillian and had no time to see Andre. After some hassle, Ramond switched to Yale. Neveu and Schwarz sent Ramond their paper that didn't sufficiently appreciate Ramond's key contributions: the antiperiodic people may sometimes act strangely. Recall that the Ramond sector is more "new" - with the spinors built-in - because the Neveu-Schwarz sector is analogous to the bosonic string.

Mandelstam was one of a small number of people who understood and cared about Ramond's work. Ramond with Kalb, his student, introduced the B-field. Because of the general lack of interest, Ramond left string theory in the 1970s. He was happy to see that exceptional groups, his new focus, appeared in the heterotic string in the 1980s.

Related

John Schwarz has written similar memoirs. Who is missing here? Yes, Andre Neveu. Instead of memoirs, he solves bootstrap in the N=1 Liouville theory. In which sector? Of course, in the Neveu-Schwarz sector. ;-)

America, Australia: total lunar eclipse

Too late, the theater is over!



It should be the most spectacular one in years... In Australia, watch it Tuesday night. In the Western portions of the Americas, it will be Tuesday morning.

Hansen: all hell is going to break loose

Will oceans surge 82 feet or 97 miles?

New discoveries of the leading climate expert

Based on globeandmail.com

I don't like if the right-wing blogs interrupt leading climate experts by humiliating comments so let us allow Prof James Hansen, one of the greatest living scientists in the world and the boss of the esteemed GISS institute at NASA, to speak himself. LM

Title: All hell is going to break loose
Author: James Hansen

Current estimates for how high the seas could rise are way off the mark - and in the next 100 years melting ice could sink cities in the United States to Bangladesh.

If we follow 'business-as-usual' growth of greenhouse gas emissions, I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several metres, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose.



Figure 1: a diagram depicting my newest scientific discovery. The purple color is actually not purple: it is ultraviolet because it will be really hot.

The scientific basis for this idea is outlined in our recent paper published by the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and described in The Earth today stands in imminent peril.

In stark contrast to estimates put forward by the IPCC, I and my colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago. If you know science behind the Holy Scripture, you know that one million year is actually just a month. The driving force are the positive feedbacks that exceed all imagination of mortal human beings. They are great, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

They ask me: So why the radical discrepancies between our predictions and those of the IPCC? Every time they ask, I wisely look into the skies and answer them. Listen to my words carefully. Certain positive feedback effects, as well as recent data on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, were not included in the IPCC's report. Because of the cumbersome IPCC review process, they exclude recent information, so they are very handicapped.

That's an ingenious observation about the built-in failures of the IPCC, isn't it? You must think: I would never be able to make such a fantabulous inference as Dr James Hansen. And you are right. There's no other Dr James Hansen but me.



Figure 2: the IPCC according to my new theory. It hasn't been realized so far that the IPCC was crippled, except for the court jesters who have realized it for years. The Devil was an angel, too. He has just made a sign error.

The lethal disease of the IPCC has a scientific name: I have described it in my recent preprint about scientific reticence. There might have been times when scientific consensus worked. It helped us to get rid of the deniers. Today, deniers are completely isolated and they can only speak to other deniers. But I have had a revelation: scientific consensus is no longer enough. We must switch from the first cosmic speed to the second cosmic speed much like socialism was destined to be superseded by communism on a rainy day. In the name of Earth, trust me.



Figure 3: this is the 800-pound gorilla that is threatening Creation. When you are offered these cold hard data and you see how it actually looks like with your own eyes (the shape of the gorilla was found by a computer model combined with Photoshop), would you really believe the infidels who argue that there is nothing to be afraid of?

In another important work, I have demonstrated that all climate skeptics are court jesters controlled by big fish who co-operate with the 800-pound gorilla to destroy Creation. There is no point to joust with these court jesters who have lots of time to jest with us adjusters.



Figure 4: two court jesters and the big fish. Note that the surface of the fish is full of oil and so are the hands of the court jesters.

Both Thomas Jefferson and Richard Peltier agree with me. Thomas Jefferson is already dead but it doesn't matter: he still belongs to the living in usufruct and all of us will be dead when all hell breaks loose anyway. In the article in globeandmail.com, Peltier says that my basic thesis is undeniable. That's a very important word. Strictly speaking, this adjective means that you can't deny it even if you're a denier! That makes my theory much more powerful than the scientific consensus that could have been denied by deniers.

You need a model that incorporates everything and no such model exists, he admits. Because such a model doesn't exist, you must believe me because I am the greatest climatologist in the era before all hell breaks loose.

My salary is much higher than the salary of the little fish in the IPCC panel and my predictions for the sea level rise are comparably gigantic. No one can beat me. Only global warming, climate change, and sea level rise - the Holy Trinity - are greater than I am.

Infidels

However, there is a growing list of infidels. For example, Andrew Weaver, a physicist at the University of Victoria who works on the dynamics of the polar ice caps and also contributes to the IPCC reports, says he thinks the "upper bound for sea-level rise this century is a metre."



Figure 5: court jester. This is how everyone who disagrees with me will look like unless he agrees with me quickly. Andrew Weaver, unless you retract your heresy, this is what you will see in the mirror tomorrow around 7:30 am!

As soon as Weaver said these words, frankly, all hell was going to break loose. While he calls me his hero (he should also add that I am his Holy Prophet), he dared to criticize the tone of my recent paper and the use of words such as "cataclysm," which he believes move "dangerously away from scientific discourse to advocacy." I don't know whether it is advocacy but it is a holy word. It is my word.

Sorry, Andrew, but you will be among the first ones who will be burned in the fires of the coming cataclysm. I have seen the future of humanity and I have seen yours, too. You shall share the melting pot with Cheney, on the right side from Lindzen, Crichton, Christy, and Schwartz who has just betrayed us.



Figure 6: What are you waiting for? Sign it.

I have made it clear and rigorous that the debate is over. It's time to act. I urge all presidential candidates to sign my

Declaration of stewardship for the Earth and all Creation

Every good candidate will thus promise the following:

1. I shall support moratorium on coal
2. I shall support ever increasing price of carbon emissions
3. I shall support energy efficiency policies according to which the price of energy doesn't depend on the amount of energy but rather on the carbon efficiency
4. I shall make sure that light is not on upstairs

These rules directly follow from my previous scientific work. Even the former U.S. vice-president is a witness. And Richard Branson is oh so rich that I can pay as many witnesses as I need. Every candidate must still respect the usual 10 commandments as edited by the IPCC, for example "I shall fear or worship no other threat than global warming."

Also, I urge all citizens, especially the supermodels, to start civil disobedience against the old king Coal II. The case is clear: I have extended my model to the year 2300 and because this model can't even include all necessary physics, we know that the cataclysm will be even worse.

Sorry, as I explain in the paper under the previous link, the "supermodels" was a guise, using prurient interest to gain attention of my fellow technocrats. But every other single word or number I have ever said or written is accurate and will be accurate until I find that my current physical model is incomplete and the future is therefore going to be exponentially worse than I expect today.

And that's... Amen.

Thank you for your deep and detailed thoughts and the time you have spent with the mortal readers of this blog, Prof Hansen, and good luck in your mission to save the Earth!

The only important thing I have forgotten is your telephone number where you may answer additional questions of your new disciples. No, it's OK, it is 77-89-20-00 - check it on Google...

Alberto Gonzales is gone

A popular attorney general is leaving Bush

The subtitle is actually the title used by the leading Czech newspapers. Long time after Rumsfeld and weeks after Karl Rove, Gonzales is leaving, too. Tony Snow will also step down.



I think it's bad news. Gonzales is one of the ultimate role models for kids who are growing up in poor Hispanic families. Regardless of his origin, he has been the ultimate benchmark defining moderate, workmanlike lawyers who are moreover loyal to an unjustly attacked administration.

If you want to see what kind of people are behind his illogical and purely ideological ouster and behind the unfair treatment that acted as a distraction for the department, using Bush's words, see e.g. this page.

Hillary vs Iraq

Meanwhile, Hillary and some other Democrats ask al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, to resign. Even though I would personally prefer someone like Iyad Allawi, I find the "Democratic" attitude non-democratic and arrogant.

Al-Maliki is not a U.S. employee and he is definitely not an employee of the Democrat Party so I would like to encourage Hillary Clinton to shut up. One might be dissatisfied with some events in Iraq but it would be highly counterproductive to openly undermine the democratic mechanisms in Iraq and the independence of this new democratic country. I have no idea what is her better alternative and frankly speaking, I don't believe that she has even thought about one.

Leonard Susskind on black holes

A rather entertaining video...

Also:

Juan Martín Maldacena on string theory

The latter three videos are in Spanish: train your language skills. :-) Can't I offer you Maldacena's lectures in English? You bet.

Julius Wess died

Update: The New York Times about Wess

Originally posted on 8/11/2007:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on December 5th. Your humble correspondent was born on December 5th. Werner Heisenberg and Sheldon Glashow were also born on December 5th. And so was Knut the polar bear.

Julius Wess was born on December 5th, too. It was in 1934. Sadly, he died on August 8th, 2007.



When supersymmetry is discovered next year, he will unfortunately no longer be eligible for the Nobel prize. That's one of the disadvantages of leaving this world.

Even the young generations that have never met him (that includes me) will know him because of their Wess & Bagger textbook on supersymmetry, from the Wess-Zumino model (yes, I wrote the page) - the renormalizable theory of a single chiral multiplet which was the first known interacting supersymmetric theory; from the Wess-Zumino term - the integral of a closed (d+1)-form over a higher-dimensional manifold whose boundary is the spacetime; and from the Wess-Zumino-(Novikov-)Witten model where this term plays a role.

Public mostly against global warming ideology

Andrew Revkin wrote an article in the New York Times about Steve McIntyre's 1/4-degree Fahrenheit reduction of the recent U.S. temperature record.

AOL reprinted the story and added two polls. 180,000+ people voted whether the threat of AGW is being exaggerated. The result?

• 52% think it is exaggerated
• 26% think it is understated
• 22% think it is fair

Recently, Sharon Begley complained that 42% thought that AGW was being exaggerated. Now it's a more sensible figure, namely 52%. ;-)

There are also 11 pictures with moderately catastrophic predictions by the IPCC. Among 150,000+ voters,

• 55% think that the predictions won't prove fairly accurate
• 45% think that they will prove fairy accurate

Thanks to Rae!

Related: Prof Christopher Lingle criticizes the "strikingly one-sided" reporting on the climate change in the Japan Times.

Related: Two key BBC news bosses attacked global warming jihadists' plans to dedicate a whole day to environmentalist propaganda, saying it was not the broadcaster's job to preach to viewers. The program titled Planet Relief was classified as "consciousness raising" and contradicts the corporation's guidelines. Peter Barron realizes that many people think that the BBC's job is to save the planet but this thinking must be stopped, he insists. Peter Horrocks also realizes that it's not their job to "proselytize" about the AGW religion.

Related: Two months ago, a British poll showed that 3/4 of Britons think that global warming is a natural occurrence and not a result of carbon emissions.

Related: In another British poll two months ago, 56% of respondents agreed that scientists are still questioning climate change. Most people thought that the problem was exaggerated to make money.

Related: One more British poll whose results were published two weeks ago showed, among many other things, that the number of people who consider environment to be among the most important issues for the government dropped from 25 percent in 2001 to 19 percent in 2007. 32 percent refused to reduce their flying and 24 percent refused to reduce their use of cars.

Was Thomas Jefferson an alarmist?

The most discussed text of this week, originally posted on 8/20, is returned to the top for the discussion to be easily available.

James Hansen has released a new scientific paper

The Real Deal: Usufruct & the Gorilla

reflecting the most rigorous kind of scientific "thinking" that this director of a NASA institute is capable or willing to perform these days. He explains that all global warming skeptics are court jesters controlled by big fish who cooperate with an 800-pound gorilla to "destroy Creation". He also argues that no errors in his work can ever matter. I suppose that everyone has already seen these "theories" and everyone could be bored if we responded again.

But there is a brand new "argument" in Hansen's new "paper", after all: it turns out that Thomas Jefferson was an AGW alarmist! Who could have thought? That should finally settle the question about global warming! :-)



How does Dr Hansen prove that Thomas Jefferson was an alarmist? Well, he quotes a letter (click) that Jefferson sent to James Madison during their discussion about the Bill of Rights.

The question whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. ... I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living;" that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. ...

Hansen interprets this letter by saying that Jefferson was an environmentalist and the Earth belongs to living beings of all generations. He apparently wants you to believe that the "living" in Jefferson's letter means "Gaia" - the union of all plants, animals, and bacteria of all generations.

If you actually read the whole letter, it is very obvious that Jefferson's point was exactly the opposite. Jefferson said very explicitly that the past generations - the dead people - or the people who are not yet living have no right to control the resources that exist at a given moment or bind the future generations to pay any money (or land). That's a good policy because otherwise we would be governed by zombies which would be bad unless they would be lively zombies. ;-) According to Jefferson as well as any other person who understands some of the basic principles of Western democracy, a generation has no right to bind another generation, e.g. by carbon targets or a territorial debt.

Jefferson declares clearly that everything about these resources should be decided by the people who live at the particular moment. The Earth belongs to them in "usufruct". The purpose of this word - meaning the right to use assets of someone else - seems controversial but I certainly assume that the actual owner according to Jefferson is God or Nature and not future generations or anything of this sort. In the fast comments, I explain why Jefferson's "owner" is a secular version of God whose gift is described in Genesis 1:26.

If you wonder why I seem to think to have so much understanding for Jefferson's feelings, it's because I have spent the last six years in the Jefferson Lab. ;-) More generally, we've made trips to the museums of the Founding Fathers around Boston and I was extremely impressed by their souls and minds. The prominent figures of the Czech National Revival were great guys too but the Founding Fathers were a category above them.

According to the Roman law, to own something in usufruct means to be allowed to use it, enjoy it, have profits from the "fruits" of the property (the word derives from "use" and "fruits"), sell it to someone else in usufruct, but the ownership in usufruct doesn't allow one to alienate the property or destroy its long-term potential to produce. Needless to say, what approach is the right one to use the fruits without destroying the long-term potential returns us to the beginning of the debate (see Rae Ann and Larry in the fast comments): should we preserve the economy or the concentration of CO2?

Nevertheless, it is very obvious that the "living" whom the Earth belongs to are those who live right now and not some people from other generations or even other animals. It is the living people who should decide how to use the resources. Only God or Nature - as the real owner - is above them and no other generation should have any impact on this behavior.

In the context of the environmentalist discussion, Jefferson explains that our generation will have no right to determine the rules of life for the future generations and no right to bind the future generations by protocols because in the future, we will be the dead people who have no business whatsoever to determine how they use Earth. And vice versa: no other generation has the right to determine how we use the resources today because only living people have powers and rights over Earth.

Jefferson even states another important rule quite crisply:

If the society has formed no rules for the appropriation of its lands in severalty, it will be taken by the first occupants.

In the context of fossil fuels, his sentence means that the first generation or generations have the right to use them. How it could be otherwise? The civilization would be completely dysfunctional if people who don't live right now had any rights to decide what happens tonight. Jefferson knows it, every sane person knows it - probably not only in the West. Hansen doesn't.

According to Jefferson, should our generation try to give gifts to the future generations out of the resources that, as he has explained, effectively belong to the living generation? Do these distant generations have such special relationships with each other and obligations with respect to each other? Once again, Jefferson is very transparent - maybe too transparent for our tastes, tastes of 21st century sissies - about the relationship that should exist between different generations:

... but that between society and society, or generation and generation, there is no municipal obligation, no umpire but the law of nature. We seem not to have perceived that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another.

