Teppo Mattsson: Dark energy as a mirage

Is cosmological constant zero, after all? (PDF)

If this guy were right, the required changes would be tiny. Dark energy would go away, 90% of the mass would be dark matter, 10% would be baryonic, and the age of the Universe would jump to 14.8 billion years.

He says that as you observe distant objects, the Universe is getting emptier, due to a hierarchical clumping of matter, and in these emptier regions, the Hubble constant increases, mimicking the accelerating effects of the cosmological constant.

I am confused about elementary things such as signs in his argument but you should think about it yourself. So far I will keep my estimate of 95% probability that the standard cosmological model including the C.C. is right and the C.C. can't be explained away in this way or a similar way.

Fine-tuning

My problem with an explanation based on hierarchical clumping - which is otherwise a cool old idea - is that the observed cosmological constant seems to be determined rather accurately and uniformly in all directions.

On the other hand, there is no good reason to expect that we are exactly in the middle of our local clumped hierarchies of galaxies and their clusters. If we assume that we are not, the deduced acceleration according to the mirage effect would depend on the direction but it doesn't. Of course, we might be close to the center but it seems as an additional unlikely assumption that makes the whole explanatory framework less likely.

If you care about this argument quantitatively, a small observed cosmological dipole of the microwave background implies that we would have to be a few percent from the center of our local clump. Only a few parts per million of stars live in this small central "core". This determines the degree of fine-tuning. You might still believe that it is better than 10^{-123} fine-tuning for a small but non-zero C.C. But at this moment, I think that physical arguments show that there's nothing wrong with a non-zero C.C. and the new kind of "central" fine-tuning is too high a price to pay for eliminating the C.C.

Thanks to You Know Who(m).

2007 Atlantic hurricane season: below forecasts

The 2007 Atlantic hurricane season that officially ends today (and it is no longer possible for an additional named storm to occur in time) was stronger than the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season but much weaker than what we saw two years ago.

Current hurricane info (bookmark)

In 2005, 2006, 2007, the total accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) was 248, 78.5, 67.5. You see a clear decreasing trend here: ACE even indicates that 2007 was even weaker than 2006. The median ACE index and the mean ACE index for the 1951-2005 period are 89.5 and 102.3, respectively. It means that according to ACE, both 2006 and 2007 were below the average.



Figure 1: H. Dean, the angriest hurricane of the season. ACE: over 33. Dean was the first male category 5 hurricane after four previous female ones - Emily, Katrina, Rita, Wilma - in 2005. But the surprise is not so overwhelming because Dean is really a self-described metrosexual. ;-)

The total damage was about USD 130 billion, 0.5 billion, 4 billion in 2005, 2006, 2007.

In 2007, the number of named storms, hurricanes, major hurricanes was 14, 6, 2, close to the average values of NOAA which are 11.0, 6.2, 2.7. Both major hurricanes managed to become category 5 hurricanes but the number of category 5 hurricanes is not among the quantities that are normally being forecast. All the three standard numbers 14, 6, 2 are higher than virtually all forecasts.

To see that in detail, let us see what various teams predicted at various moments (if no year is specified, we mean 2007):

• Reality, 11/30: 14, 6, 2
• CSU, 12/8/06: 14, 7, 3
• NOAA 5/22: 13-17, 7-10, 3-5
• CSU 5/31: 17, 9, 5
• UKMO 6/19: 9-15, N/A, N/A
• CSU 8/3: 15, 8, 4
• NOAA 8/9: 13-16, 7-9, 3-5
• CSU 9/4: 15, 7, 4
• CSU 10/2: 17, 7, 3

You see that every single prediction of the number of major hurricanes was overshot: instead of the consensus value around 4, we only saw 2. Every single prediction of the total number of hurricanes was overstated, too. Also, most predictions for the total number of named storms were overestimates.

I would like to claim that this science might be sophisticated and interesting but it is not yet sufficiently mature to make useful predictions. If a scientific team chose the 1951-2005 average to be their prediction, it would be shown more accurate than virtually every single team that tried to predict what would happen, both in 2006 and 2007.

Klaus: Africa, don't rely on foreign aid

It has been ten years since the so-called Second Sarajevo Assassination, a forced resignation of the Czech prime minister Václav Klaus during his visit to Sarajevo that was justified by a financial scandal, one that was later demonstrated to be bogus.

The times are different now. President Klaus who was just nominated for the next term (the only candidate so far, despite many people who are desperately seeking Antiklaus) delivered his

speech in Lagos, Nigeria.

Klaus advised them to rely on their comparative advantages rather than foreign aid that is never really free, whose magnitude and importance is always overstated, and whose structure is always determined by the interest of donors. East Germany was used as a bad example of aid - a whole GDP of the Czech Republic was pumped to East Germany every year and they didn't make more progress than the Czech Republic that was getting no aid. Aid often makes actual useful developments impossible.

Also, the third world should determine its own optimal environmental, social, safety, labor, hygienic, and other standards, rather than to listen to someone else. Moreover, the best thing that the first world could do for Africa is to open its markets. You should see what Nigerian newspapers and their commenters write about the speech. Klaus's speech is accepted kind of enthusiastically and they seem to understand the main points and their power.

Hep-th papers on Friday

Below you find descriptions of the 17 today's papers on hep-th.

Bert Schroer dedicates 50+ pages to what he calls "significant conceptual differences" between quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Needless to say, quantum field theory is a standard example of a quantum mechanical theory and the difference between quantum field theory and other quantum mechanical theories is purely dynamical, not conceptual. What defines a quantum theory are the postulates of quantum mechanics (Hilbert space, observables given by linear operators, evolution given by a unitary operator, probabilities given by expectation values of projection operators) that hold everywhere, including quantum field theory, plus a choice of dynamics on the Hilbert space (e.g. a Hamiltonian) that depends on a theory. Quantum field theory is thus just another example. Also, all the features of the uncertainty principle and localization that hold in non-relativistic quantum mechanics of particles may be derived from quantum field theory in the appropriate limit(s). The paper is a nonsensical stream of philosophical misinterpretations, misconceptions borrowed from the "real" algebraic quantum field theory, and buzzwords.

Alikram Aliev shows that the "g=2" gyromagnetic ratio for rotating charged black holes is surprisingly universal in general relativity, regardless of the asymptotic geometry, its curvature etc.: the value remarkably coincides with the value for the electron calculated from the Dirac equation. (Non-relativistic gyroscopes have "g=1".) It becomes "g=4" when two angular momenta coincide.

Arthur Sergyeyev and Pavel Krtouš study the Klein-Gordon equation on a multi-dimensional Kerr-NUT-dS or -AdS background. They find a complete set of many commuting angular-momentum-like operators and prove that they commute. This is done purely in the first-quantized setup because the second-quantized Hilbert space of course can't have a finite complete set of commuting observables. Moreover, it can't really be interpreted in the quantum fashion because the Klein-Gordon equation (or any other relativistic equation) can't really be used as a first-quantized physical Schrödinger equation. So to summarize, it is purely a work in general relativity & classical field theory, the word "operator" should be interpreted as nothing else than a mathematical (differential) operator and it is somewhat confusing why the paper is on hep-th.

Noboru Nakanishi seems to be unfamiliar with conventional renormalization and is troubled by the quadratic divergences of the Standard Model. So he rediscovers the Pauli-Villars regularization and interprets the wrong sign as a consequence of wrong statistics of these new complex fields, rather than a negative sign of the kinetic term. The author doesn't seem to be at home with quantum field theory, as highlighted e.g. by the fact that he or she doesn't use the term "Standard Model". He only cites three (not too relevant) papers besides his own and Pauli & Villars are not among them.

James Hartle, Stephen Hawking, and Thomas Hertog offer a possible solution to a problem of the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal: that it predicts a very short inflation. They show a gauge-invariant, serious, "non-anthropic" calculation whose result is to add an additional factor of exp(3N) where N is the number of e-foldings to the probability of various classical solutions: similar factors may have appeared as results of anthropic hand-waving (or ingenious anthropic prophecies, if you wish). In the relevant physical context of a stringy-like landscape, a lot of inflation, starting near a de Sitter geometry at the saddle point, then follows. Surely one of the most interesting papers today.

Ee Chang-Young, Hoil Kim, and Hiroaki Nakajima construct a matrix representation of a super Heisenberg group that occurred in a stringy two-dimensional N=(2,2) deformed superspace describing D-branes on background Ramond-Ramond fields. Just like a background B-field forces bosonic coordinates to be non-commuting, a background RR-field makes the supercoordinates non-anti-commuting even though the math and limiting procedures are somewhat less clear.

Suresh Nampuri, Prasanta K.Tripathy, Sandip P. Trivedi ask, along the lines of "Dualities versus singularities", whether T-dualities - in their case those of type IIA on K3 times a two-torus - are enough to refractionalize a black hole with large D0-D4 or D0-D6 charges and bring those charges to Cardy's limit. The answer is "Yes" for non-supersymmetric black holes and "No" for generic supersymmetric black holes. The "Yes" answer might imply that the entropy of all extremal but non-supersymmetric black holes may be calculated.

Arzumanyan and 4 more Armenian authors compute the radiation from a charge that moves along a helix. Given the fact that the typical energy they consider is 10 MeV and the topic is more relevant for condensed matter physics (dielectric materials are needed) or something else, I don't think that the otherwise interesting paper should have appeared in a high-energy archive.

Cristina Zambon attempts to incorporate the so-called jump-defect, known from the sine-Gordon model, to the affine Toda field theories which are a complementary integrable description of similar physical systems.

B.M. Zupnik studies harmonic superspaces for three-dimensional theories. Harmonic superspace is a superspace that, in addition to anticommuting coordinates, contains additional bosonic coordinates spanning quotients of groups. His particular interest is in a non-Abelian Chern-Simons theory whose manifest supersymmetry from the superspace is N=5 but is extended to N=6.

Juraj Boháčik and Peter Prešnajder study the zero-spatial-dimensional anharmonic oscillator with a quartic interaction term using non-perturbative methods due to Gelfand and Yaglom. They offer a comprehensible proof of an equation that specifies corrections for such an oscillator. Again, it is interesting but not directly relevant for high-energy physicists.

A.T. Avelar et al. study topologically unusual soliton solutions to models with a single real scalar field. Their potential is a combination of (mostly fractional) powers of the field and the topologies include lumps with flat plateux at the top and lumps on top of another lump. The fact that they mention that the results may have applications to non-linear science highlights that this should probably not be a hep-th paper.

Kwan Sik Jeong studies supersymmetry breaking in KKLT-like models. It is being assumed that the source of the breaking is in a hidden, sequestered sector. The author argues that the impact of this breaking on the visible sector can be summarized in an F-term expectation value that is universal. Ratios of vevs and logarithms of ratios of various mass scales are the only thing that appear in the ultimate key formula.

Albion Lawrence, Tobias Sander, Michael B. Schulz, Brian Wecht look at type IIB string theory on a Calabi-Yau three-fold. Their aim is to find the spectrum of auxiliary fields which is not exactly a physically unique, objective, physical question but a particular natural answer may be useful. Indeed, it is useful and they argue that the expectation values of these auxiliary fields lead to deformed CFTs that add either the H-field (a field strength for the NS-NS B-field) or an SU(3) x SU(3) structure (different tangent bundles for left-movers and right-movers). Once these things are nonzero, generic vacua are non-geometric globally (although probably geometric locally, because of their starting point), a worldsheet argument suggests. Mirror symmetry is argued to hold beyond the (2,2) worldsheet supersymmetry and worldsheet instantons are presented as more important animals when their fluxes are turned on. One of the most interesting papers.

Niklas Beisert, Denis Erkal present the spin chains arising in the AdS/CFT correspondence as very special spin chains with non-nearest-neighbor interactions that nevertheless preserve the integrability of a simpler spin chain with nearest-neighbor interactions only. They can't prove the full integrability for the interesting cases that occur in string theory but they can do so for a seemingly similar gl(n) spin chain model with longer-range interactions. The proof is technically based on checking the Serre relations for a Yangian generator. A very interesting paper.