If string theory or another law of Nature doesn't take care of it, there should exist no additional laws that would require societies or generations to sign "contracts" with others or feel any other kind of obligation. Can you read, Dr Hansen? Face it: environmentalism is a textbook example of the intellectual impurity that the Founding Fathers wanted America to be protected against.

While Jefferson says that different generations are independent and can't ever have any obligations to do something for other generations, Hansen "summarizes" Jefferson's principle as follows:

Jefferson's philosophy regarding generational relations was based on this "self-evident" principle. That we have an obligation to preserve Creation for today's and future generations is a widely held belief.

The operation that Hansen has performed is known as negation.

Because political correctness has confused many other topics including the natural relations between different nations, let me also say that when Jefferson talks about different nations, he means that the average love/hatred among them is also naturally near zero and they, too, have no lasting obligations in relations with each other. Do you find all these comments cruel? They may be cruel but they are the best definition of a fair relationship that the Founding Father ended up with after years of deep thought: a relationship based on free and dignified individuals, nations, societies, and generations who have the same rights during their lives.

At any rate, his principle doesn't sound like the environmentalist thesis that the well-being of other generations should play a crucial role in the decisions of our generation. Quite on the contrary: I think that Jefferson says exactly the opposite.

Summary

To summarize, I find it bizarre that a director of a NASA institute uses an interpretation of a private letter of a person who lived centuries ago to influence the debate about environmentalism. Why? Well, Thomas Jefferson is dead and no longer living. According to his own rules, he has thus no rights or powers to determine what we do today. ;-)

It is a free decision of the current people to have respect for his ideas and achievements.

But I find it equally worrisome that James Hansen is not even able to understand the point of the letter - and the basic values or at least dreams of the Western democracy - properly and prefers to present it upside-down. If Thomas Jefferson were alive, he would completely agree with your humble correspondent and others that it is self-evident that one can't justify a policy influencing land or resources by referring to generations that are not alive right now because such a non-existent generation can have no right or powers about the Earth the belongs to the living in usufruct.

If you want to do something nice because it may (or may not) bring benefits in the future, it's great (or not), but you can never add "votes" of non-existing people to justify your proposed policies. You must rely on your own vote only. If environmentalists want other people to pay 400 billion USD a year, they want the world to pay the money to themselves, the environmentalists, to satisfy their desires, and they can't hide behind generations that are not alive. Quite obviously, this is hardly acceptable and it won't work.

And that's the memo. Via JunkScience.

Bonus climate articles on The Reference Frame

• Monckton of Brenchley & global warming
• Temp decided how much there's CO-2 and CH-4, not the opposite way around
• Intelligence Squared US duel: deniers defeated jihadists
• Massachusetts versus EPA
  
• Solar activity and the climate
• 2006: list of warmers' setbacks
• 2006: lowest temperature in five years

MAGIC: rational arguments vs. propaganda

I will use the results of the MAGIC experiment as an example to show the difference between fair and rational reasoning on one side and irrational bigotic propaganda, represented by Peter Woit, on the other side.

Lorentz violation: basic facts

Einstein's special relativity published in 1905 became one of the key pillars of modern physics. It unifies space and time and includes the Lorentz symmetry, an invariance under transformations mixing space and time, that severely constrains allowed laws of physics. Indeed, special relativity is a meta-theory that tells us that certain classes of laws of physics don't even have to be considered.

Since 1905, good "fundamental" physicists have only considered Lorentz-invariant theories. That's the reason why Schrödinger needed some more time to find his equation: he found the relativistic Klein-Gordon equation first. He saw that it didn't describe the Hydrogen atom correctly. So he didn't publish the equation - guess who published it first - and decided to solve an easier task and find the non-relativistic approximation of the right equation that is named after him. Dirac soon realized what is the right relativistic equation anyway. Soon after Dirac, quantum field theory was born and it was always relativistic i.e. Lorentz-invariant. String theory didn't break the symmetry either.

Is special relativity true? According to all observations we have, it is true and exact. The effect of all hypothetical violations of special relativity on any phenomena that can be realistically observed may be summarized by Lorentz-breaking terms in the effective action. Experiments show that these terms are zero or at least extremely tiny: the bounds are very stringent.

Can we imagine that special relativity is not exactly true? Even though it looks like returning before 1905, the answer is: Yes, of course, we can. Just add the small symmetry-breaking corrections. Can these hypothetical corrections be associated with other physical phenomena? Maybe. If they're associated e.g. with the quantum gravity scale, you may obtain an order-of-magnitude estimate how large these violations should be.

Nanopoulos' reasoning

This violation is an assumption that has been made by many people such as Nanopoulos, Mavromatos, Sarkar, Amelino-Camelia, Mitsou, Farakos, Ellis, Kostelecky, Samuel, Pospelov, Myers, Alfaro, Morales-Tecotl, Urrutia, and others. Quite many people for this non-result, frankly speaking. ;-) It's been repeated by many other people. Later, the same scalings were argued to be compatible with loop quantum gravity but no rational justification of this assertion is available. The people who gave this interpretation just wanted to be parasiting on the work of others. For example, Smolin's implicit assertion that he has done something important in the context of Lorentz violation is a lie.

Also, the statement that "doubly special relativity" can give some constraints on physical theories that are somewhere in between broken and unbroken Lorentz invariance is mathematically flawed. There doesn't exist any set of conditions restricting a theory that would be somewhere in between. A theory is either Lorentz-invariant or not. Everything else that you can read in the media is a result of sloppy maths or an attempt to confuse the public (and sometimes the authors themselves).

An order-of-magnitude estimate leads to a specific prediction of the magnitude of these Lorentz-violating effects. But do these effects actually exist? Are they nonzero?

According to string theory, the only consistent theory of quantum gravity we know, these effects don't exist. That's a consequence of the equations of string theory as I understand them. Even in general quantum gravity, the local Lorentz symmetry is a crucial ingredient in the whole framework. Needless to say, most string theorists agree. If we're right, these Lorentz violations can't be used to test quantum gravity. Testing quantum gravity is as hard as the normal dimensional analysis applied to proper distances suggests - it is extremely hard. Every sane person who has been doing quantum gravity for years knows that it is probably hard to test it experimentally and theoretical work is inevitably dominant in this field. But it is a theoretical research about questions that obviously make sense in principle.

Even though some people haven't yet noticed, mathematically heavy work has been the most important part of theoretical physics for more than 350 years.

But whether most string theorists agree or not is scientifically irrelevant. We don't have the full answer to everything and we might be very well wrong and the list of people above who have written vague, mathematically loose papers may be right. If experiments show that the Lorentz invariance is violated exactly in the Nanopoulos-like way and if a more complete theory emerges or if it is even reconciled with the detailed rules of string theory, then we will have to shut up. We will be proved wrong. Prof Nanopoulos is surely not among the most respected string theorists even though he is in the top 5 of most cited particle physicists. But that doesn't mean he can't be right.

In the same way, if experiments demonstate a marriage of loop quantum gravity and doubly special relativity controlling our Universe, we will also have to shut up. So far it is not even clear what the previous sentence could possibly mean. But someone may give it a meaning in the future and experiments could hypothetically confirm this meaning: it is just superextremely unlikely right now.

Some people just don't seem to be capable to understand this basic mechanism of science: evaluating hypothesis by looking at more detailed evidence.

The four-minute delay seen by the MAGIC collaboration is exactly of the right magnitude that could be derived from Lorentz-violating effects suppressed by the string scale (which is close to the Planck scale). So if Nanopoulos, Mavromatos, and Ellis really believe their scenario, they must be pretty excited. I am not that excited because I think that this effect will be explained by local dynamics of the source and their explanation will go away. The four-minute delay is also of the same magnitude as the duration of the flare itself which suggests a local explanation. Most likely, one of us is right and the other is wrong. More precisely, I am right and Nanopoulos is wrong but unless you copy the whole content of my brain into yours, you can't really know it for sure at this moment. ;-)

Improving MAGIC experiments

Is there a way to decide? Sure, there is. Repeat similar observations with other, more distant galaxies. Try to increase the delay relatively to the length of the flare. If their ratio can be increased and if the scalings quantitatively agree with a Nanopoulos-like theory, all of us will have to pay some attention to their so-far unusual and so-far unconvincing theories. If the delay is always comparable to the length of the flare, it means that the origin of the delay is local in character. The delay of the high-energy gamma rays has something to do with the source.

That either means that the high-energy gamma rays are emitted after the low-energy ones - for example because the electrons that emit them are slower at the beginning of the flare and gradually accelerate - or it means that the high-energy gamma rays arrive from a greater region because of some dispersion or scattering (this hypothesis predicts a wider spread of the high-energy gamma rays). At any rate, experimenters can converge towards the right answer in a finite amount of time. There is absolutely nothing untestable about this situation and only complete morons could suggest that the hypotheses here are untestable.

Pragmatic unions of theorists and experimenters

The only thing that I find morally problematic about the recent paper is that those 100+ experimenters were forced or convinced to believe and promote a particular theoretical explanation that is prominently featured in their paper. I don't believe that these 100+ experimenters universally started to believe that this explanation is correct or likely, especially because the same team of 100+ people has published a previous paper with a completely different explanation half a year ago.

That's why I think that the theorists should have written their interpretation of the MAGIC data separately from the experimenters. There has been no real collaboration here: there was just a pragmatic coalition in which the theorists were used to make the experimental results sexier than they are. The theorists' interpretation became more visible, too, because of the visibility of the large experimental team. I think that similar papers that are really composites of two unrelated research programs should be published separately.

If the paper were properly divided, I would find nothing morally bad about it. The only bad aspect of the theoretical paper is that it is probably wrong, I think - but in science, it is not a crime to be wrong. Being wrong for some time, or at least the right to be wrong, is a necessary step in the scientific approach to questions.

Woit's propaganda

Peter Woit doesn't write a single sentence about the scientific topic itself. That's not hard to understand. The reason is that he has no idea about physics whatsoever. He doesn't have a clue whether string theory or loop quantum gravity predicts Lorentz violation and how large this violation is supposed to be. He doesn't know what string theory means. He has no idea about the alternative, conventional explanations of the observed delay either. He hasn't done a single calculation in his life that would be relevant for answering any of these questions.

Suddenly, he refers to the authority of string theorists including Jacques Distler and your humble correspondent who have said that string theory exactly implies local Lorentz symmetry. When did it happen that we became such authorities for Peter Woit so that our words can be used as reliable ingredients of Woit's "precious" conspiracy theories?

Instead of looking at physics, Woit is irritated by a Slashdot headline that says that this anomaly could test string theory. The Slashdot headline is clearly correct. If this experiment really measured Lorentz-breaking terms in the effective action suppressed by the Planck scale, it would surely say a great deal about string theory to the string theorists and about quantum gravity to all researchers in the field of quantum gravity. We would immediately start to ask detailed questions - how these terms actually look like and what is their origin. We would suddenly consider these far-fetched vague papers by Nanopoulos et al. in a more serious light. Things would change. If this ambitious interpretation is refuted, we will learn something, too. It will only be less surprising. ;-)

Every sane person knows that testing quantum gravity is probably difficult but certainly possible in principle. And if there are effects that influence long-distance physics, such as these Lorentz-violating effects, then testing quantum gravity is not only doable in practice but it will be done in the near future.

Peter Woit has written about 591 nearly identical blog postings. In each of them, he repeats the same lie - the same idiocy - that string theory can't ever be tested. He relies on Goebbels' rule that if a lie is repeated 591 times, it becomes the truth. And indeed, there exist hundreds of ignorants and morons who keep on reading the junk that he keeps on producing. Woit is scared by any indication of progress in science because his goal is exactly the opposite. His goal is nothing else than the destruction of theoretical physics.

While I am happy that George Musser blogging for Scientific American has understood how Woit has been working in this case, I am always flabbergasted by the stupidity of the people who still haven't understood, after more than 3 years, that Woit's writings are 100% vitriolic junk that has nothing to do with science. They haven't understood that Woit has no idea about science whatsoever and the only thing that he is doing is to invent emotional and usually hateful fairy-tales about the sociology of every event in science, fairy-tales that are consistent with his primary idiotic opinion, namely his opinion that modern theoretical physics is no science. Every other drunk hateful high-school student would be able to do the same thing as Mr Woit.

Woit only repeats selected quotes of others and gives them an anti-string-theoretical flavor and spin. He never offers any meaningful idea himself. This is my theory how this primitive animal works. It is a falsifiable theory: show me a single text written by Woit that disagrees with my thesis if you want to falsify it.

It seems to me that you don't have to understand any physics if you just want to understand why Peter Woit's "work" is pure garbage. Just look at his postings: there is not a single physics-related idea, and if there is one, it is always copied from a convenient "authority". What he cares about is to transform people into fanaticized imbeciles - imbeciles who are never willing to learn the truth or understand details about any question. Imbeciles who can't listen and who only know how to attack and intimidate people whose IQ is roughly 40-60 points above the imbeciles' IQ.

I must tell you: these aggressive imbeciles have already intimidated a huge portion of smart people - scientists who are afraid to say what science has actually found because they would be instantly attacked by Woit and his trash fan club. Unless we do something about this scum, they will soon control the whole scientific community.

And that's the memo.

Update: Despite his proclamations, I am in no agreement with the critic of science about any essential question here. At the level of accessible experimental data, this experiment is compatible with the Lorentz-breaking explanations. Woit disagrees. I think that further observations can easily figure out which explanation is correct. He doesn't. I think that the Slashdot headline was fine. He doesn't.

I think that it is string theory that allows us to predict that the explanation will be conventional. He doesn't. I want to know the right answer as chosen by Nature regardless of our preconceptions. He doesn't. I think that minorities or individuals may be right. He doesn't. I am making a prediction based on my knowledge of physics. He doesn't. Instead, he chooses his "answers" to fit his dirty agenda. He chooses whom to agree with in such a way to maximize the hormones behind his jihad against theoretical physics.

You can't use the word "agreement" for any binary similarity between the man's assertions and science. Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. He doesn't have any of the correct reasons or methods to find the answers. It is not my fault that my best judgement has a binary similarity with an anti-theoretical-physics agenda in individual questions. And frankly speaking, I don't care about it and I am not influenced by it. That's not how I use my brain to make decisions. I am not choosing answers to questions in order to agree or disagree with a particular irrelevant parody of a human being. I am choosing my opinions by rational arguments.

Hillary Clinton, GOP, and terrorism

Hillary Clinton has exposed another Democratic taboo. She said that a hypothetical new terrorist attack against the U.S. would help the GOP in the 2008 elections, even if the GOP doesn't necessarily deserve it, and she - as a former GOP hottie - is the best Democrat to deal with these issues.



Video 1: Hillary vs Rudy, kid edition. The fat feminists will do literally everything to achieve their goals. ;-)

The second-class Democratic presidential candidates together with their blogging allies got very nervous about her "fascinating" revelation. ;-) They say it's tasteless. They say that Hillary is just like the GOP because she thinks that terrorism is a legitimate political issue that may be used in debates and campaigns.

Well, exactly. That's exactly her point and her advantage. Indeed, terrorism is a legitimate political question. How it could not be? Most of the GOP candidates know it and Hillary knows it, too. The very fact that various likes of Dodd and Edwards deny that terrorism is a legitimate political issue and a part of the U.S. president's job is the reason why they're not the right people for this job, at least in this particular respect.