Borun D. Chowdhury and Samir D. Mathur study the fuzzball model of black holes. Now they look at radiation by these monsters. They derive the classical radiation emitted by these classical solutions (not suppressed by hbar) by combining the Hawking radiation into (very many) unstable modes of their individual geometries. I kind of feel that this was guaranteed to work because of the standard limiting relationships between classical and quantum systems but don't worry. They argue that this means that the information is manifestly preserved in the supergravity degrees of freedom. Well, I don't have any problem with the statement that these fuzzball geometries preserve the information or may behave as ordinary horizon-free solutions. They are ordinary, after all. What is missing for me is a proof that these fuzzball geometries conspire to behave like ordinary black holes in contexts where I want to believe that the black hole description is correct, e.g. after a collapse of a star. Also, I don't see any proof that all the relevant degrees of freedom that store the information about a black hole are geometric in character.

Chris Hull and R.A. Reid-Edwards discuss similar structures as Albion Lawrence et al. above, namely non-geometric compactifications. If the monodromy in such a background is taken from the T-duality group, such a background may be made similar to a geometric one by adding the T-dual coordinates besides the normal coordinates at each point. This has been discussed many times, even on this blog, and Hitchin was the most well-known guy who has advocated this viewpoint. Hull and Reid-Edwards think that one can also construct backgrounds that are non-geometric even locally, by thinking about the double as a Drinfeld double. I don't see this statement justified in the paper.

Al Gore & Pat Robertson

Tim Slagle, a political satirist, offers not only some comparisons of Gore and Robertson but also a funny albeit unflattering outsider's viewpoint on scientists in general.

Hat tip: Antagoniste

Bonus: You should see John Brignell's list of 600+ evil things caused by global warming, alphabetically sorted and including links to the mainstream media where the individual catastrophes are described. ;-)

The list works like a dictionary. Invent your favorite problem, for example salmonella, and find the word. Click it and you will see a proof that salmonella or anything else is caused by global warming. :-)

Jim Simons & string theory

Bloomberg & The International Herald Tribune

writes about some daily activities of Jim Simons. He divides his time between string theory, autism, and math education. Cumrun Vafa who is, much like Simons himself, a wizard is an important channel into string theory. And by the way, Simons also doubled his assets during the last year.

Paul Davies: Taking science on faith

Update: a list of wrong assumptions about science was added at the end of this essay. The article written on 11/25 was moved to the top as the most discussed recent text.

As far as I can say, The New York Times remain by far the best source of science news and opinions among the English-speaking newspapers.

Paul Davies' op-ed

meditates about the controversial question concerning the difference between science and religion. I agree with most things he writes. He starts with the idealized picture that many people believe to be true - namely a picture in which science and religion are sharply separated. Skepticism belongs to science while blind belief belongs to religion.

He instantly adds his main thesis that this picture is an oversimplification because science has its belief system, too. The first thing that a typical scientist - and especially a theoretical physicist - believes is that the questions he is trying to answer have coherent, understandable, and universally valid explanation.

Needless to say, this belief is a fact in the case of approximate laws that describe classes of physical phenomena that have already been understood and whose theories have already been verified. But whether the "next step" is going to be comparably rational, mechanical, satisfactory, deterministic, unique, or otherwise similar to the previous theories is always a matter of extrapolation. It is really a matter of belief.

Geocentrism

I primarily want to discuss this issue in the case of the anthropic principle but let me mention a few episodes from the past. How was science and religion separated during the debates about heliocentrism? Well, not too sharply. Of course, there were priests who were dismissing the champions of heliocentrism on religious grounds. But there were also many people paid as scientists who were frantically attacking heliocentrism as a bad science that contradicted insights of giants of science such as Aristotle or Ptolemaios and the basic pillars of the scientific method as understood at that time.

Some people like to forget about these things but geocentrism was not invented by the Catholic Church. It was constructed by Aristotle who lived 3 centuries before Christ and Ptolemy who lived 1 century after Christ. Aristotle was a philosopher and a scientist but Ptolemy was primarily a scientist. The belief in geocentrism was being defended by scientifically sounding propaganda, too. It couldn't prevent the theory from being incorrect.

Determinism

The second example I want to mention is the interpretation of quantum mechanics. For centuries, people believed that the Universe was a deterministic system where every event has precise reasons why it occurs in one way and not another way. Many people believed that at least in physics, determinism was a universal requirement that a scientific theory had to satisfy. Well, they were proved wrong, too.

Today we have fully rational and scientific evidence that all the work on "hidden variables" and similar attempts to return to the era of determinism was incorrect. The best theories that explain virtually everything we observe inevitably imply that it is only the probabilities of different outcomes that can be scientifically calculated. The basic principles of quantum mechanics have been settled for decades and they show that the world is different than what the people have thought to be necessary for science as recently as a century ago.

In both cases, and many other cases in science (not so much in religion), these beliefs sold as "principles of science" emerge as a result of extrapolation of successes of a certain kind of scientific approach in the past. Such extrapolations can turn out to be wrong and they often do. Nature doesn't care how many times someone screams "it is essential for science!" when he or she tries to defend a wrong statement. If a statement is incorrect, it doesn't help to call it "scientific" as opposed to "religious". As we will discuss below, if someone screams "everyone must respect the holy principle that there is only one vacuum", it is equally religious and equally dumb a statement as the statement that "everyone in the world must worship the same God".

Of course that the "idealized scientists" are more likely to avoid irrational approaches and unjustified dogmas. But there is no universal and eternal definition of an "ideal scientist", partly because the beliefs of such an ideal scientist depend on scientific questions that have not been fully answered. A scientist must be honest, bright, hard-working but whether he should believe these philosophical principles or others must be left to himself: it is a dynamical question whose answer may be influenced and should be influenced by the scientific research itself.

In real science, opinions are being shifted by evaluating evidence rather than by frantically parroting philosophical dogmas. The same thing holds in many other situations in science, including the question about the multiverse.

The multiverse

For many centuries, people were working on theories that assumed that all parts of the world must be visible with the help of ordinary light and they have universal properties such as the spectrum of particles and their interactions. Virtually everything we have learned is compatible with this assumption. One is therefore often tempted to extrapolate. It must be true, otherwise it is not science, is it? If must be true, otherwise our belief system collapses, doesn't it?

Well, it may be true and it may be false. Some people who consider themselves "scientific" seem completely incapable to grasp the concept that their assumption may be wrong. Because the inability to understand that an assumption could be wrong is a defining feature of religious zeal, these people are living proofs of the fuzzy boundary between faith and reason. They apparently think that if they repeat 1,000 times in their books and their blogs that their assumptions are necessary for science, the assumption suddenly becomes true. But if it is wrong, if will remain wrong. By their frantic repeating of a hypothesis 1,000 times, they just reveal something about themselves, not about the Universe. They reveal that they are the same kind of zealots as those who have opposed heliocentrism.

Paul Davies correctly writes that the anthropic principle is becoming increasingly acceptable in the science circles. Of course, in this context, both of us are talking about real scientists - meaning people like Weinberg, Hawking, Susskind, Wilczek etc. and not Sarfatti, Woit, Hossenfelder, Smolin, and similar jokes who have almost nothing to do with the contemporary research in physics but who are extraordinarily capable to jam the Internet and the newspapers with garbage and to push the laymen's opinions exactly in the opposite direction than the direction indicated by the scientific research. Why is it becoming increasingly acceptable?

Well, simply because the alternative explanations keep on failing. As a person who finds the anthropic principle inconvenient, I would like to tell you something else but I won't do it because it wouldn't be true and I happen to prefer the truth over wishful thinking. The details of possible non-anthropic explanations simply don't seem to work so far.

It is pretty clear that if a truly viable - and correct ;-) - non-anthropic explanation of the tiny cosmological constant and other constants emerged, it would be abruptly accepted. The anthropic explanation seems far less attractive, far less accurate, and far less convincing which is why it cannot be accepted too quickly but that doesn't mean that its validity would cause the end of science. It doesn't mean that science would cease being scientific. It doesn't mean that this answer can't be the correct one.

As we are excluding non-anthropic scenarios by seeing that their details don't work, the likelihood that the unattractive anthropic explanation is correct is inevitably increasing whether someone likes it or not. It is increasing in the same way and for the same reason as the likelihood that the probabilistic approach to quantum mechanics was correct. That likelihood was also increasing when new problems with various "hidden variable theories" were being discovered.

The analogy between the probabilitistic interpretation of quantum mechanics and the multiverse could turn out to be very accurate - but it could also be wrong. We just don't know for sure. It is a matter of belief. If the analogy turns out to be correct, people in the future will emphasize that we should have known it from the beginning: in both cases, one can talk about "parallel universes" - something that shouldn't exist according to the widespread prejudices but something that is a possible interpretation of the newer and correct scientific answer.

Strategies to find the answers

Physicists should sensibly divide their capacity to different approaches that can turn out to be right. They should also rationally divide their energy between all the approaches to the vacuum selection problem on one side and other problems where progress is more likely on the other side. But the worst thing that could happen to science would be if some intellectually inferior zealots such as those who gather at Peter Woit's blog were intimidating scientists and if they were preventing them from reaching a certain kind of "inconvenient" results.

I am not sure whether the ultimate explanation of the Universe completely avoids the anthropic principle but I am certain about many other things, especially the fact that science has much greater chance if it is pursued by intelligent and hard-working people who don't have to be afraid of the reactions of the laymen. One should expect much worse results if we fill science with less gifted people and one may expect comparably bad results if the scientists are afraid to communicate the conclusions of their work because they could be attacked by Peter Woit or similar aggressive zealots.

And that's the memo.

Bonus: a list of incorrect "essentials of science"

Finally, I want to end up with a slightly more extensive list of seventeen wrong beliefs that were once considered to be essential components of any scientific explanation of the world. I am confident that this list instantly falsifies the naive viewpoint of many shallow thinkers, such as those at edge.org, who deny that science itself requires a sort of belief system that is often unprovable and that can turn out to be incorrect.

They deny that scientism is not the same thing as science and they deny that a person who uses the magic word "science" (or "falsifiability") in every other sentence may still be wrong (and easily "falsified"). Here is my list:

1. Isaac Newton believed that his impressive physical explanation of the world required everything to be composed of particles. In his opinion, they were necessary for a scientific description of the real world. This principle was applied to light - that had to be explained as a flow of particles - and even more seriously, to heat. Newton thought that the heat had to be carried by a special kind of material substance.
2. It was believed by Maxwell et al. in the 19th century that every wave requires, much like sound, a material substance to propagate; they believed that the existence of the aether was a crucial and inevitable component of any scientific or "materialistic" explanation of electromagnetic waves. Lorentz's and Einstein's liquidation of the luminiferous aether was one of the essential steps in the development of relativity.
3. Marxists were selling themselves as the champions of a "scientific" world view. Everyone knows that virtually all of their beliefs about the society were incorrect but that doesn't mean that their beliefs about natural sciences were always right. For example, Lenin believed that the electron was as inexhaustible as the atom: he thought that it had to be composed of many other particles that were also composites and this hierarchy continued indefinitely. We know that the substructure certainly stops at the Planck scale and probably earlier and Lenin's belief was in no way important for the essence of science.
4. It was believed by Lord Kelvin that a scientific description of the Sun implied that the Sun couldn't be older than 30 million years or so, because of an upper limit on the amount of energy that the Sun could have emitted. The severe lord viewed the alternative assertion of Charles Darwin, involving a much longer and much more accurate life expectancy, to be associated with an inferior scientific approach.
5. Lord Kelvin offers us a lot of examples like that. But instead, let us look at Auguste Comte who argued in 1835 that the chemical composition of the stars would remain outside the realm of natural sciences forever because it was impossible to travel there and take a sample. The hypothesis about the hydrogen over there was untestable and not even wrong. It only took seven years for spectroscopy to be discovered and Comte's prophecy to be shown profoundly incorrect.
6. It was once believed that a scientific description of reality requires us to think about the world as events that occur on the background of a Euclidean geometry. It was first realized by mathematicians that other geometries can be defined and analyzed. Later, it was understood by general relativity that a non-Euclidean geometry is actually essential to describe the gravitational force.
7. In mathematics, it was believed by many people that every assertion can either be proved or disproved. Kurt Gödel has demonstrated that every sufficiently powerful system of axioms allows one to construct a statement that can be neither proved nor disproved. Moreover, the consistency of such a system of axioms cannot be proven within the system. There have been many shocks in mathematics - for example when Bertrand Russell proved that the old set theory was inconsistent.
8. A century ago, physicists believed that the Universe had to exist from minus infinity to plus infinity. It couldn't have had a beginning because such a "Big Bang" would be resembling the creation according to many religious systems. It wasn't just a wrong belief but it had also led to some wrong research. For example, Einstein designed his model of a static Universe and introduced the cosmological constant for a wrong reason. The Big Bang remains deeply controversial among the Marxists. Contradictions between the Big Bang and Lenin's guesses about infinities play against the theory; on the other hand, Eric Lerner, an anti-Big-Bang theorist, argues that the Big Bang is bad according to Karl Popper. Because Popper is viewed as an anti-Marxist, this argument supports the commies' belief in the Big Bang. Amazing way of thinking, isn't it?
9. As I have already mentioned, it was believed that determinism was a key component of a physical description of the real world. Many well-known scientists were thus led to reject the postulates of quantum mechanics and/or construct theories of hidden variables that were later falsified.
10. Thirty years ago, it was believed that causality can never be violated, not even in the presence of black holes and not even infinitesimally. Such an assumption implies that the information is being lost during the evaporation of black holes. As we know today, the information is preserved and the reason why the old argument was incorrect is an exponentially small violation of causality and locality inside black holes, a kind of "tunelling of information".
11. It was believed by some people that only particles that can be observed in isolation exist in the scientific sense. Today, quarks are known to exist. They are also known to be confined and they can never be observed in isolation.
12. It was believed that the equations that describe the properties of elementary particles and forces had to have a unique solution. Now we know that there exist discretely many vacua of quantum gravity. Whatever are the rules that determine the correct vacuum, it is clear that the assumption that solutions must be unique has been turned into an irrational prejudice. This fact has also killed the original bootstrap program that assumed that consistency was sufficient to find the unique laws of quantum field theory.
13. It was believed that continents were so huge that they simply couldn't spontaneously move. The motion of such a huge object sounded ludicrous or perhaps religious: God could perhaps move them but the laws of mechanics couldn't. It took several decades before continental drift became acceptable. Anti-religious sentiments may partially be blamed for this slow process.
14. It was believed that non-white races had to be phased out for the human species to survive in a decent form: such a belief was argued to be an inevitable consequence of Darwin's scientific theory about the origin of species. Most of us no longer believe these things. But these beliefs were not confined to the Nazi Germany: they had many advocates in the U.S. and elsewhere, too.
15. On the other hand, people believed - and some people still believe in 2007 - that there can't be any innate differences between groups of people because such distinctions are artifacts of religious hierarchies and science respects symmetry and creates all people equal. Or you should look what their exact wording is: they certainly defend a patently false scientific assertion by the jargon of scientism.
16. The Soviet officials thought that conventional genetics was a burgeois pseudoscience. It was banned in the Soviet Union for quite some time. Instead, they were supporting "real progressive" scientific approaches such as Lysenkoism that led to food shortages in the Soviet Union and famines in China instead of substantial improvements in agriculture.
17. In the first decade of the 21st century, it was believed by many people that a radical reorganization of the functioning of the society was needed to save the Earth from a global warming apocalypse. This profoundly religious viewpoint was advocated as the most important insight of science and those who disagreed were labeled as unscientific.

Once again, if there were an ideal scientist who would know the right answers not only to these old questions but also all questions that will be answered in the future and who could therefore choose the correct assumptions and avoid wrong assumptions 100% of the time (these decisions must be constantly made when someone actually applies the "scientific method" in practice), he could define a sharp boundary between science and religion.

But because the only being capable to do these things is God, assuming that He exists, the boundary between faith and reason remains inevitably blurred. There are no ideal scientists in the real world. And someone's quasi-religious focus on some dogmas of scientism simply cannot prevent him from believing deeply incorrect things about the reality. The more often the anti-religious jargon of scientism is being used to defend wrong beliefs, the more similar "real religion" and "real science" become.

Mechanical work may be defined easily but creative work and real cutting-edge research always requires some intuition and an appropriate choice of beliefs about the extrapolation of the lessons from the past.

Microsoft.NET service pack 1: update failure

If you failed to install an update for your Microsoft Windows yesterday, getting the error "0x80070002" or "80070002", you should know the following facts.

Windows Vista mostly runs the 3.0 version of the .NET framework but the version 1.1 usually also exists because many older applications use it. Even the 1.1 version is fully compatible with Windows Vista. The service pack 1 for this .NET framework 1.1 has been around since 2004. The only new development is that Microsoft has confirmed that the patch is Vista-compatible and published it via its update systems.

If you try to follow some automatic hints, e.g. to erase the Windows Update temporary files and download the patch from the scratch, you will fail again. So avoid this step. Instead, download and install the 10.2 MB service pack 1 manually:

Microsoft.NET framework 1.1 Service Pack 1: direct download

Disable your antivirus software and choose the language of your operating system. Neither of these two steps is probably necessary but I did both. After you are finished, click Yes to restart your computer. As soon as your service pack 1 is installed, Windows Update will be able to figure it out and it will describe the installation of this patch as "success" after you try to reinstall the available updates. It will offer you appropriate small patches later, for example KB 929729, an additional update of .NET 1.1 SP1 itself, will occur within a day.

If you care, the installation failure is probably because you have already installed another older update to .NET 1.1, namely MS05-004, and these two updates fight against each other and the Windows Update system protects you against such possible clashes. However, the manual installation of the service pack safely rewrites the previous pre-service-pack updates anyway. Microsoft has probably forgotten about this subtlety.

Enrico Fermi: an anniversary

Enrico Fermi (9/29/1901 in Rome, Italy - 11/28/1954 because of stomach cancer) was most likely the second most important Italian physicist after Galileo Galilei (check this list).

When he was 17 and he was entering the college in Pisa, he wrote an essay about a Fourier-series analysis of solutions to the partial differential equation describing... waves on a string. The examiner interviewed Fermi and determined that the essay would have been good enough for a PhD in Pisa.

The young 25-year-old professor did his most important purely theoretical work in fundamental physics in 1926 when he wrote the paper about the Fermi-Dirac statistics. The rest of his research life was dedicated to radioactivity. In 1938, right after the war started, he was wittily given a Nobel prize for induced radioactivity. ;-) But he was just getting started.

Did everyone accept Fermi's statements from the very beginning? You may guess what the answer is with these great minds. When he submitted his famous paper on beta decay to Nature, the editor rejected it because "it contained speculations which were too remote from reality". This is what the lagging, inferior minds say about cutting-edge research in theoretical physics in most cases, even today. The paper using the new term "neutrino" that Fermi invented (but Pauli got the idea in 1931) was therefore published in German and Italian before it appeared in English.

As Wikipedia argues, he never forgot this experience of being ahead of his time. His protégés were therefore told "to never be first; to try to be second". James DNA Watson was preaching pretty much the same thing to his protégés.

Nature eventually published his report on beta decay in January 1939. Once he left Italy for Columbia University at the very same time, in order to save his Jewish wife, he reproduced some other people's fission experiments. Fermi moved to Chicago where he built the first nuclear pile, a primitive nuclear reactor that went critical in December 1942 in a "squash court"; Russians translated the location as "pumpkin field". :-) Every step was carefully and brilliantly planned.

This wisdom and experiments were also useful during the Manhattan project in which Fermi, who became a U.S. citizen in 1944, assisted. When you summarize his work on nuclear technology, you will see that Fermi was the most practically talented man among the great 20th century theoretical physicists and the impact of his work makes the comments about his work being detached from reality doubly ludicrous.

He had to think, write, and do a lot to realize all his achievements associated with nuclear physics. But if we measure the impact on public's perception of scientifically loaded questions per word, his most influential results are three words from the 1950s: "Where are they?" The Fermi "paradox" shows that it is rather unlikely for the Universe to be filled with too many very advanced civilizations.

I have talked to a student of Fermi. She admired him and she was certainly not the only one.

Most Germans are Celts

The Google News are now available in Czech:

Czech Google News

I am convinced that Google News are better than any individual source of news. And there are many special news in the Czech edition, too.



For example, we learn that Patrick Moore, a co-father of Greenpeace, met with President Klaus to support nuclear energy, industrial consumption of wood, genetically modified crops, chemical compounds protecting people against fires, industrial production of salmons, and our fight against the global warming religion.

This is how a true environmentalist should look like. The present generation should treat Patrick Moore as their role model. Incidentally, Patrick Moore was immensely influenced - and led to the green movement - by a Czech scientist and politician named Mr Vladimír Krajina (1905-1993) who emigrated to Canada in 1948. If you care, the word "Krajina" means "landscape". ;-)

Germans are mostly Celts

According to a DNA analysis of 19,457 people made by Igenea, Zurich-based genetics corporation, only 6 percent of German males have inherited Germanic genes from their fathers (including the Y chromosome). German women are way more Germanic: about 50 percent of the German people have inherited Germanic genes from their mothers. The inflow of non-Germanic male genes is explained by premature deaths of German men during wars when they had to be replaced by newcomers. ;-)

Equally importantly, 45 percent of Germans have Celtic roots while 10 percent of Germans have Jewish ancestors. I am afraid that if Nazi Germany had won the war, this research would have to be classified and its authors executed. :-)

This DNA chaos has affected other European nations, too. According to Genomac, a Czech company, only 50 percent of genes of the Czechs who live today are Slavic. About one quarter of the Czechs come from Romanic countries and 10 percent of us may boast Germanic or Scandinavian origin. Most likely, Celtic roots are also heavily represented even though Genomac surprisingly didn't include Celts as a basis vector at all.

Scafetta & West: Climate phenomenology

In this weekly dose of the peer-reviewed skeptical literature about the climate, we look into Journal of Geophysical Research:

N. Scafetta & B.J. West (click): Phenomenological reconstructions of the solar signature in the Northern Hemisphere surface temperature records since 1600

The use purely statistical tools applied to the correlation between the sun spot number and reconstructed temperatures to argue that most likely, the total solar irradiance had a low secular (=trend-like, non-periodic) variability but it was accompanied by a high preindustrial secular climate variability between 1610 and 2005.

The Sun is a major player

That means that small changes of the Sun can lead to significant changes of the climate. With the preferred magnitude of variability as given by Moberg et al. 2005, one of their conclusions is that that Sun is responsible for roughly 50% of the observed 20th century warming. Not too surprisingly, if they choose Mann 2003 instead of Moberg 2005, the calculated effect of the Sun becomes negligible.

One of the inevitable assumptions of their best reconstruction is that the relaxation time differs for different kinds of forcings and even though it is at most 12 years in all cases, it is somewhat longer for the solar forcing: whether these seemingly "universal" quantities such as the time constant may depend on the kind of the forcing is discussed below.

The previous Scafetta & West 2006 paper was linked to in the context of CERN's CLOUD experiment.

Amplifying solar output variations

Also, they treat galactic cosmic rays as well as some ultraviolet radiation related e.g. to the ozone layer as feedbacks that amplify the solar forcing. Note that the increasing number of sun spots has raised the total solar output by 1 W/m2 (according to Wang et al. 2005) or 3 W/m2 (according to Lean 2000) between the Maunder (sun-spot-free) minimum 1650-1700 and today when the output is slightly above 1366 W/m2. This bare change of the output is very small - it would lead to a rather small fraction of a degree of warming - but it may be amplified by the feedbacks above.