I think that what Hillary says must be pretty much obvious to anyone who is willing to answer similar questions rationally. A terrorist attack or even a threat of it would help the GOP because the Republicans consider defense to have a more privileged role among the government's tasks while the Democrats usually deny that it is a topic that must be followed in detail. Many of them even think that the terrorist threat is just a temporary reflection of an unpopular U.S. president. Moreover, if Rudy Giuliani - the former mayor of the New York City - remains the GOP frontrunner, it is completely obvious that a terrorist attack would help him tremendously.

There hasn't been a major terrorist attack since 9/11 and the GOP says that it is due to their policies. Surely it is partially true. They're proud about this particular success but nevertheless, it is still true that in the battle against the Democrats, the absence of threats and attacks doesn't help the GOP much.

Is Hillary attracting a terrorist attack by her words? No way. Quite on the contrary. It is also a message for the terrorists themselves: if you realize another terrorist attack, you will pay because the GOP will keep the White House and they will show you much harder fists than what the average Democrats are willing to do. Do you remember how the terrorists convinced Spanish voters to vote for socialists who eventually withdrew all their troops from the Muslim world? Hillary correctly says that this strategy won't work in the U.S.

Is it immoral to talk about similar threats? I don't think that it's immoral. Many people think that talking about catastrophic global warming is not immoral, so I hope that comments about future terrorist attacks can't be immoral either, especially because they're much more likely. Another terrorist attack is a conceivable event that shouldn't be a completely shocking surprise for the U.S. president.

What has happened on 9/11 was very sad. My reactions were intense and I believe that many other people also feel that we may have overreacted. It was a very frustrating event but certainly not an event that could permanently cripple America or the whole Western civilization. Fortunately or unfortunately, 9/11 is exactly the type of job that the U.S. president must expect which is why the U.S. presidential candidates should talk about their opinions about these matters. If someone says that it is tasteless to even consider these possibilities, it doesn't look like he has thought about these questions much.

At the same moment, we should realize that it is pretty likely - I would say that it is more likely than 50% - that there won't be any significant terrorist attack before the elections. No doubt, the attitude of every candidate to the question of terrorism includes a bet. If you say that it is not an important issue and there will be a terrorist attack, you will lose. If you say that it is more important question than how it will look like next year, you may also lose.

And that's the memo.

Eight nations sue carbon regulators

Eight Central, Eastern, and Southern European countries, namely Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Malta, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, have all started legal actions against the European Commission that attempts to impose low quotas on the production of carbon dioxide, the gas that we call life.

Latvia became the sixth member who joined the team one month ago. It demands 1.8 times higher quotas than it has received! During the last week, Malta (the only non-post-socialist player) and Lithuania became the 7th and 8th members of the team.

The environmental bullying of New Europe

This region has seen a higher growth of the GDP because these economies are naturally approaching the strength of the economies of other members of the European Union. The quotas are designed to choke the expected future growth and act as a new form of communism - a disease that has been plaguing the region for nearly half a century and that has temporarily transformed many developed nations to second-world countries (which is something in between the first-world and third-world countries).

Morally, the situation is pretty clear but it is not so clear legally. At any rate, the total quotas for Europe will be the main factor that will decide about the price of the carbon indulgences and that will determine the growth of all economies that participate in this gray game with hot air, not only the countries of the Central and Eastern Europe.

Gerard 't Hooft, QCD, and bosonic string theory

Prof Gerard 't Hooft has a new interesting preprint about massive gravity, QCD, and bosonic string theory.

The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism for gravity that he talks about generalizes the usual symmetry breaking in gauge theories. However, you need four scalars, not just one, and their vevs are spacetime-dependent and equal to x,y,z,t, respectively. This induces additional masses and a cosmological constant.

't Hooft mentions that this setup could be relevant for cosmology but his real interest is elsewhere: in string-theoretical models of QCD.

He proposes bosonic string theory compactified on a 22-manifold to be a dual description of QCD. It is not really holographic but it could be useful anyway. The symmetry breaking mentioned above is supposed to kill the tachyons and massless scalars and make spin 2 glueballs massive.

Could the scalars with vevs x,y,z,t be actually embedded in string theory?

Well, I think that if one uses the correct rules of string theory, the answer is No. No scalars in string theory are just dumb fields added for fun. In fact, all fields in string theory play some function. They always have some interpretation - usually a geometric one - and their configuration space is moreover compact. What I talk about are geometric moduli of the compact manifolds, Wilson lines, embeddings of D-branes, and others.

In 't Hooft's setup, one needs a non-compact configuration space for the four scalars: that's the first contradiction. Moreover, if you want to preserve translational symmetry, the shift of these scalars by a constant must be a global symmetry. But there are no continuous global symmetries in quantum gravity or string theory. So it can't quite work, I think.

Gauge-theoretical beta-function from string theory

The calculation of the beta-function in non-Abelian gauge theories is a subtle thing. Gerard 't Hooft has been one of the first people who was able to do it. A key result is proportional to -11/3 and comes from a careful consideration of the gauge field and the friendly ghosts.

Is there a more conceptual way to get the number -11/3? Of course, there is once you know string theory. The dilaton around the D3-brane can be shown to be constant. That implies that the low-energy effective theory must have a vanishing beta-function. In fact, it must be conformal. That means that the gauge sector contributes as much as the 3 complex scalars, their 3 Dirac superpartners, plus one Dirac superpartner of the gauge field. We have 3 complex scalars and 8 Weyl fields. Each gives the same contribution. 3+8=11 and it must be canceled by -11 contributions of the gauge field. You may forget about the Faddeev-Popov ghosts. It is much safer that you will avoid mistakes in the calculation in this paragraph.

Beta-function from bosonic string theory

This calculation was arguably too complicated because it included scalars as well as fermions. Is there a simpler, purely bosonic calculation? Yes, there is. I've known this trick from 2000 when we talked about it with Josh Gray in Santa Cruz but later I learned that Gerard 't Hooft was aware of it, too.

Take D3-branes in 26-dimensional bosonic string theory. Again, there must exist an argument why the one-loop beta-function must be zero even though I can't make the argument too rigorous (the background AdS_5 x S^{21} is not an exact solution of bosonic string theory). The fields that contribute to the running in the effective field theory are the gauge field and 26-4=22 real scalars. They're equivalent to 11 complex scalars and again, the gauge field must contribute -11 units to the beta-function in order to make the sum vanish.

It seems that whenever there is a number in a field theory whose origin looks extremely strange, there exists an alternative and much more illuminating calculation of this number based on string theory.

And that's the memo.

E=mc2: Einstein explains

Ivan Janković: Why climate change skeptics should applaud hockey stick?

The author has sent a screenshot of the visitor #1,500,000 but the actual visitor #1,500,000 was, according to the Sitemeter, from Bonn, Germany and came to the main page of this blog from backreaction.blogspot.com



Hockey stick graph from IPCC TAR 2001 is often cited as an important paleoclimatological piece of evidence of unprecedented climate change in 20th Century. Graph, showing flat temperature trend in most of previous millenium with sudden upward swing in the last Century, is widely advertised in schools, media, and by advocacy groups, as a reason to believe in man-made global warming. No surprise, many climate change realists or skeptics, on the other side, tend to reject this graph and underlying study as bogus and scientifically invalid. Well-known hockey stick scientific controversy in previous years was about how reliable are Mann et al. results in their 1998 and 1999 reconstruction(s) of North Hemispheric temperature variations in the past millenium. From the very beginning of the controversy, implicit for both sides involved was belief that to affirm hockey stick was to affirm human induced global warming in the last Century, and vice versa – in order to refute anthropogenic warming thesis you should refute hockey stick conclusions as well. As prof. David Deming has pointed out, probably the very motivation of alarmistis to "abolish Medieval warm period" was to make human induced climate change more intuitively acceptable as a concept; if MWP realy didn't exist, i.e. if current climate is by far warmest one in the past millenium, and if that warming occurred suddenly and anomalously in 20th Century, than it must be something more than ordinary natural variability at work, that "forces" climate to change so tremendously; most probably – human influence. Conversely, for skeptics, to abolish this "abolishing of MWP" would mean to vindicate their basic claim that in 20th Century climate there is not anything unusual or unprecedented, and thereby that human influence on global temperature is probably negligible.

But, problem with this whole debate was that it was wrong way rounded from its inception. Hockey stick results had nothing to do with attribution of 20th Century warming to anthropogenic causes at all. At the contrary, were those results correct, they would only demonstrate that NATURAL warming in 20th Century was unprecedented. Both sides were wrong in prevailing motivations for debate.

Let us take a closer look to the hockey stick reconstruction to better understand this. The reconstruction encompasses period since 1000 AD to 1980. Period of "unprecedented warming" which hockey stick refers to is the period 1900-1980 (reconstrucion stops in 1980, and some cynical explanations of that fact point to assumption that climate proxies from period after 1980 do not show much warming – so called "divergence problem" – so it was quite inconvinient for authors to include them in the study purporting to suggest human guilt for "unprecedented" warming in 20 th Century). By and large, according to IPCC, anthropogenic influence on global climate became dominant only in the second half of 20th Century. In other words, "mainstream" climatological analysis, including IPCC, considers warming before approximately 1950 to be dominantly caused by natural factors.

How this fits into the wider picture of hockey stick implications? The answer is pretty straightforward. We had a fluctuating temperature since 1900-1915, then from 1915-1945 fast global warming at rate 0.16 degrees C per decade (warming that must be, according to IPCC, dominantly due to the natural factors). And then from 1945-1976/77 we had a minor global cooling, whatever factors were principal drivers of global climate and temperature in that period. So, the only period of "unprecedented warming in 20 th Century" covered by Hockey stick reconstruction, is basically large NATURAL warming from 1915-1945. This reconstruction doesn't deal with period 1976 onwards which is the only period of warming that, according to the mainstream scientific assessment, must be, or at least should be, driven primarily by human influence!

Obvious conclusion from the above is that Hockey Stick reconstruction clearly attributes "unprecedented" warming in 20th Century to NATURAL CAUSES, and not to human ones (if one takes IPCC findings as paramount). So, we are left with following choice: either MWP was warmer than 20th Century natural warming, or 20 th Century naturally occuring warmth was warmer than MWP. In either case, there is not much "useful" implications for anthropogenic climate change thesis to be drawn from the Hockey stick reconstruction. In the Hockey stick context, anthropogenic warming simply doesn't play any significant role!

Let me be clear: I think this reconstruction is fatally flawed, as many scientists already have demonstrated. Most of the other reconstructions and historical evidence we have, strongly support thesis of Medieval warm period being significantly warmer then the present climate. But, the point is – even if we accept hockey stick analysis as correct, it only would prove that natural forces, driving temperature increase in the first part of 20th Century, were anomalously strong. And frankly, climate "skeptic" (person advocating thesis that present global warming is mostly of natural and not anthropogenic origin) has all reasons to be satisfied with such an outcome. The same natural forces causing climate to warm up so greatly in the first half of 20th Century probably are at work even now (whatever they are), and we have not much reason to believe in dubious greenhouse theories. Occam's razor cuts them off.

WMAP cold spot: a huge hole

Click for an article.

In the right lower "corner" of the WMAP pictures, there is a rather small and thin blue region - the so-called WMAP cold spot in the constellation Eridanus. Some people argued that they could see non-gaussianities there at 3 sigma. At any rate, the Very Large Array radio telescope has looked into this region and concluded that there are virtually no stars in that direction and at distance between 6 and 10 billion light years: there is a gargantuan hole there. They also call it "Woit" because "void" means emptiness, vacuity, lacking legal validity: every void is transparent and has no content.

The hole is so huge that it looks like Mother Teresa's spiritual hole: it turns out that she has been a cryptoatheist for 50 years.

Uranus: rings changing

The rings of Jupiter and Saturn seem to be changing but Uranus is the leader: its rings look completely different than 21 years ago when they were mapped by Voyager 2.



Click to get to Scientific American. BBC.

The innermost ring is getting much closer to the planet and the brightness of various rings is changing abruptly.

"The observations are the last nail in the coffin for climate change deniers," NASA spokesman Gavin Schidt told our blog. "We have 8 years and 157 days left to stop the climate change," Al Whore added, "if we don't act right now, the inner ring will fall to Uranus which is, as you might know even though it's very complicated, a radioactive material. The whole Solar System will simply explode. Boom."

His colleague Games Jansen agreed: "Uranus is a 800-pound gorilla. The dramatic changes at Uranus have no other explanation. That means that the reason is that we don't respect fossil fuels in usufruct. The catastrophic changes on Uranus show the fate of every planet that listens to the big fish and stays blue instead of becoming green. The debate is over. Amen."

Imke de Pater from UC Berkeley played the role of the court jester when she suggested that the changes could result from previously neglected frequent collisions with microscopic meteorites.

Greenhouse warming: wrong altitude and latitude dependence

Figure 1: Predicted greenhouse warming (left) versus reality (right) as a function of latitude (x) and altitude (y)

Lord Monckton has written down a convincing paper showing that the greenhouse effect predicts a "hot spot" at certain rather high altitudes above the equatorial zones, something that isn't really observed:

Monckton's fingerprints HTML, PDF

This point was emphasized to me by Fred Singer half a year ago. Thanks to Robert Ferguson who also offers a text explaining that consensus is rubbish.

Peer-reviewed version of the article about the wrong fingerprint:

Douglass, Pearson, Christy, Singer

MAGIC: dispersion of gamma rays?

Sociology around the MAGIC experiment: update

The MAGIC collaboration (100+ people), together with five theorists, has posted their preprint about a measured delay of high-energy gamma rays during a flare in an active galaxy.



Figure 1: MAGIC's telescope #1 acording to its webcam

Setup

Markarian 501 is an active galaxy at redshift z=0.034 which, I believe, corresponds to something like 700 million light years distance from Earth.

Once upon a time, there was an exploding source of gamma rays over there that has sent us some gamma-ray signals. It is believed that the source is around 3 light seconds in size. The flare takes around 2 minutes or so. The gamma-ray photons have energy between 100 GeV and 10 TeV or so: you could call it the accelerator energy range.

The collaboration has measured, during at least one flare, a delay up to four minutes for photons near the upper end of the interval (10 TeV) relatively to the gamma rays with lower energies. I think that they should have written a fair paper with the text above and many additional numbers, graphs, and interpolations. For example, I can't understand why they only offer three simple graphs and not the full profiles of the intensity of gamma rays in their four bins as a function of time, among other things.

In fact, they have already submitted a similar preprint in February 2007 where the delay is attributed to gradually accelerating electrons that emit the gamma rays. I feel that the new twist included in the August paper is a matter of marketing.

Guess

While some estimates based on the extension of the magnetic field imply that the source is 3 light seconds in size, I would bet that the radius of a source that is able to produce such a dramatic fast signal, if we include the clump of matter that significantly influences the gamma rays, will be comparable to the length of the signal - up to 2 light minutes.

Now, do you know why the sky is blue? It is because of Rayleigh scattering, an effect whose rate increases with the fourth power of the frequency. Consequently, it is much more likely for high-frequency blue light to come reach our eyes from different directions than directly from the Sun which is why the sky is blue.