Links to other analyses:

Climate Audit
Real Climate

Steve McIntyre says that in a personal discussion, Nicola Scafetta argued that different forcings influence the climate differently - the response of the climate is non-universal - which is a subtlety not allowed in most existing models. Well, it is a somewhat awkward assumption but nevertheless, it is likely that if different forcings influence different regions of the atmosphere (different altitude and/or latitude) or if they act during different parts of the day or the year, they can lead to very different feedbacks. And different feedbacks of course can have different relaxation times (and lags). So a phenomenological analysis of such possible fudge factors could be helpful.

Can different effects be simply added?

Scafetta and West also argue that different effects - such as solar activity and the greenhouse effect - shouldn't be assumed to be independent because there can be strong "non-linear" interactions between then. They also process various papers in literature and decide that several of them - such as Hegerl et al. - are unphysical because they imply a negative, cooling effect of an increased solar variability.

Concerning the non-linearity, they offer a very entertaining but still potentially realistic example of a feedback: 200-year-long solar-induced droughts may have led to the collapse of Mayan civilization. This collapse led to refosteration, reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere, and thus cooling. ;-) You see that the solar and greenhouse forcings may contribute to each other. Well, such mixed, natural-anthropogenic events may occur but even if they do occur, the question here is whether such effects are strong enough and regular enough to be considered as parts of a useful and predictive model.

I completely agree with Larry that this kind of awkward conspiracy-like theories is often produced by the alarmists and they should be criticized both in the case of alarmist papers as well as skeptical papers which is what I do.

Phenomenology vs theory: climate edition

Even though I wrote that various non-linear and feedback-specific subtleties may exist, I tend to agree with the (somewhat chaotic) Rasmus Benestad's article claiming that these phenomenological reconstructions would become more trustworthy only when a more complete and realistic physical model becomes available. I would probably prefer an inaccurate model - that can be getting better - with some "linear" assumptions over non-quantitative clichés that everything is complex combined with ad hoc, unconvincing mechanisms such as those involving Mayan civilization. In science, it is often crucial to neglect certain effects but one must correctly choose the effects that can be neglected and the essential ones that can't.

On the other hand, I would agree that a statistical analysis such as Scafetta & West might in principle be enough to obtain strong circumstantial evidence that simple models where the effect of feedbacks is universal and where feedbacks are essentially independent - and where the Sun is more or less ignored - are unacceptable: data are sometimes good for falsification of oversimplified models; life is tough. ;-)

Incidentally, Real Climate didn't offer their readers the text of the actual article that they criticized: they only criticized it. These methods remind me of the communist propaganda.

Ada Lovelace died 155 years ago

Augusta Ada King née Byron, Countess of Lovelace, died of medicinal bloodletting associated with uterine cancer on November 27th, 1852, at the age of 37. She is considered to be the first programmer in the world.

Her father, the poet Lord Byron, called her "the princess of parallelograms", Charles Babbage called her "the enchantress of numbers", and she was one of the most mathematically gifted women of the history. She wrote the first computer program for the "Analytical Engine", a mechanical computer designed by Charles Babbage that was never built. The program was computing the coefficients of the expansion of the closed string vacuum in string field theory in the Schnabl gauge, the so-called Bernoulli numbers.

Some science historians argue that the program was written by Babbage himself and Ada hasn't really mastered some basic maths but the story in which her contributions were original sounds more sexy. Moreover, I find many champions of this viewpoint untrustworthy. On the other hand, it is also plausible that people like Ada Lovelace contributed to Babbage's design of the computer itself.

As you can see, she wasn't a real string theorist but her first program calculated coefficients whose most natural application is in string theory. But Ada Lovelace should not be confused with Claude Lovelace, the first person who has calculated the critical dimension in string theory.

Her name "Ada" was used for a programming language created by Pentagon. As a kid, I used to read that the language was very sophisticated but when I saw how it actually looked like, I changed my mind. Microsoft has used her image on its authenticity hologram stickers.

Alexei Zamolodchikov died

... see Asymptotia.

Andrew Revkin asks James Hansen about holocaust

On his blog, Andrew Revkin from the New York Times discussed Hansen's description of coal-burning power plants as extermination camps.



Figure 1: Is global warming the new holocaust?

He reviews the very same formulations as we did. At the end of his text, Revkin reveals five questions that he has sent to Hansen:

1. Do you care whether holocaust survivors are offended?
2. Have you received complaints/support from any?
3. Is such a metaphor necessary to change the people?
4. Is it true that such analogies polarize and paralyze any discussion?
5. Who is the actual victim of your holocaust?

It might be interesting - and probably shocking - to see Hansen's answers to Revkin's questions. I would expect something like that:

1. They have no reason to be offended because Hitler was just a 150-pound gorilla while global warming is a 800-pound gorilla. So they should better shut up.
2. I have received support from a nephew of a survivor. Concerning complaints, if those court jesters feel uncomfortable, maybe they should.
3. Such a metaphor is not the only thing to change the people. I have already prepared much more accurate metaphors, more gruesome than all the previous ones.
4. The only people who can have any problems with my metaphors are the deniers and these deniers should be convicted at Nuremberg-like trials anyway.
5. The real victim of the holocaust is life on Earth and the rest of galaxy and the principles of socialism that the founding fathers fought for. Be afraid, be very afraid.

A poll: Among 15 issues, global warming is the least important issue for the U.S. Democratic voters. About 0.5 percent consider global warming to be the most important issue - roughly the same percentage as the issue of subsidies for beverages for the extraterrestrial aliens.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

Lucie Vondráčková: Strach

I feel that Slovak music remains overrepresented on this blog so let me offer a purely Czech song this time.



Ms Lucie Vondráčková (1980) is the niece of Mrs Helena Vondráčková, a top-tier Czechoslovak and Czech pop-music musician. Lucie's song "Strach" (Fear) remains at the top of many hitparades for much of this year (again).

This post with English lyrics

Fantastic journey: scales in Powerpoint

Has anyone seen the English version of this presentation?

Fantastic journey

The presentation includes typical pictures of various length scales from clusters of galaxies down to the size of quarks, including a Czech description.

Hansen: power plants = extermination camps

Source of correspondence (PDF)

In his recent testimony to the Iowa Utilities Board, Rev. James Hansen argued that the construction of a new coal-based power plant is equivalent to the holocaust. The trains that bring coal to the new power plant are nothing else than the death trains that were moving the Jews to extermination camps:

... If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species ...

Kraig Naasz, the president and CEO of the U.S. National Mining Association, suggested that this comparison was both repellant and preposterous. It trivializes the suffering of millions of people while it irrationally evaluates the actual reasons behind various climate phenomena: one additional power plant in the U.S. surely can be no "tipping point" especially when China builds a new plant every week.



Figure 1: Kraig Naasz is the second man from the right. How many chestnut trees (and power plants) has Mr Hansen planted? ;-)

Naasz recommended Hansen to apologize to the hard-working men and women in the coal mining and railroad industries. What did Mr Hansen do? You may guess.

Hansen sent Naasz a letter advocating additional delusions about an unprecedented motion towards a climate catastrophe. He has also confused the U.S. founding fathers with Lenin and Stalin when he mentioned that the U.S. founding fathers created America for [a couple of communist clichés]. And what about the very paragraph comparing power plants with the Nazi extermination camps?

Well, Mr Hansen simply repeated it and wrote that there was nothing scientifically invalid about the paragraph. If the paragraph makes Mr Naasz uncomfortable, maybe it should. ;-) Mr Hansen should be treated as a mentally ill person, the healthy people should be protected from him, and I assure you that there is nothing scientifically invalid about this sentence of mine. If it makes Mr Hansen or other lunatics feel uncomfortable, maybe it should.

And that's the memo.

Sheldon Glashow: five minutes of video

You may watch four one-minute clips with Sheldon Glashow so that this co-father of the electroweak theory doesn't feel discriminated against: ;-)

1. The unification of the large and the small
2. The origin of the Universe
3. The four forces of Nature
4. Early work on unified theory

Alternative place to find the videos: Honeywellscience.

On December 5th, 24:00 EST, right after Glashow's 75th birthday, there will be 90-minute-long videopodcast at

http://www.honeywellscience.com/

In the four videos above, you will probably not learn too much but there is a story in the last part. Julian Schwinger told Glashow, one of ten annoying students who wanted projects, to go and construct a unified electroweak theory. At the end, Glashow needed a help from his high-school buddy.


powered by ODEO

Audio 1: Glashow describes the LHC as a possible end of particle physics. ;-) But he hopes for the best possible outcome: absolute confusion.

Amazon Kindle: an electronic book

People have been talking about electronic replacements for books for quite some time. But Amazon may be the first company to offer a viable realization of the idea: Amazon Kindle. It can't read PDF files and your right to read the e-books probably expire in a few years - and consumers give it 2.5 stars only - but a zeroth approximation for USD 400 is here. Click the picture to get to amazon.com.

Sorry, the "electronic paper" screen is black-and-white.

Telegraph: Cosmologists are killing the Universe

Steve Heston has posted a comment telling us that

The Telegraph

argues that "mankind is shortening the universe's life" by observing the cosmological constant, bringing us closer to the doom. As soon as I saw his message, I would have accepted a 10:1 bet that the author had to be Roger Highfield because it is very unlikely that there exist two or more breathtakingly unreasonable people of this magnitude in the Telegraph. Of course, I would have won the bet.

Roger Highfield has already "informed" his readers that Einstein may have started the rot (the word "rot" means modern theoretical physics) and that Garrett Lisi has found a theory of everything.



The names of the two sensation-thirsty alternative "physicists" who wrote this complete absurdity into their preprint are

Lawrence Krauss, James Dent.

These "scientists" offer far too many basic misunderstandings of cosmology and quantum mechanics to discuss all of them. For example, without a glimpse of a rational reason and in contradiction with all existing theories and scenarios, anthropic or otherwise, they proclaim the typical lifetime of our Universe to be comparable to the Hubble time.

More seriously, they argue that by observing the cosmological constant, we have "reset the cosmic clock" which means that the Universe can no longer have a bright future. Their "reasoning" is wrong at every level you can imagine. This religious idea is based on a complete and rudimentary misunderstanding of the measurement theory in particular and the interpretation of quantum mechanics in general.

The fictitious event of "resetting the clock" or "collapse of the wave function" or anything like that is certainly not associated with our decision to interpret some macroscopic observations as a vacuum energy: it is an inseparable consequence of the interactions of macroscopic systems with their environment.

The expansion of this Universe has been accelerating for billions of years before there were any humans around. Even though it was rather hard for us to measure this acceleration, this acceleration has influenced billions of processes in the Universe and was imprinted into detailed properties and trillions of degrees of freedom of many macroscopic systems in the Cosmos. Whether a conscious or intelligent being is ready to interpret some observations in one way or another has no impact whatsoever on the correctly calculated probabilities of different outcomes in the future.

I wonder whether experimental cosmologists start to be executed as a threat for life in this Universe. Will the U.N. boss Ban Ki-moonbat propose this step to save our Universe? As Steve correctly says, this alarm looks much worse than global warming! You can see where the tolerance towards crackpots leads. Because writers such as Mr Highfield haven't faced the appropriate consequences, he - and others - will be writing increasingly more outrageous BS into his newspaper and other sources.

And that's the memo.

Now, when you have finished reading this article, please use a quantum eraser to undo the decoherence so that you don't contribute to the decay of our Universe! ;-)

Leave string theory alone

Before you watch the video below, you should know Chris Crocker's famous, 13-million-visit defense of Britney Spears against the journalistic hyenes. Well, doesn't string theory need its own Chris Crocker? Yes, it does. Here it is:



But scooter, you should have been a bit more passionate! ;-) But at least, I am happy that you will now deal with all those Woits and all this crap. What a relief.

Radiation is not too deadly

Spiegel

talks about scientific teams, especially experts from GSF, that have analyzed several events that led to increased levels of radiation,

1. Hiroshima in 1945
2. Radioactive rivers and explosions in the Soviet Union preparing their nuclear bomb after 1949
3. Chernobyl 1986

In all cases, it is found that the actual effects of "radiation illness", including birth defects and delayed deaths, were several orders of magnitude below the description available in the media. For example, almost all people who died as a consequence of the Little Boy did so either instantly or within a few hours, because of burned skin. Casualties who died after a long time because of radiation illnesses were very rare.

Similar conclusions hold for the contaminated river and the 1957 Chelyabinsk explosion of a tank with 80 tons of nuclear waste produced by the Soviet Union as well as for the Chernobyl tragedy. There doesn't seem to be any reliable source that would really prove an elevated frequency of birth effects and similar complications. Among 6,293 men who worked in the chemical plant preparing the radioactive material for the Soviet bomb (without masks!), only 100 died of lung cancer related to radiation. Greenpeace's proclamations that 50% of adults in those regions are infertile seem to be pure silliness.

It may be fair to say that whole generations have been living in the state of superstition concerning the health risks associated with radiation.

Hat tip: Benny Peiser

Geoengineering: a discussion

I am kind of interested what various readers think about geoengineering. Some of the questions are:

1. If you had the tools to achieve anything you want, what would be your optimal temperature and the concentration of basic compounds such as CO2? Is it higher or lower than the present values? Why do you think it is optimal?
2. How would you estimate the economic value of such an improvement? Describe your method and the result.
3. Would you find it OK to significantly change the composition of the ocean, e.g. by adding a lot of iron?
4. Would you find it OK to significantly change the composition of the atmosphere by sulphur oxides or particulate matter?
5. In the context of cloud-seeding, if you could pre-program when it is cloudy, what would be your schedule? You don't have to think about cooling the planet only - but about your general comfort.
6. If these global changes could be made much more rapidly than the changes that occur nowadays, or if someone installed some mirrors in space that could increase or decrease the amount of solar radiation, how would you regulate what is going on? What role would you assign to democracy or markets?

Joel Shapiro on the birth of string theory

Joel Shapiro, a very interesting early worker on string theory whom I know well from Rutgers (also as an excellent teacher, by the way), remembers the early days of string theory and it's a lot of fun.



At that time, the four interactions were really separated, both physiologically as well as sociologically. Shapiro was interested in "unified field theory" but his advisor never told him to study general relativity. ;-)

Instead, Shapiro started as a hadron phenomenologist. He improved the old Veneziano amplitude a bit and started to draw diagrams. Sy Pasternack insisted that "pomeronchukon" should be used instead of "pomeron" in his Physical Review. Pasternack should have cared about fixing his own silly name instead of screwing others. ;-)

Shapiro says that he still feels a certain kind of grumpiness :-) about a paper he wrote that was more cumbersome than another, more recent paper that became more famous - but truth to be told, I've never read either of these two original papers.

They quickly realized that there were harmonic oscillators in a string and amplitudes could be written as integrals over the position of the fourth vertex. At any rate, Shapiro may be largely credited for the discovery of closed strings and modular invariance, among other things. In the early 1970s, Shapiro wasted too much time with math learning of renormalization that could have been completely avoided if he realized that the sum of integers equals -1/12.

In the mid 1970s, social pressures forced him to leave string theory for other, less important endeavors. In the conclusions, Shapiro mentions that during the zeroth string revolution 1968-1974, Europe was more receptive than America. But there were already "forefathers" of the current critics who complained that string theory "abducts children just like the Pied Piper of Hamelin." He also recalls an encounter with a stupid female journalist in the 1970s who asked preprepared questions assuming that similar work must be justified by concrete experimental data. There are quite a few of such people today.

See similar memoirs by Pierre Ramond and John Schwarz.

Arthur Eddington died 63 years ago

Arthur Stanley Eddington died on November 22nd, 1944. He was the most famous astrophysicist of the early 20th century and an interesting and sensible character who became a crackpot in the 1930s.

The Eddington limit, i.e. the maximum luminosity that can be obtained by accretion, is named after him.

Eddington and general relativity

Eddington was once asked by a journalist whether it was true that only three people understood general relativity. Of course, Eddington realized that such a statement was just another manifestation of journalistic stupidity but he answered with his famous question: "And who is the third?" :-)

Eddington, one of the most important early promoters of general relativity, made Einstein famous in 1919. His expedition confirmed Einstein's prediction that the light bending has to be twice as strong as Newton would have expected if he had assumed that light was a stream of massive particles moving at the light speed and influenced by Newton's gravitational force.

It seems rather likely today that Eddington's confirmation was a case of scientific misconduct. His accuracy couldn't have been good enough to make a decision. Nevertheless, the media were already powerful back in 1919. The London Times announced a "revolution in physics" on their title page. Masses started to adopt general relativity. Fortunately, general relativity was correct. But Einstein's remarkable intuition about classical physics was a more solid sociological explanation why it was correct than the journalists' belief in Eddington's statements.

Eddington's observation was overhyped

I find this phase transition irrational. Every good theoretical physicist who was interested in gravity and special relativity had to know back in 1915-1916 that general relativity was almost certainly the right theory of gravity because it was the only plausible theory of gravity at its level of complexity that agreed with special relativity as well as the equivalence principle. Moreover, it correctly postdicted the precession of Mercury's perihelion.

On the other hand, even if Eddington's measurement were correct, it wouldn't have been a terribly accurate and complete new proof of Einstein's theory of gravity. Those who didn't want to rely on theoretical arguments couldn't have been satisfied either. Eddington's experiment was just an inaccurate measurement of one ratio whose value should be two. Precision tests of general relativity only started with the Pound-Rebka experiment in 1959, four years after Einstein's death.

Today, the effects of general relativity are important for GPS and a few other satellites but the experimental impact of this beautiful and essential theory remains limited.

Eddington as a crackpot

For pedagogical purposes, I want to end up with a discussion of Eddington's research in the 1930s. David Gross describes his numerological talk from 1938 on page 7 of his paper dedicated to Oskar Klein. If you read the text below, you might agree that Eddington could instantly shake his hand with Quantoken, Nigel Cook, and their intellectual peers.

Eddington started with the key assumption that the fine structure constant was exactly 1/136. Today, we know it is 1/137.036... so he only had a 1 percent error. In fact, Eddington himself knew that it was close to 1/137. See this paper published on the New Year 1929. He explains that even though the measured value was 1/137.1, the right number - by quantum mechanics and relativity - should be equal to 1/136 because 136 is the number of elements of a symmetric 16 x 16 matrix. ;-) In his 1930 paper, he briefly corrected his prediction from 1/136 to 1/137. ;-)

But that was just the beginning. In 1931, he applied the "cosmical constant" on protons. And in 1934 a 136-based quadratic equation for all elementary particles (rederived in 1940) followed. Later he used that number to deduce everything else about the Universe. The number of particles in the Universe was inevitably "2 x 136 x 2^{256}" while the radius of the Universe was 1.23410 x 10^{25} meters.

Because Eddington was very popular with the media (see e.g. page 46 i.e. 6/22 here), something like Carl Sagan, he just assumed that the audience believed this crap. Just to be sure: it is very clear that there exists absolutely no rational or scientific reason why the fine structure constant or the number of particles or the radius of the Universe should be "simple numbers" and the latter two concepts can't even be properly defined, especially because they are time-dependent and depend on the definition of "now".

To make the things worse, the 1938 talk wasn't called "Intriguing numerological speculations" or anything like that. Instead, it was called "The cosmological applications of the theory of quanta." Wow! He was just like a person paid as a physicist who draws 30 different and random octopi and calls his painting "Quantum gravity and the standard model." ;-)

After Eddington's talk, his approach to all parts of physics including quantum mechanics and relativity was criticized by Bohr, Fowler, Gamow, Kramers, von Neumann, Rosenfeld, and Wigner. Kramers' criticism was the longest one and he was awarded a medal by Gamow, on behalf of all the young participants, for his service to the community. The medal reads "For the masterpiece of polite scolding."

Meanwhile, if you want to be really entertained, Eddington's science was revived by a scientist in Saudi Arabia. M.S. El Naschie wrote "On D. Gross’ criticism of S. Eddington and an exact calculation of alpha=1/137" in 2007. It is so much fun that I copy the full abstract here:

While Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington attempts to derive alpha=1/137 mathematically may be considered to be a stretch, as correctly noted by Nobel laureate David Gross, in the meantime such a theoretical derivation is possible and feasible. In the present work, we show that the inverse electromagnetic fine structure constant may be derived in various ways using a combination of the Green, Shwarz, Witten and Gross string theory and the ‘t Hooft-Susskind and Maldacena holographic principles.

Besides the 136 science, you must also learn about "Shwarz" [sic], "Gross string theory", whatever it exactly is, and double the number of holographic principles. But once you do it, you may derive Eddington's numerology from string theory. Some people are simply loons and Elsevier Ltd happily prints them in peer-reviewed journals.

If you summarize Eddington's contributions, it might be fair to say that he gave physics exactly as many good gifts as bad gifts. After all, this is the average score for the people who are popular with the media.

And that's the memo.

France: horses may replace buses and trucks

Reuters informs that French towns will be replacing vehicles, starting with school buses and refuse trucks, by horses. Seventy towns are ready to realize the plans of the Regional Horse Promotion Commission and thirty more will follow in a year.

In his 2003 speech at Caltech, Aliens Cause Global Warming, Michael Crichton was thinking what kind of a catastrophic problem the environmentalists in 1900 would predict for the year 2000. His best answer was exponentially increasing horse manure from their natural vehicles of choice.

As many science-fiction authors, Michael Crichton was right but he was 107 years ahead of his time. In reality, the tons of horse manure per squared meter are now predicted for 2107 rather than 2000. And Paris, not New York, will be the first city to experience this development.

The obsolete 20th century vehicles such as buses, trucks, and perhaps cars (for example Renaults that were never too good anyway) will be replaced by modern vehicles that emit not only CO2 but also CH4. The smoothly, exponentially increasing volume of excrements on the streets is referred to as "sustainable development" by Reuters. ;-)



Horses are beautiful animals but five million horses in Paris could be too much of a good thing. I have no doubts that there are places where horses would be more pleasant friends to do certain tasks. On the other hand, doubling or tripling the time that children need to get to school or from school could cause certain problems.

Also, I am not sure whether they correctly evaluate the strength of these cute animals. For example, the power of the vehicle (ML63 AMG) pictured above is described as "500 horsepowers". I wonder whether the French guys know what it means and why this funny name of the unit was chosen in the first place. If you don't know, a horse may peak near 15 horsepowers for a few seconds but for longer periods, an average horse produces less than 1 horsepower.

Möbius transformations

This video is not quite a theory of everything but - as its creators forgot to tell you - it is about the tree level approximation of a theory of everything. The Möbius transformations are conformal i.e. angle-preserving, one-to-one maps from a sphere onto a sphere (or from a complex plane onto itself, or from anything of the same topology such as the Stanford bunny) which is why they are essential in perturbative string theory to bring a sphere diagram into a standard form.

Incidentally, the sphere is conformally equivalent to the plane because of Riemann's stereographic projection.

I didn't want to have too many birthday postings at the same moment but August Ferdinand Möbius was born on November 17th, 1790. This early 19th century string theorist is famous for his work on projective geometry, number theory, theoretical foundations of astronomy, and - of course - the Möbius strip, the characteristic one-loop Feynman diagram that only appears in vacua that contain both open and unoriented strings.



Benoît Mandelbrot celebrated his 83th birthday yesterday: congratulations.

See fast comments for links to high-resolution videos.

Sidney Coleman: 1937-2007

Very sadly, Sidney Coleman died on Sunday morning. In sleep. Apparently peacefully. Arthur Jaffe's e-mail is here and there is an obituary in Chicago Tribune and Harvard Gazette.

In 2005, Arthur Jaffe and Barbara Drauschke organized Sidneyfest (official WWW) to celebrate Sidney's life achievements, his sense of humor, and his friendship.