Rayleigh scattering occurs when there are particles much smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. That can still be satisfied as long as the source contains gas of TeV-scale dark matter or stuff with an analogous influence. If something like that is true, it could mean that the high-energy gamma rays mostly arrive from boundaries of the source and thus reach us after the lower energy gamma rays that are emitted from the center. I think that this interpretation is consistent with the fact that during one of the flares, the high-energy gamma rays didn't occur at all: the interactions of the high-energy gamma rays with the "halo" were just too strong and the gamma rays were effectively absorbed.

Even if the scattering inside this source or the previously reported gradual acceleration of the emitting electrons were not the reason, it is still possible for the high-energy rays to be delayed because of some dispersion along the path caused by more ordinary types of matter. The Universe is not a vacuum, after all.

Quantum gravity

However, all these comments would be rather boring. So they offer an interpretation based on "quantum gravity" - this term even appears in the title even though I believe that it is extremely unlikely that such an experiment has anything to do with quantum gravity. Given the fact that most of these theoretical Lorentz-violating papers they refer to were co-authored by the theorists in the recent paper, it seems that my opinion won't be that unusual. ;-)

What do they mean by quantum gravity? They mean phenomenological equations that violate the laws of gravity - general relativity - such as the local Lorentz invariance. According to these not-quite-justified models, the speed of light "c" for frequency "E" photons equals

• c = 1 - (E/M)^n

where the exponent "n" is taken to be "1" or "2" (heuristic theoretical reasons but no one can really falsify either, except for people like me who can rule out both). The speed is always smaller than the speed of light, as you can see, while "M" is the characteristic "quantum gravity" scale. The higher energy you deal with, the more you deviate from the normal speed of light. The gravitational terminology is just about words: "M" is simply a scale that determines these modified dispersion relations.

For their data, an optimal fit gives you "M" near the usual Planck scale for "n=1" while it is around the intermediate scale "10^{11} GeV" for "n=2". The collaboration is not able to say anything about "n", indicating that any interpretation based on a particular simple value of "n" is probably too fast.

Related: Lorentz violation and doubly special relativity (DSR). You should realize that despite their marketing, DSR is neither among the first scenarios to suggest Lorentz violation nor the most convincing one. And DSR doesn't follow from loop quantum gravity!

I feel that the experimenters should have written what they have actually measured instead of selling one particular "sexiest" interpretation, in my opinion a very unlikely one, throughout the paper and in the very title. I think that quantum gravity (and string theory) imply an exact local Lorentz symmetry and there are many ways how to parameterize and describe the effect that they have seen.

More generally, it sounds strange to attribute a delay that is not much longer than the length of the flare to something else than the nature of the source itself. Of course, I would change my mind if they observed a delay that would be way greater than the width of the signals. That would indicate that the delay has something to do with the propagation of the radiation. The current data don't indicate such a conclusion too strongly.

It is probably fair to admit that my "conventional" interpretation of the events predicts that the high-energy gamma rays should be not only delayed but also spread over a longer time interval. As mentioned above, the paper doesn't seem to offer any information that would verify or reject this prediction. Or am I wrong?

If they believe that the effect is due to dispersion in vacuum, it shouldn't be hard for them to double or triple the delay/length-of-flare ratio in further observations of more distant sources, should it? In other words, their determined slope of the delay is 0.030 plus minus 0.012 seconds per GeV. At 2.5 sigma, I can still believe that it is zero and even the local dispersion effects don't exist. I am surely not the only one who finds 2.5-sigma signals unconvincing. If the effect is real, they should easily double the accuracy and get to 5 sigma, right?

Quite generally, I don't think that it is normal for big discoveries to appear in the form of small signals. Why? Because in particle physics or astrophysics, quantities are spread along huge intervals that span many (sometimes dozens) of orders of magnitude. If you pick a random size of the noise or a random size of a signal, their ratio is likely to be much smaller than one or much greater than one.

So you will either see nothing at all or you will see a clear evidence of the effect. Seeing a weak evidence of an effect is thus unlikely. So far, a weak effect was only a way to realize discoveries that were fully predicted in which the experimental apparatus wasn't strong enough, so they were raising its power before e.g. the top-quark was discovered. That's not the case here. For example, I don't see any other good reason why the delay should be almost exactly equal to the length of the flare except for saying that these two timescales are related because the delay has something to do with the source.

Needless to say, the main reason why I am skeptical about these quantum-gravity explanations is that I am convinced that quantum gravity and string theory prohibit any kind of Lorentz violation of this kind. But I might be wrong and Dimitri Nanopoulos et al. could be right, of course. If they really believe that they are right, they must surely be excited by every 2-sigma signal. ;-)

George Musser from Scientific American was the first blogger who responded to the new article. See also comments by Chris Lee at ArsTechnica.

Off-topic: at least 46 papers by Turkish graduate students, usually related to the gr-qc archive, turned out to be plagiarized. Many of them were accepted for publications in dozens of printed journals. The journals and arXiv are clearly flooded with papers that no one cares about which is why this thing can happen. Via N.E.W.

Incidentally, the nasty crackpot behind N.E.W. is again inventing dirty tricks how to abuse every sentiment, every statement of every person, and every piece of data. He doesn't care about the truth at all. I despise trash like himself. What I care about are the correct answers to various questions, and I don't think that violations of local Lorentz symmetry are justified rationally, not even in string theory, and I don't think that the non-stringy alternatives deserve a serious discussion. These opinions of mine of course shape my expectations about the correct interpretation of these results. I won't allow scum like P.W. to intimidate me.

Google Earth goes extraterrestrial

Launch your Google Earth, click Help, Update Your Program. In the new version of the software, click View, Switch to Sky, and 100 million stars plus 200 million galaxies are yours.

See also Microsoft WorldWide Telescope.

How to sell a pseudoscience

Brian O'Connor has sent me the following fascinating essay by Anthony Pratkanis:

How to sell a pseudoscience

While he mainly talks about paranormal phenomena - aliens and magic cures for diseases, among others - you will see that the conclusions are way more general. Holy cow: why do these people believe all these things and what do the pseudoinventors need to make it work? They need to create:

• a phantom, an unavailable goal that looks possible
• make their subjects committed which changes their mode of thinking and make their commitment gradually increase
• manufacture a guru or a source of sincerity and credibility, invent new degrees and hierarchy in which the "top" cannot be questioned; elect their prophets (what's up, Al?) and seers (and what about you, Lee?)
• establish a meaningless association of people that makes its members feel that they are relatives
• this association should be equipped with rituals and symbols, jargon and beliefs, shared goals, shared feelings, secret information (about UFOs etc.), and enemies
• transform your customers into salespersons; each of them will be motivated to convince himself when he tries to sell it to others
• construct catchy images that are influential mainly for emotional, not rational reasons
• use pre-persuasion: invent generally accepted or acceptable values that your pseudoscience defends and its opponents refuse; differentiate your pseudoscience from other similar pseudosciences; create expectations about phenomena
• rely on heuristics and commonplaces, for example people's fast conclusion that expensive means valuable; the consensus or bandwagon heuristic saying that if everyone believes something, it must be true; that a long message must be strong; the representative heuristic saying that similar situations lead to similar outcomes; the natural commonplace - what is natural is good, what is man-made is bad; the goddess-within commonplace that the spiritual side of humans is suppressed by modern materialistic science (use science in both ways, as something whose authority supports your partial goals but something that isn't complete and must be beaten by more important things)
• to protect your construction from the external world, attack opponents via innuendo & character assassinations; these tricks create new pseudotopics for discussions (are these people ethical or qualified?), they create doubts about the skeptics, and also discourage them from any action

Finally, Pratkanis says that even true science sometimes uses some of these tactics which is dangerous because if these tricks are given weight, pseudoscientists may abuse them even more efficiently. Finally, Pratkanis had classical ESP phenomena in mind when he wrote his text but you can see that the stop-the-climate-change pseudoscience uses 100% of these tactics: it is the ultimate synthesis of all previous pseudosciences. Let me clarify why all the tactics are being used:

• the phantom or impossible goal is to stop the climate from changing
• the commitment is indeed being gradually increased: the subjects are supposed to emit ever smaller amounts of CO2 and believe in increasing catastrophes
• the hierarchy of credibility is carefully designed, with 2500 mostly average but politically passionate scientists at the top of this credibility pyramid
• meaningless associations are being established, for example do you remember Al Gore's 1000 clones? In other cases, pre-existing organizations are directly transformed into associations to promote the pseudoscience
• the movement has rituals (lying naked on the glaciers, using bikes for 200 meters once you jump out of your private jet etc.), symbols (pictures from catastrophic movies etc.), jargon (deniers, court jesters), beliefs (the whole AGW orthodoxy), shared goals (stop the climate change), shared feelings (Gore: reducing CO2 has become a deeply moral question), secret information (unpublished reports that AGW is even worse than ever before or sea level will rise more than anyone would believe because of mysterious Hansen's "calculations"), and of course enemies (the skeptics and the corporations)
• consumers and victims of the pseudoscience have been transformed to salespersons; look at Alexander Ač, for example
• catchy images are the melted glaciers, swimming polar bears, hurricanes etc.; a portion of glaciers were always melting, hurricanes were always blowing, and polar bears were always swimming but they're still catchy images
• regardless of any details, the AGW pseudoscience is about the conservation of life on Earth and well-being of future generations in 2100 while its opponents are not
• all the heuristics in the list are misused; expensive is valuable: define a price of reductions of hot air (CO2 emissions) and it becomes valuable even though its real price is zero (you may buy the indulgences yourself); declare that there is a "consensus" about AGW so it must be true; show how long the IPCC report is so it must be really impressive; representative heuristic: argue that hundreds of millions of years ago, some species went extinct because of climate change and we will thus also die; of course, claim that everything that is man-made such as warming is wrong and everything that is natural is right; preach that the materialistic industrial society suppresses the priceless eco-friendly spirits of Gaia within our souls; science is a tool to increase credibility until it is used to falsify some of AGW statements
• and finally, of course, the AGW pseudoscience identifies skeptics with corrupt people paid by oil corporations, court jesters, holocaust deniers; that changes the debate into "who pays them?"; the authority of the skeptics is constantly undermined by lies and hatred produced by the advocates of the pseudoscience; the skeptics start to ask themselves: isn't it better for me to be silent?

And that's the memo.

New York: record cold

Yesterday, the high temperature in New York, 59 degrees Fahrenheit, tied the record set in 1911 for the coldest August high ever and was 23 degrees below the normal high:

The New York Sun

The record cold high of 64 degrees Fahrenheit for August 21st, set in 1999, had to be edited, too. The new record is 5 degrees cooler than the previous one:

CBS

Summer 2007 is on its way to become one of the coolest summers on record: July was 1.5 degrees below the normal and August is so far 1 degree below the normal. Participants of the Simons Workshop on Long Island such as

Aaron Bergman

are freezing, too. But you won't hear these stories from RealClimate.org. The temperature in the Arctic is way more important for the society than the temperature in Manhattan, as long as it is warmer than average. ;-)



These court jesters deny global warming and look how they dress up in August: how funny. ;-)

Occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968

I missed the anniversary yesterday.



10+7-minute videos with Czech narration: 1,2

Thirty-nine years ago, armies of the Soviet Union and four other communist countries (a list that didn't include Romania) have offered a brotherly help to Czechoslovakia and terminated the Prague Spring, a period of relative freedom, democratization, and liberalization of the economy and other segments of the society.

These half a million soldiers who were invited by local communist traitors and sent by foreign communist barbarians have only killed about 72 people in the country. But the actual political and economical consequences of their acts were far more dramatic. The country was returned to the grips of neo-Stalinism for 21 years.

It was a clear confrontation between a small cultural nation that knew what it was doing on one side and the brute power of five undemocratic governments. People did what they could to peacefully complicate the progress of the occupation troops. They were changing traffic signs and so forth. However, everyone knew that it was physically impossible to defend the country against the occupants. A political catastrophe was inevitable and given this fact, it seemed better to save the lives. The enlightened Czechoslovak socialist leaders with a human face have thus recommended the people not to resist.

Two decades of oppression and stagnation - officially called normalization - followed, two additional percent of the population decided to emigrate, including my uncles on both sides. Only the Velvet Revolution in 1989 was able to revert the impact of that unhappy morning of August 21st, 1968. The experience of 1968 has made it rather clear that socialism can't really be reformed. It has to be eradicated.

And that's the memo.

Game & trailer: Mafia 2

Update: Videocam version of the Mafia 2 trailer





Much higher resolution is here (click).

Between 1997 and 2002 or so, I didn't play too many state-of-the-art computer games. That was not the only reason why I was completely stunned by the Mafia game back in 2002. According to various journals such as PC WORLD, it became the game of the year 2002. The PS2 and XBOX versions were kind of slow and unsuccessful but they couldn't change the fact that the game became the best game ever for hundreds of thousands of players and it sold over 2 million copies.

Videos from Mafia
Website (including free demo)
Mafia fan websites

The game, produced mostly by Illusion Softworks (now 2K Czech) in Brno, Moravia (Czechia) and distributed by Take 2 Interactive, is about Tommy Angelo who accidentally joins Don Salieri's mafia in the early 1930s. Tommy (you) is getting increasingly bloody tasks. The storyline that looks like a pretty good movie is kind of linear, with 106 main episodes full of driving, shooting, racing, emotions, love, betrayal, action, and a moral message. But there's still a lot of freedom how to solve the individual episodes.

But it was the physics of the game that was really astonishing. Everything occurs in the Lost Heaven City which is pretty much the same thing as the New York City. Three-dimensional graphics is nearly perfect. It takes a lot of time to drive through the city. I always thought that a team would need millenia to collect all the necessary data, textures, and create all the three-dimensional models.

The cops have artificial intelligence, trams, ships, and other cars work as they should, much like birds, waves, falling cigarettes and their smoke, fire, transparency and reflections from various materials, shadows, blood, and many kinds of weapons, among many other things. The motion of the people in the game was designed according to real actors whose motion was scanned. There are 60 types of cars whose physical characteristics coincide with 60 actual models from the 1930s. They respond to shooting and driving in a physically realistic way. You should look into the game yourself.

Since the very beginning, there have been understandable rumors about Mafia 2. However, nothing specific could have been heard about it for five years. This situation changed last Friday. The trailer from the game that will be shown this week in Leipzig, Germany had to be approved. Someone was making searches on the German rating agency's website and found ... Mafia 2. The secret has thus instantly leaked.



I can tell you much more right now. Mafia 2, to be released for PC, XBOX360, and PS3, is put into the late 1940s and early 1950s and the visual experience in this breathing city should be even better than it was in Mafia 1 and fully comparable to Hollywood movies. Here are five screenshots:

• 1,2,3,4,5

Well, I guess that those five years have made a difference!

Aaron Bergman & multiverse

Aaron Bergman has fulfilled his threats ;-) and wrote two additional short texts about the multiverse.

A multiverse apologist
The lay of the landscape

While the first text is just an introduction, he uses mini-golf analogies in the second text to explain what it means for your theory to have many solutions. He doesn't say much and omits names - because the authors of the ideas really don't have anything to be proud about so far, as two of us think :-) - but it's kind of OK.

Once we accept that the most accurate theory we can have predicts very many valleys or environments (vacua) where life in principle can occur, we may choose different strategies to look for "our" valley in the landscape. Either to give up, or to map all of them and compare their shape with the measured shape (encoded in properties of elementary particles), or start to play with statistics of these valleys and fuzzy "predictions" resulting from it. The only two other choices are to hope and search for missing cosmological or selection rules or, more speculatively, searching for a completely different theory than string theory.

His comments are minimalistic and thus fair. There are a few questions underneath.