Sidney was a physicist's physicist. He has been an excellent teacher, simplifier, expositor. His lectures at Harvard on quantum field theory were legendary and his notes were used by many of his successors including your humble correspondent for years. See the TeX edition of these notes and an earlier proposed Sidney Coleman Open Source Project. Many physicists have his Aspects of Symmetry with selected Erice lectures on their bookshelves.



With Abdus Salam, 1991 (taken from a today's article about crackpot Lisi)

But of course he has found some precious results, too. The Coleman-Mandula theorem showed that many superficially plausible ways to unify physics in the 1960s were guaranteed to be on the wrong track. Some people haven't understood the power of the theorem to day.

Related: ScienceNews celebrates Juan Maldacena: a decent article

The Coleman theorem proves that one cannot spontaneously break continuous symmetries in two dimensions or below. The Coleman-Weinberg potential pioneered loop corrections to the vacuum energy that can also induce new phase transitions. Coleman also found that the Thirring model was equivalent to the sine-Gordon model. He is the main physicist behind our understanding of the fate of false, unstable vacua. Add tadpoles (i.e. spermions), thin-wall Q-balls, many other papers about symmetry breaking, confinement, black holes, wormholes, parameterizing Lorentz symmetry breaking with Glashow... it's a lot of stuff.

I took the picture (960 x 1280) that is used at Wikipedia and all of its mirrors but that was one of a very small number of opportunities to meet him. Coleman will be missed...

My deep sympathies to Diana and his friends. Finally, I guess that Sidney wouldn't endorse overly depressed reactions, so here is a quote by Sidney describing his role in the physics community (hat tip: Betsy):

If I have seen further than others, it is because I was standing in between the shoulders of dwarves.

See also: Betsy Devine eén Wilczek, Sean Carroll

Matory's disgraceful demagogy

The Harvard Crimson rightfully criticizes Lorand Matory's attempts to discredit friends of Israel as "enemies of free speech".

I find comments about free speech from a person such as Mr. Matory absolutely incredible. In 2005, Mr. Matory was the author of a truly disgusting "lack of confidence vote" against President Summers that was primarily justified by Lawrence Summers's polite and cautious remarks about the basic relationships between gender and innate aptitudes.

This guy, Mr. Matory, clearly thinks that free speech is something so intolerable that even the brilliant president of the world's most famous university must be eliminated when he dares to speak - or even ask - about things that every sane person knows anyway.

I have had huge personal problems with the voodoo expert myself. In 2005, after I criticized his resolution, he has harrassed all officials in the hierarchy above me behind the scenes and forced them to create problems for me. If you realize that all Harvard officials with a possible exception of Summers were (and are) cowards, you may guess what the result was.

Today, Mr. Matory, a fanatical anti-Semitic bigot, a freedom-hater, and the closest thing to Adolf Hitler that Harvard can offer, wants the FAS to "reaffirm its commitment to free speech and tolerance of minority views" which really means to "transform Harvard into loud headquarters of the world's anti-Israel movement".

Thankfully, the FAS has at least tabled the resolution. But until mechanisms will work not to allow crap like Mr. Matory to penetrate into influential places, similar ideological contamination of the Academia and the society and immoral ploys are guaranteed to continue.

And that's the memo.

Craig Loehle: Medieval Warm Period is back

There have been many peer-reviewed or at least published skeptical climatological studies but I didn't have enough time to give you a report. In this weekly dose, C. Loehle in Energy and Environment, vol. 18, No. 7+8, 2007, takes the average of 18 stations: click at "Download file" on that page to receive a PDF file. Also, feel free to download the CSV file for Excel.



Figure 1: Temperatures in the last two millenia.

Craig Loehle has eliminated tree ring series from his datasets, explaining that they don't seem to be good temperature proxies. The result is a new kind of a hockey stick, the so-called zig-zag hockey stick. ;-) The new blade in the middle of the stick is called the Medieval Warm Period.

For an audit of Loehle's paper, see McIntyre I, McIntyre II.

See also: Loehle vs Schmidt, Loehle vs tree ring reconstructions

Winds

Also, in a soon-to-be-published article in Climate Dynamics, Matulla et al. show that storminess - high winds - hasn't changed in Europe during the 20th century. See World Climate Report for details.



Figure 2: P95 of geostrophic wind strength. For example, the heavy curve that goes back (much more than) 130 years is from Prague-Klementinum and two German-speaking stations.

Amazon: Zune beats iPod

I was almost certain that the moment would eventually arrive. It's here.

The brown Zune 30 GB is #1 bestseller in electronics at amazon.com, ahead of all iPods. It is not so shocking because this particular color only costs USD 134, much less than the price of much weaker iPods. I am simply amazed how they can produce it for this ridiculously low amount of money.



Other colors besides brown are more expensive. And the 2nd generation Zune (above) costs USD 250, with 80 GB of disk space.

BBC HARDtalk with Václav Klaus

Part I
Part II
Home page of the program
Real Video

You can guess whether the BBC journalist and the Czech president agreed about every word or not. ;-)

I find the approach of the journalist somewhat incredible. It's the same kind of guys who like to say that George Bush is unprecedentedly stupid. But he finds it sensible to take the opinions of the same George Bush and other similar people and accuse Prof Václav Klaus of "plain arrogance" just because he doesn't agree with those fashionable talking points by all these lesser minds. It is apparently not "plain arrogance" to treat a European president in this way.

Their behavior is just an amazing combination of stupidity, intimidation, and hypocrisy.

After the second part of the video, Klaus answers that he has grandchildren. They won't know about the global warming debate in 30 years because it will be forgotten. But if they find something about it, they will just say that their granddad was right.

Finally, Stephen Sackur asks a few questions about the European constitution and the radar.

Klaus vs Smolin: a comparison

If you happened to think that HARDtalk is always equally hard, have a look at the interview with a far-left critic of physics, Lee Smolin: Real Video, HTML. I can't watch the whole interview because 90 percent of his statements are lies so that it drives me up the wall. But one observation is clear.

The approach of the journalist is very different. Suddenly, Sackur doesn't seem to think that it is "plain arrogance" to suggest that the top 2,500 high-energy theorists might be wrong and a criticism of a crank could be right. Especially when you take into account that string theorists' IQ exceeds climatologists' IQ by more than 20 points (and even all of physics is 7 points above Earth sciences in average), it is hard not to ask: where does the different attitude come from? Why is it that in the field controlled by lousy scientists, it is always the majority who must be right and any disagreement is "plain arrogance", while in fields dominated by the smartest people on Earth, it is the "audacious" minority cranks who must be supported by the journalists?

Well, as long as it is the far-left loons who are fighting against the basic values, principles, "establishment", and achievements of the Western civilization and science - such as crackpots of the Lee Smolin type - they deserve the support. Once this politicizing crap takes over - for example in the case of the left-wing climate "scientists" - heretics must be liquidated. This is how the left-wing movement thinks and this is why it is comparably dangerous as Al Qaeda if not more so.

Type IIA vacua claimed to be cosmologically excluded

Take Barton Zwiebach's textbook on string theory and read his story about the type IIA braneworld scenarios with intersecting D6-branes. They surely look beautiful as a possible source of the Standard Model but are they correct?

Hertzberg, Kachru, Taylor, Tegmark

claim that they can rule out all types of type IIA models that have been constructed in literature, by their violation of cosmological requirements.

The slow-roll parameter epsilon that should be small is shown to be greater than 27/13 whenever the potential V is positive. You may view this inequality as a quantitative example of our generalized "weak gravity" principle. Slow-roll inflation and de Sitter vacua therefore become impossible. Their theorem makes some assumptions - such as the absence of NS5-branes. They sketch a possible class of models with extra features that could circumvent their no-go theorem. Well, with the right ingredients to obtain mirrors of the type IIB vacua claimed to be alive and well, it should be possible. ;-)

Sociologically speaking, you may want to know that these authors have been saying that type IIB vacua - the canonical KKLT-like and KKLLMT-like landscape - are the phenomenologically more acceptable ones for quite some time.

Niels Bohr died 45 years ago

Niels Bohr died on November 18th, 1962. Like most great 20th century theoretical physicists, this Danish physicist was a Jew.

While Bohr received his Nobel prize in 1922 for his old model of the Hydrogen atom - with ad hoc discretized Kepler orbits for electrons - that was superseded a few years after he was awarded the prize, it might be true that Bohr's role as a spiritual leader of the quantum community was more important.

Bohr is the father of the complementarity principle in quantum mechanics - something that only differs from the uncertainty principle by a different handwaving. And he became the ultimate lawmaker who codified the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. As a boss, it was both his responsibility as well as pleasure to debate leading misguided contrarians, particularly Albert Einstein. He had to invent a lot of wise quotes, too.

Werner Heisenberg was his pupil. Their intellectual relationships were very intense and were only destroyed once the two great minds appeared in two different competing teams that were trying to create a nuclear weapon. Bohr was on the good side that eventually became the winning one, too.

Velvet Revolution: 18th anniversary

Video 1: Music and lyrics by Brontosaurs, a Czech folk and tramping band: one of the informal anthems of the pro-democratic demonstrations in 1989. The clip includes not-quite-English subtitles. ;-)

I was just watching a documentary about the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and there were many well-known things in it as well as some new ones.

The dissidents were remembering how hopeless the situation seemed even at the end of 1989 when communism in East Germany started to collapse. However, Czechs didn't seem to care. There was no visible momentum. There seemed to be no plausible mechanism that would lead to the end of the totalitarian system. I have had the same feeling at that time.

Suddenly, the communist suppression of the student demonstration was a gift from the heavens, as a dissident called it. The analogy with the Nazi suppression of Czech students that occurred exactly 50 years earlier, on 11/17/1939, was far too manifest. A sort of phase transition took place. People suddenly threw their fear away and the anti-communist movement started to grow rapidly.

The program was showing some speeches that the prominent velvet revolutionaries made at the end of 1989. For example, for the first time, I saw some comments by Kňažko, a Slovak actor, that he made on the Slovak TV back in 1989, and I was really impressed. On the other hand, Alexander Dubček, the communist leader during the Prague Spring, was a fair guy and a symbol of Czechoslovak sovereignity but I was surprised how deeply he believed in some sort of human communism based on the working class etc. When Dubček was told that he wouldn't become the president, he began to cry. The key Slovak dissident didn't say a nice word about him in the program.

Also, Ladislav Adamec was a tolerable communist but he was clearly a communist anyway. On the other hand, Marián Čalfa, the Czechoslovak prime minister after Adamec, seemed as a completely modern pragmatic politician even though he grew up as the very same career communist politician as others (which was not great symbolically but he was just very talented and did a good job over there).

Finally, Václav Havel was elected the president. The former finance minister Václav Klaus remembered that it was the only plausible choice at that time, as opposed to Alexander Dubček or Valtr Komárek, a guy from the Prognostic Institute that became kind of popular. The question I have never tried to answer in detail was the following: How was it possible that the communist Parliament unanimously elected Havel as the president of Czechoslovakia even though the very same people agreed to put Havel in the prison just a few months earlier. ;-)

The answer was explained by some former activists of the Civic Forum. There has been a peaceful but brutal, non-democratic pressure by the Civic Forum against all those individual communist deputies, forcing them to vote for Havel. It had to resemble the pressure by the global warming movement and others ;-) but yes, indeed, I think that the outcome was a good one. It's good that such events - whose details have been hidden from me - were no longer happening after the first democratic elections in June 1990.

At any rate, the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990 was a fascinating era of big changes and big hopes. The path to democracy, freedom, and capitalism was open. I remember we would be discussing how much time Czechoslovakia would need to catch up with the West economically and otherwise. And of course, we would say that it could take a long time, 15 or 20 years. These estimates were essentially exact. For example, look at the GDP. Today, the Czech GDP per capita (PPP) exceeds that of Portugal and is very close to Greece. It is more than 2/3 of France or Italy.

Of course that the natural state of affairs is that the Czech Republic is richer than Italy and similar countries. But 18 years ago, this looked like a dream. Today, it is a realistic result of a 5-year extrapolation into the future. One shouldn't be an alarmist. If communism or a similar tragedy plagues your country for 45 years, it partially screws the lives of two or three generations but it is not a permanent catastrophe for the nation. Within 20 years, most of the negative consequences of that regime can be undone.

And that's the memo.

See also:

15th anniversary,
16th anniversary,
17th anniversary.

Kentucky, climate, and intimidation

If you want to see how intimidation by the climate change movement looks like, look at this story. There are hundreds of such stories every day but we have to pick an example. A Kentucky legislative committee had a hearing dedicated to climate change on Wednesday:

The Courier Journal

Jim Booch (DEM) was a co-chair of the committee and one of the guests, Lord Monckton, said a few very decent things - about Al Gore and others - that were however not great enough for the champions of the climate change catastrophe.

Jim Booch himself said that he had supported "their vice-president" nevertheless. He is also a "tree lover although not necessarily tree hugger" and wins most of the political battles for Democrats. Nevertheless, by having been a co-chair of an ideologically imperfect hearing, he has become a heretic anyway.

Two days later,

Lexington Herald Leader

ran a story asking whether Jim Booch should resign. To help the case, the journalist mentioned that USD 11,750 of donations during Booch's career could be linked to coal. Now, that's a lot of money, indeed - about 0.01% of what Al Gore has earned with his fraudulent theater and derived activities. Now, 0.01% doesn't seem as too much but when we talk about a heretic, the rules of mathematics change...

The talk about a resignation is of course absurd but you know that the power of the media is very large. Tens of thousands of people have surely begun to debate a fabricated question of his possible resignation. And when something is debated, it is gradually becoming a "reality" anyway.

The champions of the fight against climate change have high ideological standards, indeed. People must be 100% clean. A famous German political party in the 1930s allowed their new leader to be 1/4-Jewish. I am not sure whether this degree of tolerance could be found in the contemporary global warming movement. Jim Booch is untolerable for some people because he has been seen a few meters from Lord Monckton. Imagine what would happen if he were a cousin or a grandson of Lord Monckton! ;-)

15 minutes of fame: a definition

Andy Warhol, a Slovak American pop artist, coined the idiom "15 minutes of fame". No doubt, the modern media are creating a lot of short-lived hysterias, madness, misinformation, and cheap fads with no lasting value. But some of the quantitatively inclined readers don't know how this term is defined. Is there a graph that explains the concept? Well, there is one:



Click the graph to get to the source at Google Trends. The two peaks in the third quarter of 2006 correspond to the publication of "Not Even Wrong" and "The Trouble With Physics", two silly books attacking science. Besides the search queries "Woit" and "Smolin", I have included another query that is not subject to the 15-minute-of-fame effect as a reference.

Symmetry and the Monster

A mathematics talk in RealVideo: use RealPlayer and open the following URL (write as one line):

http://streaming.mediares.ucl.ac.uk/
ramgen/Lunchtime_Lectures/LHL07/
LHL_Symmetry_And_The_Monster.smil

The speaker, Mark Ronan, covers some history about the solutions to quintic equations, Galois's life, etc. Since 22:00 or so, he talks about the classification of finite groups. One minute later, the Monster enters the scene.

Hat tip: Prof John McKay, thanks!

A theory of everything triples traffic

A. Garrett Lisi doesn't know why bosons can't be added with fermions and why spinors can't be added with scalars and vectors, among many other things. But he has made it. ;-)

The term "a theory of everything" in the title together with a bunch of unusually stupid journalists is enough to do so.



A female surfer was picked instead of AGL to enforce affirmative action.

The Telegraph, The Ottawa Citizen, and other outlets have made this crackpot so famous that even humble blogs such as this one have seen their traffic triple yesterday as a consequence. On Thursday, TRF had over 9,000 unique visitors and on Friday over 14,000 unique visitors. Everyone is thrilled with the "E8 theory of everything". Well, people are rather excitable. ;-)

Good for them. Bad for the wisdom of the society.

Blauer Planet in grünen Fesseln

Was ist bedroht: Klima oder Freiheit?

And a climate conference

Buy at amazon.de

Czech President Václav Klaus (whose book "Blue not Green Planet" was just published in German) and Petr Mach, the boss of the libertarian CEP think tank, have organized a pretty cool climate conference in Prague, showing seven scholars who can be counted as climate skeptics. There were 500 people watching and it was aired live on TV which is why it wasn't a good idea for me to be semi-gravel-voiced ;-) but otherwise my talk went just fine. I don't plan to see the conference again through TV archives. :-)

My PPT/DOC contribution in Czech: science basics of the climate debate

The ČT24 channel has attempted to preserve the people's sanity and ability to think independently against absurd proclamations about the "climate consensus" that some people are trying to import into the Czech Republic.

With all my respect to all of us, the Czech and other Central European speakers, the last two speeches by Julian Morris and Michael Walker (in English) were simply a different league. They're professional speakers, after all. I have learned some new things during the day, including conversations at a fun dinner in Sherwood, and other people have learned things, too.

Uganda: Global warming makes girls hot

A short time ago, we saw that global warming has stopped circumcisions in Kenya. Consequently, young men are not ready to marry anyone which is why the girls marry older guys.



In neighboring Uganda, global warming causes a related problem, namely early marriages. It is also caused by global warming but the detailed mechanisms are different. It occurs because rich men are ready to marry young females while the girls' families need some money that were stolen from them by global warming. This is a conclusion of a scientific report funded by the United Nations that has identified "famine marriages", i.e. a new method for families to earn money and food by selling their daughters.



Global warming also increases the school dropout rates: click the cartoon above to zoom it in. It exposes people to sexually transmitted infections because when it is warm, people tend to undress their condoms, despite intense education by dancing Indian condoms. Other consequences of global warming are bush-burning (because they want to punish the bush that is clearly responsible for global warming and for the hot girls and because it should improve pastures), hunting of birds and animals, and diets.

Let me emphasize once again that these conclusions were not obtained by some generic local shamans but by a scientific team funded by the United Nations. Well, this team could also be composed of shamans but it is much more important that its members are now employed as colleagues of the IPCC. They are automatically among the top 3,000 world's scientists.

If you want to increase your chance to marry a young girl in Kenya, start a fire. It will emit CO2 and cause global warming. Global warming will allow you to organize a famine marriage. Richard Feynman has invented the term "cargo cult science" but if he could see the African edition of the warming cult science, funded by the main international organization, he could have used the cargo cult scientists as a relatively positive example instead.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

Is there a consensus among skeptics?

Richard Black at BBC asks the question whether the climate skeptics have unified opinions about detailed questions about the climate.

I think that the correct answer is obviously "No". But unlike Richard Black, I don't think that it is a disadvantage or counter-argument of any kind. The differences between the skeptics pretty much reflect the amount of uncertainty about individual questions. If Richard Black or someone else believes that those 100% unified committees of communist parties or the unified body of believers in Al Qaeda make the opinions of these groups more likely, I beg to differ.

Not only skeptics have different opinions about detailed questions but individual skeptics are uncertain about individual questions themselves.

Unity

Skeptics have a unified opinion about the question that defines their skepticism. More concretely, they believe that climate change is not an urgent crisis that requires dramatic changes of the way how we live and how we use the fossil fuels.

But there are differences about pretty much every question simply because these questions are not settled and free people normally reach different conclusions when they analyze incomplete observations and incomplete theories. I know that this is an inconvenient truth for those who would like the opinions of the whole population to be unified but it is a truth nevertheless.

Also, there is a subtle problem with the questions that are usually not accurately enough formulated so that different people may mean different things by various words. Let us look at particular examples.

Is there global warming?

Well, I think that most skeptics will tell you that it is likely that the average temperature on Earth has increased during the last 100 years. But surely not all of them and frankly speaking, I have a full understanding for those who doubt it. The surface measurements don't seem too reliable because they are plagued by the urban heat island effects, human errors, and other things. It is conceivable that once a couple of these errors will be corrected, the warming that we like the quote today will go away or will at least be substantially reduced.

Some skeptics will tell you that the global temperature is not a terribly well-defined notion. Others will argue that the global character of the warming doesn't seem to be statistically significant. There have been many places that got cooler and the global average may be warmer simply because of statistical fluctuations: it is never guaranteed that the area of regions that get warmer must be equal to the are that gets cooler.

Many skeptics will protest that the choice of the 100-year timescale is an example of fine-tuning, cherry-picking, and cheating, and they are right. At different timescales, one cay see either warming or cooling. By emphasizing the importance of the 100-year timescale, we are already putting the "man-made" answer into the game as an assumption.

OK, I personally think that it is most likely that the warming trend in the last 100 years was close to 0.6°C per century.

Is this warming unprecedented?

Most skeptics, including myself, will say "No". They will tell you about dozens of types of climate changes in the past. Is it true that this 20th century warming is twice faster than the average warming or cooling during an average century in the last 1 million years? It might be. Was it the fastest centennial warming in the last 1 million of years? Probably not.

I think that it is obvious that people are guessing here. Climate has clearly been changing as we know from thousands of sources, experiments, and observations. But equally obviously, we don't have direct measurements of the decadal variations of temperatures 17,680 years ago, among other examples.

How the hell could there be any unity of opinions about it if we clearly have no data about it and no quantitative reliable theories either? Any group of people that is unified about these questions - such as decadal variations 17,680 years ago - that can be neither measured nor reliably calculated is simply a religious group. I think that the previous sentence is another statement that virtually all skeptics - and all sane people - will agree with.

Does the Sun's activity measurably influence the Earth's climate?

Surely, almost all skeptics, including myself will answer "Yes". Some influence is both explained physically as well as deduced from statistical analyses of the temperature records. The influence of galactic cosmic rays on the clouds and the climate is much more scientifically established than the role of the greenhouse effect. Again, most skeptics will agree. Look at the correlations in the papers by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen: they are simply impressively accurate.

The question about the cosmic and solar influence is just a quantitative one, just like the greenhouse effect. When combined with complex phenomena and feedbacks in the atmosphere, both solar activity and cosmic rays as well as the greenhouse effect have some effect on the climate.

The legitimate question is how large it is in both cases. Anyone who tries to make this question dogmatic and binary - that the answer is "Only one is correct and you shall never believe other Gods" is a religious bigot. Such bigots may exist on both sides but I happen to know many more greenhouse bigots than solar bigots.

How much warming should we expect in the next 100 years?

Well, we will probably surpass 560 ppm of CO2. Even if you believe that the greenhouse effect is responsible for all long-term warming, we have already realized something like 1/2 (40-75%, depending on the details of your calculation) of the greenhouse effect attributed to the CO2 doubling from 280 ppm to 560 ppm. It has led to 0.6°C of warming. It is not a hard calculation that the other half is thus expected to lead to an additional 0.6°C of warming between today and 2100.

Other derivations based on data that I consider rationally justified lead to numbers between 0.3°C and 1.4°C for the warming between 2000 and 2100. Clearly, one needs to know some science here. Laymen who are just interested in this debate but don't study the numbers by technical methods are likely to offer nothing else than random guesses and prejudices, regardless of their "ideological" affiliation in the climate debate.

When Richard Black quotes some uneducated people who are climate skeptics, it just shows that he is not being fair and he is spreading propaganda. The real problem with the global warming orthodoxy is that some of the craziest opinions about a coming catastrophe are heard from the most powerful alarmists. When we want to show that the alarmists are not quite sane, we don't have to pick the stupidest representative on the street. We don't have to humiliated Alexander Ač all the time. Chiefs of their institutes at NASA and Nobel prize winners will do the job, too. This is the real difference here.

Clearly, there can't be any consensus about precise values of the climate sensitivity simply because no accurate calculation of this quantity exists. Once again, if a large group has a consensus about the precise value, it is inevitably a religious group.

Now, would 1 Celsius degree of warming be a catastrophe?

This is a question in which skeptics probably agree once again. During the 20th century, the temperatures may have increased by 0.6°C. Not only we can say that it has caused no catastrophe. In fact, it seems that it has caused no visible problems at all. Our world is richer, more fertile, healthier than it was 100 years ago. By extrapolating this observation to the 21st century, there is absolutely no reason to think that a hypothetical additional warming would cause some big trouble.