Is the set of minima finite?

Well, it is certainly infinite but countable if we include all of them: one infinite collection, for example the bulk dual of the SU(M) N=4 gauge theory, is enough to show it. But the number of vacua that qualitatively agree with our Universe and differ by 50% in each quantity, for example, is probably finite. That really means that the density of stabilized vacua per unit volume of the low-energy parameter space is probably finite. If we're able to map all vacua in "our" neighborhood in the low-energy parameter space, we would see that string theory gives very accurate predictions of all quantities.

Why are the many science fiction stories and novels about the multiverse different from what string theory tells us?

Because there still unfortunately exist actors and directors in Hollywoord who don't have a PhD in high-energy theoretical physics. And even those who have one often surrend to the temptation to create a fairy-tale that will be more catchy for the audiences without a physics PhD and sometimes even audiences with a physics PhD. ;-)

How well are actual analyses of data (WMAP etc) doing at defining WHICH universe we happen to inhabit?

WMAP tells us some numbers that string theorists wouldn't otherwise know - such as the cosmological constant and perhaps the spectral tilt relevant for cosmic inflation. However, in order to determine which vacuum in the landscape is the right one, we still extract much more data from particle physics experiments than from cosmology. The masses of elementary particles and the strength of their various interactions inform us about the shape of our valley.

Is BRST invariance true?

BRST invariance is not a hypothesis about Nature. BRST invariance is a part of one of the useful mathematical frameworks in which physical theories can be studied, especially physical theories with natural local symmetries. Within this framework, BRST invariance of states is not only true but it is an axiom. However, there exist physically equivalent ways to obtain the same predictions in these theories, ways that don't require any BRST operator.

The wave equation has infinitely many solutions. If you pluck a violin string, it could vibrate with the fundamental frequency, with the first overtone, or with the 4711th overtone. In fact, it is most likely that the frequency will be even higher, since there are infinitely many overtones above the 4711th but only finitely many below it. Hence the violin frequency will be a GHz or higher. ... This is bad news for orchestras.

Well, are there statistical distributions that would be dominated by infinite numbers? Actually, there are. Imagine that the probability of a positive integer being equal to N is equal to C/N^2 where C is a normalization constant. You can see that C is finite. But the expectation value of the integer is the sum of C/N which is logarithmically divergent. Nevertheless, even in this distribution, it is extremely likely that the integer will be less than 10. Moreover, I think that such distributions are unnatural. If there exists any cosmological rule that assigns probabilities to different vacua, I think that the vacua that are special in some sense - i.e. vacua analogous to small integers in my example - will be preferred according to this distribution. No well-defined and justifiable calculus to count the probabilities of different vacua exists at this moment.

An alternative explanation

A famous critic has written an alternative analysis of these ideas that is appropriate for the intelligence of the people who like to read him. Let me include it in its entirety here:

The Usual

Blah, blah, more anthropic pseudo-science on hep-th, blah, blah, blah, [... quote ...] blah, blah, blah, this pseudo-science is on hep-th because of blah, blah, blah.

Blah, blah, blah written for Templeton-funded conference, blah, blah, Science-Religion Interaction in the 21st Century. Usual blah, blah, turn science into religion, blah, blah Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Science, Philosophy and Religion.

Apologies for the repetitive nature of some recent postings. I can’t even stand to write them any more, but still think someone should be documenting the descent of particle theory into pseudo-science and complaining about it.

As you can see, the text is filled with ingenious ideas even though most of these gems - for example the idea about blah blah the pseudo-science - have been repeated roughly 587 times. In the case that you don't find his newest essay sufficiently rich, deep, careful, charming, original, comprehensive, multi-dimensional, rational, and diverse, you may read other illuminating articles by this giant. ;-) The recent ones are called:

• The usual
• Message to our overlords
• Latest on K-theory journal situation
• Ask a string theorist
• More of the usual sorts of things
• Various stuff
• Another journal board resigns
• Really quick links
• University grants program subpanel report
• Quick links
• Various news
• Less stuff than usual
• Too much good stuff
• Assorted news
• Random collection of stuff
• Even more stuff than usual
• This week's hype
• New blogs and other stuff
• All sorts of stuff
• Various events and other news
• Various stuff
• Not good
• Quick links
• Censored comments at Asymptotia
• All sorts of links
• Some quick links
• Kap

and so on. Well, what an intelligent, rich, illuminating, and stuffy reading. ;-) Are there really people who don't understand why I feel so offended if that blog is ever viewed as this blog's competition? It has happened to me several times. The guy is a complete excrementhead.

Tipping points, sweet spots, and model ensembles

In his Musings about models, Gavin Schmidt discusses three topics:

1. Tipping points
2. Sweet spots
3. Model ensembles

Because there are both valid points as well as significant confusion in his short text, let's try to clarify the situation.

Tipping points

The term "tipping point" is often presented by global warming advocates as a well-established notion in natural sciences that is based on a solid theory and that should impress the audiences. In reality, the term is, at best, a vague talking point in the context of sciences. If you look what a "tipping point" means according to Wikipedia, you are being explained that it is a concept in sociology, not science, describing a point where some behavior suddenly becomes much more common. The name was chosen in analogy with "tipping points" in mechanics: sociologists were entertained when they saw that adding weight to a bananced object can eventually topple it and decided that they must use this fascinating phenomenon in their work, too. ;-)

The disambiguation page offers you several additional meanings of the term:

1. the term in sociology we mentioned
2. a book about sociology
3. a musical album
4. a band
5. a computer security provider
6. climate surprise.

You see that only the last meaning, the "climate surprise", is related to natural sciences. Why is it called "climate surprise"? Well, it is because these hypothetical effects have a very low probability, as the Wikipedia page explains. Although "tipping points in the climate" and "climate surprise" are the same thing, certain people prefer to talk about "tipping points" so that they hide that these effects have a very low probability.

A collapse of the thermohaline circulation or rapid deglaciation of both polar ice sheets are examples. There has been a lot of recent literature explaining why these events are very unlikely and commenters may mention some links to the papers in the comments. Don't worry: the Gulf Stream is certainly not stopping especially because it is driven by winds i.e. indirectly by the rotation of Earth and so far, not even James Hansen predicts that the Earth will stop spinning.

Schmidt refers to an article by Tim Lenton who talks about the tipping points and also writes the following:

The parameters controlling the system can be transparently combined into a single control, and there exists a critical value of this control from which a small perturbation leads to a qualitative change in a crucial feature of the system, after some observation time.

Well, if Tim Lenton knew concepts in thermodynamics, he wouldn't have to invent this new awkward terminology. A closely related concept in thermodynamics is called "phase transition" while the "single control" is called "order parameter". Clearly, we need to generalize the thermodynamical concept if we want to cover diverse speculative and complex scenarios about the climate but it's possible.

A more important question is whether such tipping points are around or whether it is at least somewhat likely that they are nearby.

This question should be answered individually for different kinds of tipping points but let me say a few general words instead. The tipping points could hypothetically appear in situations that may be roughly divided to two groups:

1. clean physical systems with a predictable behavior
2. chaotic physical systems with a largely unpredictable behavior and a lot of mutually interacting objects

Quite generally, the tipping points in the first group are easily accessible to physicists and they may resemble sharp phase transitions. On the other hand, the hypothetical tipping points in the second case are always fuzzy and they only influence a small part of the physical system because different components of the system respond differently.

Let me say a few examples. If you have a lot of uranium in one place, you may eventually reach a tipping point - the critical mass - that will lead to a nuclear explosion, a chain reaction in which the number of neutrons exponentially grows for a while. Such an exploding mass of uranium is a rather clean (conceptually) system that may be studied by physicists and the change of the behavior is fast, indeed.

If your temperature reaches the melting point or another temperature of a phase transition, ice can start to melt or water may start to evaporate. There is indeed a tipping point - a phase transition - waiting for us once the temperature of oceans reaches 100 Celsius degrees. Will it happen by Christmas 2014? I leave this question to Al Gore.

The Arctic regions don't have too much life in them and they are rather simple physical systems. We mostly know what can happen with these physical systems and there are no tipping points nearby because they would have to resemble conventional phase transitions that have been classified. On the other hand, dynamics of the atmosphere and biosphere in the moderate zones is so complex that no hypothetical tipping point is really sharp or qualitative and no hypothetical tipping point influences the whole biosphere coupled to the atmosphere at the same time.

Rationally speaking, we simply don't expect any discontinuous transitions of this kind. The higher number of components you have, the more continuous the behavior of any kind of physical average becomes. Of course that there can always exist some transitions that we haven't thought about and that will look like climate miracles or other miracles. But I, for one, prefer if scientists only believe miracles that are supported by some rational arguments. If Jesus Christ returns to the Earth this winter, then - well - let Him rule. It's not a business for science to analyze unlikely scenarios that can't be studied by doable experiments and robust mathematics.

We should end up with the conclusion that any conceivable, large enough, physically driven effect of the climate on life will proceed continuously and we will never be completely shocked. As far as science goes, tipping points don't exist. Let us look at the second topic.

Sweet spots

What does Gavin mean by the sweet spots? He means a vague idea that also occurs in sweet-spot supersymmetry. We have already discussed a recent article by Doug Smith et al. The term "sweet spot" refers to a balance between the natural effects and the industrial influence. The idea is that the natural effects are just a short-term noise while the industrial influence is the effect that survives in the long run. The sweet spot is what we see in the medium term (five years?). This assumption itself is a kind of bias: it would be more reasonable to link humans with the short-term changes of the Earth while the natural effects dominate in the long run. But let us assume that their identification is fine and proceed.

Smith et al. realize very clearly that regardless of their detailed calculation, it is rather likely that there will be no visible warming until 2009. And I think that they are driven by their belief in global warming and are afraid that others won't believe it if there are several additional years without warming. So they essentially say that until 2009, the natural forces may still be winning while after 2009, a warming may start again.

Is it possible? Of course that it is possible. But in science, we must go well beyond the labels possible/impossible because virtually everything that doesn't grossly violate the laws of physics is possible. We must care whether it is likely and whether we have evidence that it is likely. Imagine that there will be cooling from 2005 to 2009. People in 2009 may state the hypothesis of Doug Smith et al.:

• Natural forces were winning and cooling the Earth in 2005-2009 but a warming trend will start really soon.

Will this sentence be true? Well, we must realize that this is not one sentence but two sentences:

1. "Natural forces were winning in 2005-2009 and their net impact was cooling" will be a proven statement.
2. "A warming is gonna start in 2009" will be an unproven hypothesis.

It is a popular strategy of various demagogues to connect a true, proved assertion with a speculation (or even untrue statement) and sell them as one product. The proved part of the product gives it credibility while the other part gives the demagogue what he wants. The demagogues do their best to convince people not to distinguish the very different parts of the package. For example, a package says that "the globe has warmed by 0.6 Celsius degrees or so; our survival requires us to stop all CO2 emissions." The first part is likely to be true but the second part is complete nonsense. Demagogues will give you some evidence for the former statement and pretend that they have proved the latter statement.

Well, I would encourage every single person to be careful about these tricks. Every composite sentence must be separated into pieces that must be evaluated independently.

When you do so in the case of Doug Smith et al., you will see that their paper is really a union of two independent papers. One of them tries to analyze the climate in the short run and shows that there will be some particular fluctuations until 2009. And the other part of the paper tries to repeat clichés about anthropogenic global warming. These two parts are incoherently connected into a single paper.

That's not how a wise scientist should analyze complex problems. A wise scientist should follow Galileo's recipes and always try to separate a complex situation into pieces that can be studied in isolation because we can only reliably understand a complex system if we understand its components. If you do so, you will find out that it is the natural causes that are at least partially understood - and the weather can be predicted at least for a few days - while the industrial influence is not demonstrated or quantified. The research of the natural phenomena in the climate is a natural science where a large amount of data exists and many of them are processed in some kind of scientific way that makes some progress.

But the research of the industrial influence is something else: it is a doctrine about a single number - the overall temperature change caused by CO2 - that has never been measured or proven to be significantly nonzero and that has never been used in any kind of scientifically nontrivial calculation. But ths single number is claimed to be one of the key results of all of science. Once again, these two very different human activities are being sold as one package. One must be careful: climatology is not pure junk. Current climatology is a combination of science and junk science.

Finally, we approach the third topic:

Model ensembles

It is a great news to see that Gavin Schmidt realizes that averages and probabilities calculated from an ensemble of models are not the same thing as averages and probabilities in the real world.

If you work with one thousand climate models and run them on one million computers, it doesn't mean that the statistical characteristics of this ensemble will give you a more accurate representation of reality. Imagine that an ensemble of one million models predicts that the temperature will change by 2 degrees plus minus 1 degree by 2100. Does it mean that you should take this number very seriously because you used one million models?

Not at all. The actual temperature change can be very different. The accuracy indicated by the ensemble of the climate models can be both much larger as well as much smaller than the uncertainty in reality. Let me explain why.

If someone actually has a very accurate model, for example because he is a better physicist, he could predict the temperature change very accurately. And maybe, the temperature change could be pretty exactly calculable if one is smart enough. But if you add almost one million of other models that are not that good, their statistical distribution becomes fuzzy even though someone might be able to do a better prediction individually.

The opposite situation occurs more often. If you have one million models, it doesn't mean that they nicely cover the neighborhood of the right answer. Even one million models may share a systematic error, a neglected yet important physical effect, and other things. The authors of these models could have been copying from each other and perhaps, none of them understands the physics too well. As Richard Feynman emphasized in his cute story, you can't get a good idea about the length of the Chinese emperor's nose just by averaging a large number of answers by people who haven't seen the emperor. Try to find emperor's assistant and ask her.

And that's the memo.

Cosmology under attack, too

It has recently become a fashionable sport for people who have never contributed anything significant to science - and most likely, they never will - to use media and populism to sling mud at the key results of science as we know it in 2007 in order to replace serious science by an irrational media-driven hysteria, at least in the eyes of the public, and to erase the difference between the scientists who are doing or have done something serious on one side and themselves on the other side.

Paper can withstand anything and ignorant enough people are ready to believe anything, too, and it is in fact easier for them to swallow an emotionally loaded untrue cliché than a difficult technical argument. So this is quite a good business for these folks. Modern cosmology is slowly joining the list of fields that are under attack. The only difference from high-energy theoretical physics is that I expect that the hysteria won't catch up in the case of cosmology because cosmologists kind of enjoy activities related to P.R.

Michael J. Disney, a retired astrophysicist, wrote an article for American Scientist,

Modern cosmology: science or folktale?

He starts with a sequence of hostile comments about the money flowing to cosmology. The subtitle expresses one of the main assertions of the article: current cosmological theory rests on a disturbingly small number of independent observations.

The similarity with the proclamations by people like Woit can't be more obvious. Let us first look at some of his opinions and terminology.

Labels

In the text, cosmic inflation is called a "vague conceptual solution", the Lambda CDM theory is "the currently fashionable concordance model of cosmology". Big Bang cosmology "is not a single theory" while dark matter and dark energy are "insubstantial notions". Also, "modern cosmology has at best very flimsy observational support". He even says that "cosmology has always had such a negative significance, in the sense that it has always had fewer observations than free parameters, though cosmologists are strangely reluctant to admit it."

An expanding Einstein model was elegant but "it has since run into serious difficulties". He ends up with the thesis that "Acceptance of the current myth, if myth it is, could likewise hold up progress in cosmology for generations to come".

Are these statements based on actual science? Maybe the kind of science used in Disneyland but certainly not the science used by serious researchers.

Populism

You may read it yourself: you will see long kilobytes of vitriolic and untrue statements that are clearly not addressed to people who have any idea about the field. Disney says very openly that "his approach should be appealing to nonspecialists, who otherwise would have little option but to believe experts who may be far too committed to supply objective advice." Why doesn't he try to convince experts? Because he must know very well that every expert knows why his text is complete junk. But what should the laymen do? Indeed, I think that if people can't learn the technology themselves, they should better believe experts rather than loud non-experts with a personal agenda. I wonder when "supply of objective advice" exactly became an insult.

What he wants to do is to brainwash uninformed people who are unable to figure out why his conclusions are completely absurd, without any need to offer any technical evidence for these statements whatsoever. What a convenient strategy.

Progress in cosmology

Cosmology, the science about the gross structure and history of the whole Universe, has been exciting and mysterious for millenia. A long time ago, the boundaries between science, myths, and religion were somewhat fuzzy. The situation started to change in the 20th century, especially because of Einstein's discovery of general relativity. Because of many observational breakthroughs in the last decade, cosmology has recently become a precision science analogous to particle physics. Many quantities, including the age of the Universe, are measured at one-percent level. Huge amounts of data agree with a simple theory.

How much data do we have?

Disney's statement that the amount of data we have to check the cosmological statement is lower than the number of parameters in the theory is absurd. But how absurd is it? For example, look at this picture from WMAP. It has more than one million pixels of data that can be processed in many ways to obtain hundreds of overall, qualitative numbers such as the spherical harmonics. Each of these numbers must agree with the right cosmological model and the error can't be too high. They do agree.

WMAP is not the only source of the data and constraints that the cosmologists use. They observe billions of stars and other celestial bodies to check the model and deduce that something like dark matter must exist. They observe billions of other galaxies and their relative motion to deduce that something like dark energy must exist, too. Theorists tell them that the cosmological constant is the only known plausible model for dark energy with the right equation of state and most cosmologists simply accept it: it doesn't influence their work too much anyway.

Some of their observations are made during collisions or explosions that offer a huge amount of additional information that constrains the theory. The same conclusion may be deduced from a very large number of these stars and galaxies. The Universe is huge and rich and it offers a diverse spectrum of objects and events to study. Many of them can be measured and have been measured.

Whoever really thinks that the amount of data we can extract from the Universe is small or even smaller than the number of parameters of the state-of-the-art cosmological model (roughly 17 parameters) is senile beyond imagination.

Expanding Universe vs global warming

Let me offer you a comparison with a subject that is heavily covered by this blog: global warming. According to this theory, the world is getting warmer and everyone is even supposed to accept an explanation based on one particular effect whose importance is a purely speculative issue. According to cosmology, the Universe is expanding and cooling down: Disney questions even this statement.

How does the evidence supporting the models compare in these two cases? In the case of global warming, you can't figure out that global warming exists if you look at individual stations, countries, or continents. For example, there has been no noticable trend in the U.S. temperature record. The local data look pretty much random. The only way how you can deduce a trend in the last 100 years is to take the global average. What you obtain is one number as a function of time. Global warming is not a feature of individual observations at different stations; it is a feature of one number that changes quite chaotically with time but if you wish, you may interpret this chaos as being superposed with a warming trend.

On the other hand, we can observe tens of billions galaxies and other celestial bodies and for each of them, the link between the red shift (relative velocity) and their distance from us is exactly as predicted from the expansion. It's like if you had 10 billion weather stations on the Earth and each single one of them would imply that the warming trend is 0.62 Celsius degrees per century.

In particle physics, we take the uniformity of the Universe and the universality of its laws and constants for granted. In the high-energy context, the value of the cosmological constant is one number, one parameter entering our theories, regardless of the place where you measure it. But when one actually works on cosmology and measures the cosmological constant via different kinds of galaxies or supernovae, these objects simply can't be counted as one measurement. They are many measurements and because many of them agree with the nonzero value of the cosmological constant or something that is effectively indistinguishable, it means that we have strong evidence for our conclusions about the cosmological equations and parameters.

Our certainty about the fact that the Universe expands exceeds any certainty about the very *existence* of global warming by ten orders of magnitude, to say the least, as measured by the small probability that the basic theory could be wrong. Every rational person knows that it is ludicrous to even compare these two cases because the basic facts about the Universe such as its expansion are directly and pretty accurately seen almost everywhere while global warming is a speculation based on one lonely and wiggly function of time. But with the help of media, it is not hard to create the atmosphere in the society in which global warming is as certain as the expansion of the Universe if not more so. In fact, it is politically correct to say that global warming is a fact just like it may become politically correct to say that the Universe is perhaps not expanding and the "deniers" of the cosmic expansion should be celebrated.

This combination of facts is no small unfairness: it's an example of a gigantic madness. A comparison of these situations shows that the public discourse about scientifically loaded questions is entirely irrational.

Elegance of the theory

Is the current cosmological model elegant? Well, it depends how you measure it and what you compare it with. It is pretty cool but it is not infinitely elegant. Surely, many of its aspects came as a surprise. But if something is surprising, it is not necessarily inelegant.

Various terms in the equations - such as the cosmological constant or the density of dark matter - are phenomenological in character, indeed. Some of us would always prefer to understand what is the deepest possible way to explain the origin of these entities. And of course, people are making progress in this direction, too. But I would like to stress that this is not really a job for cosmologists; it is a job for high-energy theorists.

Cosmologists are satisfied with a low-energy effective description of the Universe at the cosmological distances and their approach is fully legitimate. From their viewpoint, the agreement of the state-of-the-art model with observations is excellent. Their measurements and calculations imply that what they observe must be explained by the theories we have or something that gives virtually indistinguishable predictions.

The microscopic and conceptual details of a deeper theory could become very different if high-energy theoretical physics makes some progress in this question. But it won't be too great a deal for cosmologists because the approximate theory at the level they're interested in has already been established. Even if high-energy theorists suddenly use a very different set of concepts to describe what's going on in cosmology, it is likely that cosmologists will continue to use the current concepts and equations - simply because they're simple enough and they demonstrably work.

Another thing that Disney criticizes is the fact that the existing cosmological model had to be edited and re-adjusted to agree with new observations. Indeed, it is the case. And indeed, it is plausible that more editing will be done and will have to be done in the future. Well, this is how science works. People are usually not ingenious enough to guess the complete theory of everything at the very beginning. But this trivial sociological observation has nothing to do with the question whether their theory is safely verified by the data. Sociological observations can never be used to make arguments about natural sciences.

What's important is that today, we understand that the cosmological constant could always have been nonzero. In the recipe how the effective field theories are constructed today, cosmological constant is one of the allowed terms. In fact, what is the real mystery is why it is so small. In the same way, it is clear - and should have always been clear - that not all matter in the Universe must be visible. These facts are not contrived in any way if they are looked at scientifically instead of sociologically. The only thing that they show is that the Universe is not a trivial, naive system whose properties can be correctly predicted by people with no experience. Such an unsurprising conclusion is very different from the conclusion that there is something wrong about the theory used to explain the observations.

How much data do we need?

Finally, I want to say that we have far more data in cosmology than we need to verify models such as the Lambda CDM model. Let me put this counting into a historical perspective.

Albert Einstein may be credited with the discovery of the most important theoretical insight that has changed our understanding of the Universe at the longest distance scales and time scales: general relativity. How much data did he need to obtain his conclusions? He only needed special relativity, a theory that was itself found by pure theoretical reasoning, and the equivalence principle i.e. the equivalence of gravitational and inertial masses, a footnote observation that was well-known to Newton who had no deeper explanation of it.

Everything else followed by pure thought even though Einstein needed 10 years to complete his masterpiece. Surely, once we already know the final result, it is easy to reproduce his reasoning in one lecture on general relativity and erase the "unnecessary" mistakes in the reasoning that Einstein had to make before he saw the light.

Could he be sure that his theory was correct? Well, he was proposing temporary theories that were wrong and could be easily falsified - even though Einstein as the pioneer often needed years to falsify them. But the final form of general relativity was a settled thing once it was carefully checked that it reproduces all verified previous theories and once a single correct prediction that goes beyond them - more concretely, the perihelion precession of Mercury - was found to lead to the same result. I am certain that Einstein was certain about his theory once this one highly non-trivial number worked, and he was right. It was very rational for him to feel certain.

Many other people need much more evidence than that because they haven't really spent time with analyzing possible theories. Consequently, they are not able to realistically appreciate how strong constraints the known observations, the known principles, and additional corrections that go beyond the known theories place upon the new theory. These constraints are huge. Cosmology is not a theory about a complete chaos where one can decide to "see" an additional "signal" in the chaos. When you measure the right quantities, virtually everything is a nearly pure signal - sometimes a very accurate signal - and we measure millions of such signals.

That's a very different situation from global warming where virtually all data may be treated as "noise" and one is free to cherry-pick aspects of this noise that can be interpreted as an additional "signal" and to propose somewhat arbitrary explanations for such a "signal". The higher signal-to-noise ratio you have, the more seriously you must treat experimental data and the more certain you may become that a theory is right or wrong.

I am sure that in 2050, when people have a deeper understanding of the equations of cosmology and their origin, they will explain why this picture is correct while using less than 10% of the observations that we find "crucial" to support these theories today. There's nothing wrong with redundant data especially if they don't cost too much money but there's nothing essential about them either. The future presentations will rely on detailed experiments much less simply because their theoretical framework will be more robust and interconnected than ours, just like our theoretical framework is more robust than the framework used 50 or 100 years ago. And there will also be people who won't appreciate how much information is actually stored in different kinds of data and who will be writing similarly insane texts as likes of Peter Woit and Michael Disney write today.

And that's the memo.

Leonardo DiCaprio: 11th whore

Leonardo DiCaprio "was" me in the String Kings. He could have created a meaningful movie with a message, for example "11th dimension". Instead, he offers this piece of sh*t:

11th hour (trailer)

I don't have to explain you how ashamed I am to be associated with this weird Gentleman. The movie is about the last hour - or last minute, as a better thinker figured out - we have on this planet. Katrina and all these things are catastrophes, they are our fault, and they will be getting worse. Life is declining and the decline is accelerating. There are too many people on the planet and they use too many resources.

The theme is original and sane - but not too much. ;-)

Quite suddenly, the message changes to a completely contradictory anti-thesis: what a great time to be born, what a great time to be alive because this generation will completely change the world. I kid you not. What is the main tool to make their change happen? They explain it themselves: it's not a technological question, it's a leadership question, they say. What they want is nothing else than power. The similarity with the Nazi propaganda couldn't be more obvious.

What they want to do with this power is to replace science by their junk science, create Big Brother-like machinery that will force people to reduce CO2 production by 90 percent (not kidding), and probably also reduce the population in Earth.

They're as power-thirsty, obsessed, ignorant, and dangerous as those behind the famous leader of Germany in the 1930s if not himself, they clearly want to dismantle the very basic principles that make this world work, and it's time for the rest of the world to notice and do something about these lunatics because we might really be approaching the 11th hour.

And that's the memo.

Answering a few string-related questions

I've seen a lot of flack aimed at string theory criticizing its supposed untestability. What's the problem here, in your view? Is it just that conducting experiments in this subfield would require inordinately expensive equipment (like particle physics, only more so), or is there some larger issue?

String theory is a theory of quantum gravity. It's been known for decades that the characteristic effects of quantum gravity only appear in "full strength" in extreme conditions - characterized by the so-called Planck scale. The typical distance where stringy or any quantum gravitational processes are easily visible is the supertiny Planck length 10^{-35} meters, the characteristic temperature is the Planck temperature 10^{32} Kelvin, and so forth.

The only known loophole are the braneworlds i.e. the models of old large dimensions and warped extra dimensions in which the characteristic phenomena of string theory or quantum gravity may be much more accessible, even by the LHC. But these scenarios look unlikely.

If we ignore this possibility, a collider that would directly test quantum gravity would be as large as the visible Universe. Since the very early days of quantum gravity, it was clear that the attack on its puzzles would be theoretical in character and the field has been a domain of some of the "purest" theorists - even though some people seem to be surprised even in 2007. What was not known is that the mathematical consistency criteria almost certainly single out not only a pretty answer but a unique answer - one that is called string theory for historical reasons - even though the repertoire of physical phenomena and solutions to this theory is very rich.

According to everything we know, there is no more serious problem than a problem in practice. However, some questions of a similar character may be unanswerable - for example those related to the precise nature of the de Sitter thermal radiation.

What is the observational evidence that requires a theory like dark matter, and why do other theories come up short in comparison to dark matter?

Newton's theory has been a successful theory of gravity. Einstein's general relativity has superseded Newton's theory but in the context of rotation of galaxies, they give pretty much identical answers. While these theories agree with many phenomena, there seemed to be a discrepancy in rotations of galaxies. The density of matter that was deduced from its gravitational effects - the orbital speed as a function of the radial coordinate - was much greater than the density of matter stored in visible stars. The galaxies rotate much like CDs (where the angular velocity is pretty much constant) instead of the Solar System (a prediction of gravity based on visible stars where the angular velocity should be much higher near the center). That implies that either the theory of gravity is wrong (both of them) or that there are new, invisible sources of gravity: they were called dark matter.

One year ago, NASA offered a more direct evidence for dark matter. They found that during a collision, the (reconstructed) dark matter moves pretty much independently from the visible stars. This observation, indicating their independent existence, falsifies a large number of theories that modify the laws of gravity - all the theories where gravity is still associated with visible stars and is additive and positive - because in these theories, the deduced dark matter should still move together with the stars.

Once we adopt that dark matter is real, it must be composed out of a new kind of particle, at least partially. Neutralinos predicted by supersymmetry, a natural part of string theory, are the most obvious (and popular) candidates. But the structure of dark matter is extremely unconstrained - it can be made out of pretty much anything new as long as you adjust the mass and the interaction strength correctly - so one doesn't expect to answer all remaining questions about physics by using the existence of dark matter only. Dark matter is not such a big clue, after all. The fact that its total mass exceeds the mass of all visible matter five-fold doesn't change it into a big clue either. ;-) It's still some boring, dumb matter sitting around galaxies.

Incidentally, dark energy is 70% of the mass of the Universe but this huge mass is not why dark energy is such an unusual hint. Quite on the contrary: the mystery is why the dark energy is so light!

But, more multiverse? Why, oh why?

Because AB seems to prefer to tell people what they want to hear rather than what is true and important. (Sorry if you don't know the context here.)

Do you think the subject did not receive the attention it so richly deserves?

Typical discussions about the anthropic principle in 2007 are even less sophisticated than they used to be three years ago or so. Among the scientists, the progress was close to zero; among the general public, the progress was negative, especially because of a misinformation campaign by certain professional amateurs. ;-)

General clichés about the landscape are the most favorite topic for people with severely limited intelligence who prefer to repeat and condemn, in a circle of similarly handicapped friends, a few meaningless dogmas that they have memorized instead of thinking about new questions, confronting their hypotheses against known facts, and refining their opinions. The actual celebrated recent work in theoretical physics has almost nothing to do with the discussions of these people, for example with the writings of most journalists and visitors of a certain portion of the blogosphere.

Those blogs are pure trash.

Particle production and Unruh radiation

Does the number of particles in a state depend on the acceleration of the reference frame?

Yes, it does. Particles in physics are way more abstract objects than cows or other animals whose number can usually be agreed upon. Much like other concepts in modern physics, they can only be carefully analyzed and interpreted by the language of advanced mathematics. In quantum field theory, a particle is an excitation of a quantum field. A quantum field in a non-interacting theory is mathematically equivalent to a set of infinitely many harmonic oscillators; for each conceivable value of velocity (and each independent polarization if there are many), there is one oscillator.

In quantum mechanics, the harmonic oscillator can only have an energy (above its ground state) that is a multiple of its frequency. The relevant integer is interpreted as the number of particles. To find the probability that the number of particles equals N, you must decompose your wave function(al) into eigenstates of the harmonic oscillator. Some of the readers have heard about the gaussians multiplied by Hermite polynomials.

Accelerated observers can also interpret quantum fields around them as a set of harmonic oscillators but they must use different frequencies for different directions and/or speeds where the particles can move, relatively to the inertial observers. That changes (squeezes) the shape of the wave function(al)s with well-defined numbers of particles. While the number of particles is still quantized, an accelerated observer will end up with different answers because he is using a different Hamiltonian to determine the energy of the harmonic oscillator. He is using a different one because such a new Hamiltonian must evolve "horizontal" time slices in the past into "tilted" time slices in the future. That's why a little bit of the boost generator must be included in the accelerating guy's Hamiltonian.

The simplest example why they won't agree is the vacuum itself. The vacuum is defined as the state of the lowest possible energy. But because two observers that are accelerating with respect to one another use a different definition of energy, they will also disagree about the identity of the vacuum i.e. the ground state of the physical system.

Classically, this disagreement wouldn't arise because the ground state of the classical harmonic oscillator is simply the point x=0, p=0, for any frequency. But the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics makes these two conditions incompatible. The ground state is replaced by the gaussian wave function. However, the width of this wave function depends on the frequency (for any width, the uncertainty principle is saturated) and the two observers won't agree about this frequency and the width. That's why they won't agree what it means to have empty space.

Additional subtleties about the counting of particles arise when interactions are taken into account. The number of particles is only integer in the limit where the interactions can effectively be neglected. The more a system interacts, the less meaningful it is to count the number of particles. For example, conformal theories where particles interact strongly at many energy scales make it very difficult to count particles by integers - a basic old observation that was recently named "unparticle physics". Counting of particles also depends on the renormalization scale. If you raise it, you will see for example many more gluons inside a proton. In some sense, saying that there are just three quarks inside a proton is an idealized statement associated with the lowest possible energy scale. The higher resolution you take, the more gluons (and quark-antiquark pairs) you see.

Do we expect an electron in free fall to radiate?

Relatively to comoving objects, it doesn't radiate because the situation is equivalent to inertial electrons in empty space by the principle of equivalence, a principle that still holds, at least semiclassically. Relatively to another, accelerating observer - one that is still describing a small region of space only, such an electron does radiate. The reason was explained above: mutually accelerating observers use different Hamiltonians and don't agree about the number of particles.

How does a co-moving observer see a non-radiating static electric field while a stationary observer sees a radiating charge?

Both observers, if they formulate their questions accurately, must define what they mean by states with a certain number of photons. Because of the difference in the Hamiltonians mentioned above, leading to different bases of the Hilbert space of the harmonic oscillators, they will not agree what is a wave function with N photons. Moreover, the amount of their disagreement changes with time. Consequently, they will not agree how many photons were radiated away.

If we think of the radiation as discrete photons, are they there or not?

Photons may be thought of as discrete objects but the idea that they're universal points whose location will be agreed upon by all observers is a misguided artifact of an oversimplified analogy building on classical physics and 18th century intuition. In reality, where their existence is controlled by quantum physics, a photon is the state obtained by the action of a creation operator upon the vacuum state that has no particles. Different observers won't even agree what is the vacuum state, as argued above. Empty space for one observer is a superposition of various states with different numbers of particles moving in different directions according to another observer. They also define the creation operators with different relative coefficients and the relations between them can be easily calculated by robust mathematical laws.

Or does that question make no sense somehow when formulated precisely?

The question whether particle production exists does make sense when everything is formulated accurately but the arguments leading to the conclusion that particle production doesn't exist and different observers will agree about the answer - even though these arguments sound plausible at the verbal level - are shown to be wrong when one defines and counts particles more carefully using the proper mathematical toolbox. Once again, the question was perfectly fine but the answer was completely wrong.

Dead webs

Hmm, is anybody thinking about relaunching the String Coffee Table or SPS?

Not sure about the coffee table but SPS is fully dead because the old server receiving the postings went out of business and computer administrators who would be fixing this problem didn't exist at Harvard.

For instance, how many flavours there are really at the ends of the type I open string? 32, 10, or 5?

In bosonic string theory, the theory with open strings and with the O(8192) gauge group is special because of a tadpole cancellation: see e.g. this paper by the honorary string theorist Steven Weinberg. If it were U(8192), we could talk about 8192 colors and 8192 anti-colors. Because the group is orthogonal, colors and anti-colors are identified with one another, in a sense, so we have 8192 half-colors. A T-dual theory would literally have 4096 colors: it would have 4096 D24-branes plus their 4096 images behind the "mirror" (the orientifold plane). This is because O(8192) can be broken to U(4096). However, the space-filling D25-branes in normal bosonic string theory always overlap with each other and can't be separated, so the discussion is confusing. Whether we say that the number of colors iis 8192 or 4096 is just a linguistic question about our conventions. What matters are equations: O(8192) is the preferred gauge group.

In superstring theory in 10 dimensions, the special number of colors is way more important than in bosonic theory because all anomalies and problems cancel for the SO(32) theory called type I string theory - the background used by Green and Schwarz to initiate the first superstring revolution. Replace 8192, 4096, D25, and D24 by 32, 16, D9, and D8 in the previous paragraph and it will be true for superstring theory. There are 32 half-Chan-Paton factors in type I string theory.

It is possible (but not necessary) to generate Chan-Paton factors from (dynamically trivial) fermionic fields if the number of colors is a power of two. The number 5 refers to the number of fermions that need to be added to the endpoints of strings and if you're interested about the origin of this particular number, see the slow comments. A function expanded in these 5 anticommuting variables will have 32 components that can be conveniently identified with the half-colors. But because the 5 fermionic variables are so dummy, the precise arrangement of the 32 colors into the corners of a five-dimensional cube is mostly an unphysical artifact of this trick.

The powers of two are rather natural for the number of colors in many backgrounds of string theory, an insight that has also been hijacked by computer scientists who have revealed their true colors by not citing string theory. ;-)

Why ghosts are needed for quantization of QCD?

Dear experimentalist, ghost are not needed for "all" quantizations of QCD. Ghosts are just a wise technological trick that allows us to quantize a theory with gauge symmetries covariantly. QCD contains unphysical degrees of freedom because of the gauge invariance. We can eliminate them from the scratch and then ghosts are not needed. Alternatively, we may keep them, to make the theory prettier. Then the path integral - the simplest way to deal with the system - must be divided by the volume of the gauge group. A choice of gauge conditions must be accompanied by a Jacobian and this Jacobian may be expressed as a path integral over a Faddeev-Popov ghost system, as originally found by Feynman. See also an article about BRST invariance.

What is QCD?

QCD is the boundary CFT dual to a particular background of string theory that is important for our understanding of strong interactions.

Twistors

Firstly, is the following statement of Witten's conjecture correct: The only non-zero amplitudes for spin one particle scattering come from configurations of points which lie on algebraic curves in twistor space.

Yes, it's correct for the tree processes as argued in the original Witten's paper, but it is not the most favorite twistor-based approach that is used by particle physicists these days. A more popular and effective approach, due to Cachazo, Svrček, and Witten, is based on Feynman diagrams whose basic building blocks are MHV vertices - corresponding to lines (simplest algebraic curves) only. These two approaches are equivalent.

What is the evidence behind Witten's conjecture, and what has been done to prove/disprove it? What is the present status?

The evidence was originally based on explicit calculations of examples but later, people have proven it. One set of proofs heavily builds on an analysis of poles of the amplitudes and the way how the amplitudes can be reconstructed from the known correct poles, unitarity, and some derivable recursion formulae. Another proof of the MHV version of the twistor rules directly constructs a field redefinition in the light cone gauge so that the gauge theory in the new variables directly leads to the desired Feynman rules.

Does twistor-string theory extend the Atiyah-Hitchin-Singer theorem about instantons (using generalizations of the Ward theorem) to other cases (quantum corrections)?

I am not sure what the extension of the Atiyah-Hitchin-Singer theorem is supposed to be in this case. But the starting point of Witten's expansion is not given by the equations being classical but rather by the gauge fields being self-dual. His approach is a generalization of a self-dual gauge field to a more general gauge field (or superfield).

If Witten's relation isn't of independent differential geometric interest I'll eat my hat!

It's not a question but be careful what you eat. There is no well-defined boundary between "differential geometry relevant for gauge theory" and "independent differential geometry". I would argue that differential geometers should naturally be interested in all results that emerge in gauge theories, especially classical gauge theory, which is why they might be interested in this finding, too. But it seems hard to formulate what's nontrivial about Witten's rules while avoiding gauge theory with its Lagrangian (or an awkward mathematical description of the same thing). His basic statement is about a geometric interpretation of the interacting gauge theory. Nothing interesting is left is you decide to throw gauge theories away, considering them to be dirty physics. ;-)

I'd like to see a discussion of how (or if?) string theory reconciles the geometric interpretation of gravity with the quantum interpretation.

String theory implies that deformations or wiggles on geometry are equivalent to a condensate of strings in a certain oscillation pattern. The infinities and ambiguities are removed because of a combination of two facts: the string is an extended object (which prevents points from getting to close to each other, a qualitative source of short-distance divergences); the internal dynamics of a string is essentially unique and can be described by a finite theory, too.

An analysis of the interactions between strings in these vibration states shows that they are completely equivalent to interactions of quanta of gravitational waves and general relativity follows. See Why are there gravitons in string theory.

For that matter, I'd love to see a discussion about any other problems that string theory solves, as well as new problems created by the theory.

See Top twelve results of string theory for a list of results. I am not aware of problems "created" by the theory per se. I am only aware of two mutually related problems that are also problems for all other theoretical physicists today and that were expected to have been solved except that they're still not answered. What are they?

We don't know how to locate the right minimum in the configuration space of string theory that matches our Universe. And we don't know how to explain the tiny value of the cosmological constant. No other theory can answer these questions either, of course. The champions of the anthropic principle essentially argue that the existence of life is the only and sufficient answer to both questions and no other answer has to be searched for.

My screen freezes everytime that I have tried to access your blog over the last couple of weeks. Any hints on how to reslove this problem?

Use a feed reader, e.g. this page. A Google account recommended. The design is modest, fast, white, and clean. Comments are not there.

As I understand it, the multiverse is created by nucleating new universes as regions of "true vacuum". Question: what does string theory have to say about this mysterious process?

This mysterious process is a paradigm believed by many to be correct because of effective field theory, the long-distance limit of any theory including string theory. That's why the existence of multiverse itself doesn't depend on string theory too much, except for a complicated configuration space or "landscape" that string theory inserts as input for the field-theoretical arguments to make the set of possible transitions richer. That's why many non-string theorists, including Alex Vilenkin or Alan Guth, take the mechanisms behind the multiverse creation seriously.

String theory reproduces the field-theoretical results at long distances and is expected to reproduce the bubbling processes, too. Whether these processes are useful for learning something new, even in the context of field theory, is a different question. My personal guess is No: considering the whole "family tree" of our Universe before it was small is probably unphysical.

While many believe that the qualitative conclusions about the existence of pocket universes won't be influenced by string theory, some thoughtful people such as Tom Banks argue that string theory radically changes the predictions of field theories concerning the ability to tunnel to different vacua. But he or they (and others) haven't yet found a crisp argument that would convince other thoughtful people that this new stringy behavior is real so people conservatively continue to believe whatever seems to be the best conclusion of the previous level of theories, namely local quantum field theory.

Question: is there anything in string theory that makes it more plausible that a patch of true vacuum would necessarily or naturally evolve into something like our world?

A patch of true vacuum naturally evolves into a large flat space similar to ours, following the standard insights of inflationary cosmology that are incorporated in many vacua of string theory. At this moment, there exists no known explanation that the spectrum of particles and forces - and the constants - should naturally be what they are instead of other allowed choices. The advocates of the anthropic reasoning argue that there will never exist a better explanation for these "coincidences", neither in string theory nor elsewhere, and of course, they might be right or wrong.

If we cannot answer these questions, should we believe that the landscape is physically relevant?

Yes. There are many concepts and insights in physics that are believed - or can be shown - to be physically relevant even if they don't allow physicists to answer all related questions at a given moment that they would like to be answered. For example, Schrödinger's equation correctly describes all atoms but it doesn't allow us to explain why it is exactly carbon dioxide that we call life. QCD was always the right theory of nuclei but it didn't allow people to calculate the spectrum of mesons at the beginning even though good people already knew that it was certainly correct. There are many examples.

The lesson is that if one can imagine a particular argument to support a theory, it doesn't mean that it is the only possible method how the theory can be supported or even proven (or disproven, in the case of wrong theories). And if this argument isn't completed, it doesn't mean that science is stuck. There are many other ways to proceed. Other people may be smarter and luckier and find these better ways, instead of being stuck with a wrong approach.

The existence of a large number of AdS universes that are consistent with the laws of quantum gravity and other qualitative features of our Universe - the existence of gauge theories and matter fields - seems well-established whether or not you believe that string theory describes our Universe. We will probably never "unlearn" this fact and return to a narrow-minded box where the solution was thought to be completely unique. The people who imagine that by abandoning string theory, they may solve any of these problems, are victims of wishful thinking because without string theory, the spectrum of possibilities is much greater still.

To a lesser extent, the comment about AdS spaces is also true for supersymmetry-breaking de Sitter vacua: there is probably a lot of them, too.

This fact implies that the "landscape" is the set of candidate loci where our Universe may be. This landscape is less accurate information than the location we would like to know at the end but it is much more concrete and predictive than the space of possibilities according to local field theories, the swampland, and way more concrete and descriptive (and correct) than the ideas about physics that people had 100 years ago.

On the other hand I cannot understand why MR thinks that the anthropic principle isn't interesting scientifically.

It is perhaps interesting scientifically to some extent but there are not too many solid arguments or theories to talk about right now. That's why a discussion about this general topic among two intelligent people cannot take more than two hours. They say everything they want to say and everything is clear to both of them. All people who are spending much more than two hours with these trivial general comments are mentally challenged. For example, a blog called N.E.W. spends with this trivial topic more than 3 years and its owner, just like 99% of his visitors, are still completely unable to understand the very basic facts, or at least they pretend so. This is not how scientists discuss issues: this is how morons talk to each other.

We contribute lots of boring papers to the arxiv too!

There are many boring papers but what is clear is that a person who is not interested in theoretical physics will find almost all of them boring - or well beyond his abilities, to use a more honest and less arrogant description of his actual situation. There is nothing surprising about it and this tautological observation is certainly not a reason that should influence what physicists think about.

I just wanted to stress that while the philosophical stuff about the multiverse has been said too many times, that does not imply that one can no longer have a meaningful discussion about the science of it.

The implication is not necessarily robust but the conclusion is certainly true: there has been no meaningful scientific discussion about the issue of the anthropic principle in the blogosphere and most media, largely because the people who want to ignite such discussions are [an accurate but potentially offensive noun was removed], and one shouldn't expect this situation to change with the same amount of knowledge and the same people. And even the value of the discussions among the experts has been very limited.

I have never understood how string theory manages to stay unitary in the face of the black hole information paradox. Could you say whether this question has been resolved (I have heard differing answers from various string theorists, so I suspect the answer is "no") and if so, how. I know Hawking paid off on his bet, but I'm not satisfied.

Dear Prof Shor, one must be careful what the actual question is.

If the question is whether we have a full mathematical framework that allows us to quantify the problems with Hawking's "proof" of a violation of unitarity in his original language, the answer is No. We know that the violations have something to do with non-locality in the presence of horizons - that almost certainly exists since the argument that it stays exact simply breaks down - but no fully convincing account what happens is known (how much nonlocal it is, how far and quickly one transmits information?), at least it is not known to most people.

The qualitative picture is clear. In the presence of black holes, matter can "tunnel" out of the black hole and the information can do the same. It is known that the exponentially small rate of such tunneling is sufficient to get the information out in time. It's because the difference between mixed states and pure states can be exponentially small, in a proper counting.

But if you ask whether we know that Hawking evaporation is unitary in quantum gravity, according to string theory, the answer is a resounding Yes. There are many clean setups where it can be answered unambiguously - like in AdS5 x S5 or 11-dimensional flat spacetime. One can show that these spacetimes are equivalent to non-gravitational and manifestly unitary theories (the boundary CFT or Matrix theory) with a Hermitean Hamiltonian. We can't yet reformulate these insights in Hawking's original language because the concepts don't match his assumptions. For example, we no longer use a Fock space to describe excitations around a black hole. The black hole microstates themselves differ from a Fock space.

The Preskill-Hawking bet was about the latter, Yes/No question whether the information is actually preserved (not whether Prof Shor would understand the reasons), and the answer is - as both Preskill and Hawking (and your humble correspondent) know today: Yes, the information is preserved.

Surely AdS/CFT was the main reason why Hawking finally agreed that it is preserved. That's why it's completely correct that Hawking has surrendered in the bet regardless whether his own semi-new explanation why the answer is Yes is comprehensible to others or not. His new story is an auxiliary tool that helps him personally to see that loopholes in his previous arguments exist: the main message, that "temporary horizons" shouldn't be treated as God-given mantinels (because the spacetime is asymptotically Minkowski anyway), is surely correct.

More generally, it is clear today that the postulates of quantum mechanics are robust and will survive while the assumptions about exact locality and exact causality don't hold in the presence of horizons where tunneling can occur.

Are we supposed to understand that, somehow, spacetime CONSISTS of strings?

Yes, spacetime somehow consists of strings. Click the link "Why are there gravitons in string theory" above (or here). More precisely, we start with strings as objects propagating on a pre-existing geometry. But without strings, the geometry is rigid. Without strings, there are no additional degrees of freedom that would allow you to change the background you started with.

That changes once you add strings. You find out that if you pump a condensate of strings in a certain vibration mode to the pre-existing spacetime, the physical effect on all other strings and all other objects will be exactly indistinguishable from a deformation of the original geometry. Deformations of spacetimes are equivalent to propagating strings in a certain state. The strings can be poured to space to change the metric tensor. If you wish, you may add or subtract strings from spacetime to get all the way to a vanishing metric tensor.

Also, the consistency criteria for strings to propagate on a background imply that the background must solve Einstein's equations (with all the right corrections). This fact can be proved and also shown to be equivalent to the statements in the previous paragraph about the way how condensates of strings interact.

More questions and answers about this topic can be found in the fast comments.

The punch line is that spacetime itself is created of strings. This conclusion has a very specific content in background-independent string field theory. In this approach to string theory, you may formulate the basic equations of everything roughly as A*A=0 where A is the string field (measures how many strings there are for different shapes at different places, roughly speaking) and * is an operation generalizing the matrix product that knows about the way how strings split and join.

You will find out that there is a classical solution of this equation, A=Q, for every allowed background geometry (Q is the BRST operator that depends on this geometry, roughly speaking, and the equation is equivalent to its nilpotency). You may thus write a general form of A as A=Q+a where a is a small quantum deviation. The equations for a, namely Q*a+a*Q+a*a=0, will describe strings propagating on the background encoded in Q. Note that I could have omitted Q*Q=0. The last, bilinear term in a is the interaction term while the previous terms imply that the state of a string is BRST-closed - the strings satisfy the right equations on the background encoded in Q.

But don't forget that Q itself was made out of strings. There are no other long-distance objects or low-frequency fields except that those you can build out of strings, and strings are enough to reproduce all known types of matter and interactions including gravity in a coherent quantum-mechanical framework. This statement is derived for perturbative string theory that is valid when the coupling is weak. The only change one must make at general couplings is to replace strings with M, whatever it is. But once again, all objects, fields, forces, and dynamics are always made out of the same stuff in string/M-theory, stuff whose properties are completely determined by the mathematically consistent rules.

And that's the memo.

Bonus: The problem for string theorists is that [your humble correspondent] represents all too accurately their views, so they can’t justify censoring him.

I completely agree. A recent problem for string theorists and probably many other scientists is that they are being intimidated by ignorant, dishonest, stupid, bitter, disgusting far left-wing activists such as Peter Woit who wrote the sentence above. They are being threatened and are afraid to say what results science actually leads to: they are effectively being censored and the nasty censors are not even ashamed to admit it. Instead, they are pressured to say things that the human bottom wants them to say. This situation is no science, it is no freedom, and I assure everyone that if this tendency is not fought with, it will become worse and influence science in ever greater number of fields ever more lethally.

APEC won't accept targets

Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation probably won't accept binding greenhouse gas targets.

Via Benny Peiser.

The God particle

Unfortunately, we are witnesses of another violent attack against the "God particle". Dennis Overbye started in the New York Times and Sean Carroll added much more vitriolic a diatribe on his blog. Fortunately, I can give a proof that the Higgs boson is also called a "God particle" that Sean Carroll certainly won't be even attempting to deny: a woman from a science center.



She also offers the explanation by John Ellis - that was several days old when she was speaking - that the Higgs boson is a famous physicist walking through a room crowded by other physicists. The young woman has also figured out who the famous physicist was: it was Justin Timberlake! ;-)

What do I think about these issues?

Well, I am not used to the term "God particle" and in comparison with many other terms, it sounds insufficiently technical, but it is a good one. The God particle is what gives the mass to all elementary fermions as well as bosons including Himself, by a combination of interactions and His own vev (that results from self-interactions, too). Be careful: most of the visible mass in the Universe doesn't come from bare masses of elementary particles but rather from strong interactions between quarks and gluons that have nothing to do with the God particle.

This particle is going to be the only spinless elementary particle; God lives in the no-spin zone, too.

Moreover, the God particle remains somewhat enigmatic, much like God Himself, because it hasn't yet been seen. It is also conceivable that it will be the only new particle observed by the LHC. If a single particle costs six billion dollars or so, it simply has to be the God particle. ;-) I am not a believer in any of the material concepts included in religion and from this viewpoint, the role of the God particle in my understanding of the world is comparable to the role of God. It is pretty special and important but it is not something that controls all aspects of the world.

What do physicists think about these issues?

Many physicists are fanatical atheists so their stomach simply explodes when they hear the word "God". But this is pure sociology and their reaction has very little to do with the question whether this term is a good one. It is rather a testimony of the political bias in the Academia.

Normal physicists I know don't care about names. They know that objects must be called in some way and the essential things in physics don't depend on names.

More importantly, smart and achieved physicists - and I am specifically talking about a very famous one from the East Coast - care much more about the term "Higgs boson" that may be more misleading than the "God particle" because it creates the impression that this particular particle is tightly connected with the work of Peter Higgs. No other elementary particle is named after a person even though the right person would be more obvious in several cases than it is in the case of the God particle.



Finally, there is the person who has coined the term, Leon Lederman. Leon Lederman has won the 1988 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery of the muon neutrino. He has been the Fermilab director for ten years. In his book "The God Particle", he has also explained why it is a good name. He was right. I find it stunning if the opinions and arguments of such an important person in particle physics are neglected, humiliated, or even vilified, for purely ideological reasons. Overbye writes:

In a stroke of either public relations genius or disaster, Leon M. Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, referred to the Higgs as “the God particle”...

Well, Sean Carroll is much tougher:

... [The phrase] was coined by Leon Lederman as a shameless ploy to sell books...

What Carroll doesn't find disturbing is that his attacks on anything that has "God" in it are shameless ploys to flatter other nutroots, driven by the ultimate dream of Sean Carroll, namely to appear on the O'Reilly Factor.

Moreover, Carroll seems to "remove" Leon Lederman from the list of physicists when he writes that "Physicists, regardless of their religious status, hate this phrase." Sorry, Sean, but this is simply a lie. If Lederman were the only exception, it would already be a big lie. As you can see, he is not the only one. The statement that the Higgs field is a "thoroughly materialist idea" is also untrue. There is nothing "materialist" about this idea in comparison with other ideas and, by the way, I am pretty sure that the classical "materialists" such as Marx or Lenin would find the Higgs field - something that fills the whole space but picks no preferred reference frame - unacceptably spiritual. The Higgs ocean is a perfect realization of Isaac Newton's holy spirit filling the space, after all.

If it is necessary to slam a great particle physicist for his completely legitimate linguistic creativity and accuse him of an unstoppable desire to sell books four years after he has received his Nobel prize, Carroll will happily do it. On the other hand, if two crackpots write two sensational books filled with lies from the beginning to the end whose only goal is to fill their pockets, Carroll will offer them all the help he can.

I would appreciate if Sean Carroll realized that relatively to Leon Lederman, he is an insignificant microbe in particle physics. And if he behaved like one.

Thank you very much.

Incidentally, I also disagree with the opinion that the term "God particle" helps creationism. Instead, the term brings some satisfaction to the people who think that the main purpose of science is to smash God and it may actually make them less nervous and reduce their internal desire to defend creationism. The purpose of science is to find out how the Universe works. If the underlying dynamics under the "God particle" is the right one, there is nothing wrong about it. How the God particle can be abused to "prove" creationism in biology is beyond me.

And that's the memo.

Update: Gordon Watts also misunderstands why people are so upset about God and His particle. He adds some wise words.

(Most of this text was written on August 7th, 2007.)

Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven: climate sensitivity is 1.1 Kelvin

Many of the recent entries included in the weekly dose of peer-reviewed climate denier literature were published in Geophysical Research Letters. For the sake of diversity, today we offer an article that will appear in Journal of Geophysical Research.

Stephen Schwartz: Heat capacity, time constant, and sensitivity of Earth's climate system (full text)

The author is from Brookhaven National Laboratory, the same one that successfully tests string-theoretical holography through the RHIC experiment. His calculated result for the climate sensitivity is 1.1 Celsius degree, plus minus half a degree: three times smaller than the IPCC figure and consistent with the typical calculations of the Reference Frame.

His method

Schwartz first determines the heat capacity of oceans, by observing links between temperature and the heat content of the oceans on the record. His result is equivalent to a layer of water that is between 60 and 160 meters in thickness which is probably a reasonable result regardless of the method that was used. Other sinks add about 20% to this figure.

The time constant relevant for changes is determined from autocorrelation of the last 125 years of temperature records and ends up being between 4 and 6 years: in five years, the deviation from the expected equilibrium drops 2.718 times. The outcome - 5 years - is obtained in various ways, indicating robustness. Recall that e.g. Nir Shaviv recently talked about 2-10 year lags.

The final energetical sensitivity of 0.30 Celsius degrees per one Watt per squared meter, plus minus 50 percent, that translates to 1.1 Celsius degree plus minus 50 percent for CO2 doubling, is obtained simply by taking the ratio of 5 years and the overall heat capacity that is equal to 17 plus minus 7 yr K^{-1} W m^{-2} in ordinary SI units.

This small result is obtained despite the fact that all other forcings except for radiative and greenhouse forcing are inferred to have contributed only -0.3 plus minus 1 Watt per squared meter of (probably) cooling during the 20th century. Note the huge, 300% uncertainty about the other feedbacks, usually assumed to be dominated by unpredictable aerosols.

Predictions for 21st century

Recall that most of the 1.1 degree - about 0.7 degrees - has already occurred since the beginning of the industrial era. This fact itself is an indication that the climate sensitivity is unlikely to be much greater than 1 Celsius degree: the effect of most of the doubling has already been made and it has led to 0.7 K of warming or so. By the end of the doubling i.e. 560 ppm expected slightly before 2100, assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time, Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only - a typical fluctuation that occurs within 4 months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to.

As far as I can say, all the people who end up with 2 or even 3 Celsius degrees for the climate sensitivity are just playing the children's game to scare each other, as Richard Lindzen says, by making artificial biased assumptions about positive feedbacks. There is no reasonable, balanced, and self-consistent work that would lead to such a relatively high sensitivity. But frankly speaking, even if the sensitivity were 2 Celsius degrees, it wouldn't imply any tragedy.

Thanks to Benny Peiser.

Additional frequently visited articles about climate change on The Reference Frame

• Critics of Stephen Schwartz
• Lord Christopher Monckton & global warming
• Global warming drove CO2 and CH4 concentrations, not the other way around
• New York climate duel: sceptics defeated believers
• Massachusetts versus EPA
• Sunspots and global warming: correlation
• 2006: a sad year for fear makers
• 2006: coolest average temperature in five years

Global warming: the menopause song

Chick the Comedian, Al Gore, and George Bush have a new theory about global warming. ;-)

Yes, I mean the Al Gore who can't understand why rings of young people are not jumping under bulldozers.

BBC Radio: superluminality and two more topics

In this radio segment (Real Audio; Windows Media people should download Real Alternative), they talk about abolishing some kinds of taxes, wars, but also three science topics.

Depression over-diagnosed

Before 17:30, they talk about the opinions of Gordon Parker, an Australian psychologist, who argues that the clinical threshold for depression is too low and people like to go Prozac as soon as it's cloudy outside or as soon as their boss forgets about their birthday.

Well, my experience certainly tells me that he's right. Things are statistically supposed to go down roughly in 50% of each life or so. However, whenever someone is unhappy about anything, people instantly recommend psychologists to each other or visit psychologists themselves - even though the unhappiness has usually nothing to do with psychology.

Parker says that this tendency is a result of clever marketing. In the same issue of the journal, Ian Hickie performs exactly this kind of marketing. Hickie also celebrates that the new approach has "removed the old stigma surrounding mental illness". In other words, the new approach has made the term "mental illness" vacuous. And he's happy about it because even though it's vacuous, his colleagues still benefit from it.

Steve McIntyre

At 17:30, they talk with Stephen McIntyre by phone. In a very polite discussion, they reveal that the changes made because of his observations are not insignificant for the U.S. temperature records. We have already talked about the fact that 1934 became the hottest year in the U.S. history again.

Superluminal signals

Around 20:00, they start to talk to Günter Nimtz and oversell a huge amount of bizarre statements about superluminal signals, violations of special relativity, and time machines that he has constructed or nearly constructed in his lab.

Two years ago or so, Robert Helling explained what these experiments are all about. As far as I can say, there is nothing new about Nimtz's findings or observations and not much interesting about them either. He's been doing the very same things for decades.

He builds a setup in which the maximum of a wave moves faster than light (although you need amplifiers to find where the maximum is at the end). That's of course possible. In fact, it's very easy. You can make such things with normal classical electromagnetic waves as long as you have a layer of material w