Can the climate get out of control?

Once again, skeptics will say that probably not. But there is no rigorous proof. No one can say these things for certain. Catastrophes and instabilities are unlikely because they haven't occurred for billions of years even though our planet has tried many eras that were much more extreme than our times. So skeptics generally find theories about instabilities, tipping points, points of no return, and so forth very awkward. But they won't burn someone at stake because it can't be rigorously proven. They will just think that the person who propagates fear is not quite sensible.

Are the oceans more important than the solar activity?

Again, I don't know. If they are at least comparable, we would have to define the question more accurately anyway. Turbulent phenomena in the ocean surely play some role. 1998 was the warmest year mainly because of a huge El Nino. No doubts about it. But once again, there can't be any consensus here because we don't fully understand dynamics of these things. Even if we did, the system is so complex that we would have to carefully define two quantities that we are comparing. The question above is just too vague.

Is CO2 regulation a good idea?

Again, probably all skeptics will answer No, regardless of their belief about the previous questions. CO2 regulation is extremely expensive and it has extremely negligible impact on the climate. Moreover, we are not really sure whether the sign of this impact is positive or negative.

Summary

If I summarize. I think that the main difference between climate realists, also referred to as skeptics, and climate fanatics is not a different choice of some technical quantity such as the climate sensitivity. The main point in which they differ is their attitude to the society, freedom, and knowledge. Climate realists think that questions like that must be looked at in a very calm, balanced way, and each scientist must be free and independent to reach any conclusions that seem to be implied by the available evidence. They think that the complexity of complex systems must be acknowledged and uncertainties should never be masked. Moreover, the link between scientific conclusions and policies is extremely indirect and requires some people to answer many additional questions whose character is not related to climatology. Climate realists think that we must first answer these questions and then we can perhaps use the answers to influence policymaking.

On the other hand, climate fanatics think that these are moral questions that must be looked at in a very irrational way. Only one kind of an answer must be promoted or allowed. Policies must be created before the evidence is available and evidence must be tweaked to agree with the desired policies. Scientific conclusions must be deliberately exaggerated, cherry-picker, and oversimplified to achieved "sacred" goals. Everyone must be forced to believe the same thing and all infidels and heretics must be ostracized. The desired policies of CO2 regulations are good even if the climate apocalypse doesn't exist - even Marx himself believed these things - which justifies any amount of attacks and lies about the skeptics and the climate itself.

These two groups don't differ in technical details of science. They differ in their basic thinking about man, society, nature, freedom, truth, and science.

And that's the memo.

Berkovits, Vafa: proving AdS/CFT

Berkovits and Vafa have a paper that I choose to be the most interesting paper on the arXiv today. They may have made steps towards a full proof of the perturbative part of the most famous example of the AdS/CFT correspondence, namely between the N=4 gauge theory on one side and the AdS5 x S5 background of the type IIB string on the other side.

Some aspects of their construction are well-known to me but others are new. Among the aspects we have realized for some time, we can mention the fact that the relevant worldsheet description of the type IIB string is similar to the pure spinor language of Berkovits. It is an A-model which is a quotient of the U(2,2/4) supergroup and its maximal bosonic subgroup. Another aspect that I have believed for a few years is that the proof is based on a reduction of the two-dimensinoal worldsheet to Feynman diagrams, by "erasing" most of the information inside disk-shape regions included in the Feynman diagram.

What seems new, and what I am not able to fully check at this moment, is their statement that the proof could be analogous to the Ooguri-Vafa proof of a similar but topological Gopakumar-Vafa duality. The key feature that Berkovits and Vafa claim to be shared is that the worldsheet theory has a new Coulomb branch in this case much like it had in the topological case. The pieces of the worldsheet that are found in this Coulomb branch are interpreted as the faces of the Feynman diagrams while the boundaries between them are its propagators and vertices. As the 't Hooft coupling goes to zero, the regions found in the Higgs branch shrink and become the propagators and vertices.

Clearly, Cumrun Vafa is the first person who would be expected to suggest such a picture - in fact, I have heard such hints from him some time ago - and people who are less topological than he is, which surely includes your humble correspondent but most likely also all other humans on this planet, with a possible exception of Edward Witten and hypothetically also Marcos Mariňo (and with apologies to Aganagič, Gopakumar, Ooguri, Saulina, and others), face greater hurdles in trying to follow the details here.

At any rate, this Coulomb branch picture is different from what I wanted to do with the faces of the Feynman diagram most recently. I wanted to "integrate them out" by a Euclidean version of the AdS2/CFT1 correspondence. The faces would be interpreted as the Euclidean AdS2 whose geometry is a Poincaré disk but the partition sum over these disks as a function of the boundary conditions could be calculated by AdS/CFT methods, leading to a CFT1 theory that would match the action needed in the Schwinger parameterization of the N=4 gauge propagators. The vertices would then require a special treatment as additional singular places.

Now, is such a proof important? I surely don't think that we need a proof in order to be more certain about the correspondence because the correspondence is obviously true and only crackpots - such as those whose shoes are connected by a rope - doubt it at this moment. But I do think that such a proof would allow us to see the degrees of freedom in different descriptions of string theory from a more unified perspective. It would help us to see a little bit more why the degrees of freedom in different formulations of string theory look so different and how they can actually be directly transformed to each other.

And that would be certainly worth a memo.

Communism, capitalism, and environment

An anonymous Marxist third-world commenter mentioned - incredibly - that he or she thinks that the environmental situation in post-socialist Europe became worse after the fall of communism. I just can't believe that someone would buy such a thing because it is crazier than any propaganda I have heard during communism.

The improvements are manifest and sometimes breathable througout post-socialist Europe but I will choose the best example, the Czech Republic, for both obvious as well as less obvious reasons. You should read:

Environment in the Czech Republic: A Positive and Rapid Change

by Bedřich Moldán and Tomáš Hák. According to a Yale's 2006 report, Czechia ranks 4th among 133 countries in environmental performance, after New Zealand, Sweden, and Finland. Let me sketch some basic facts about the history.

The black triangle

The black triangle near the common borders of Czechia, East Germany, and (to a lesser extent) Poland used to be one of the most polluted regions in the world, full of power plants, chemical plants, refineries, dirty mines, and steam heating. Pilsen where I lived used to have a lot of industry and was very influenced by it: but there is no doubt that the Northern Bohemia was much worse, environmentally speaking. You couldn't really breath there. When there was smog, and it was extremely often, the visibility would be counted in hundreds of meters only.

The communist party was proud that it managed to produce millions of tons of coal or steel more than during the previous five-year plan. Similar quantities were used to measure the progress. Acid rains completely killed many forests in Krušné hory, the mountains near the border with Germany. Some diseases were linked to the very bad environmental situation and the life expectancy was significantly lower than today but you shouldn't imagine that life was impossible. As far as I can say, no one really cared much. Except for Greenpeace, there were no groups that would complain about the environment and Greenpeace was always viewed as a group of whackos, both by communists as well as most anti-communists.

Right after the Velvet Revolution

During the first two years after 1989, many useless factories that only existed to fulfill communist plans - and to export things to the Soviet Union for them to satisfy their plans - were closed. The emissions of everything dropped by dozens of percent. Even though the GDP dropped by 12 percent from 1990 to 1991, you can't really say that the life standards decreased. The difference arises because the GDP included a lot of nonsense that wasn't making anyone happy.

Fertilizers per hectare dropped 28%, greenhouse gases by 15%, localized organic pollution by 11%, SO2 by 7%, particulate matter by 5%.

The mid 1990s

The previous era had obvious reasons: the organized irrational exuberance of communism applied to coal, iron, fertilizers, and other commodities was stopped. But once capitalism started to work, things kept on improving not only because of bad aspects of communism but mainly because of virtues of capitalism, especially the power of restructuralization and privatization.

Moldan and Hák explain that the progress was a combination of research that was suddenly allowed combined with the individual care about people's health. I repeat. The progress wasn't achieved because of some vague abstract interest about some vague and ill-defined environment or because of someone's quotas and plans to improve the whole environment but because of a clear, well-defined desire of people to be healthy and to live in a nice place. About CZK 350 billion was invested in total, and CZK 150 billion (less than 50%) went from government sources.

These improvements were thus pretty much funded from those sources that were really influenced by the environment. Investments were substantial and the results followed, especially in the context of some gases of my childhood:

• SO2 dropped by 88%
• other pollutants (such as heavy metals) were in between SO2 and NOx
• NOx dropped by 38%

Of course, there were particular reasons allowing SO2 to drop: desulfurization scrubbers by energy utilites. Despite this decrease, Czechia still produces by 50% more SO2 and NOx per capita than the average EU-15 country: 22 kg and 33 kg, respectively. Nevertheless, because we have seen that emissions that are higher by an order of magnitude don't really kill most life, we also know that the current values are not disastrous in any sense.

About 1,000 new wastewater plants were built by end of the century so that they covered virtually all places with more than 10,000 people. Water simply became clean. Independently, pollutants in wastewater decreased by 90% or so.

Krušné hory, formerly mountains filled with dead forests, smoke, and chimneys on the background became a quiet and attractive world of mountain peatbogs, clean creeks, interesting architecture, and good opportunities for various sports.

Between 1999 and today

The environment has been improving rapidly until the end of the 1990s - especially because the fraction of GDP paid for such improvements exceeded 2%. At the end of the century, people generally became satisfied with the environment which means that the investment dropped considerably: the total environmental expenses decreased to 0.7% of the GDP in 2002 and let me admit that I view this percentage as a sensible figure for out times.

Moreover, people decided that the democratic government itself can manage to solve these things. Well, it is doing a better job than the communists but it is still a government which simply can't be that good in these matters. Nevertheless, the authors explain that the situation is simply good and there are no longer any major worries about the environment in the Czech Republic that has become a representative European country in these respects.

The greenhouse effect has played no role in the improvements described in this article. Nevertheless, energy efficiency was clearly important because energy costs money. A by-product of this desire to be energy-efficient is that the Czech Republic is safely below the limits imposed by the Kyoto protocol which are 8% below the 1990 levels: the main reason is, of course, the dramatic suppression of the useless heavy communist industry. That's why the Kyoto protocol itself is surely no burden for Czechia.

On the other hand, no one in the Czech Republic would mind if temperatures increased by 1 degress or a few degrees. The average annual temperature is around 10-11°C. According to the favorite destination of Czech tourists, the optimal average temperature according to most Czechs would surely be at least 5°C higher. We will have to burn fossil fuels for 500 more years, I guess. ;-)

Whether or not you achieve the reductions described above and increased efficiency doesn't depend on bureaucrats' and environmentalist activists' pressure or international treaties. It primarily depends on the efficiency of your economy and the solvency of the people who are actually influenced by the environment and who have interest for things to improve either because of themselves or because of the image that their genuine care about the environment brings them.

I think that the lesson is clear. Useless pollution simply disappears as long as people have the economic freedom to act rationally. And if the people get both free and richer, they start to increasingly care about the environment and they simply pay their own money for any problems that really influence their health or the beauty of their environment.

The fact that the Czech Republic became the best example in these improvements is not a coincidence. It is not because your humble correspondent is Czech either. It is because it is the richest post-socialist country (with a possible exception of Slovenia which is too small for conclusions to be taken too seriously and East Germany where an illogical divergent inflow of money from their rich Western brothers makes conclusions inapplicable elsewhere). The richer you are, the more you are ready to pay for luxurious things such as a high quality environment.

And that's the memo.

Trillions for CO2 regulation & propagation of guilt

Two years ago, some people criticized the Kyoto counter in the sidebar because it assumes that the Kyoto protocol costs USD 150 billion per year which seemed too high to the champions of CO2 regulation. Well, times are changing. Almost no one would raise such a childish criticism today because most people realize that the actual costs of CO2 regulation are much higher.

The Guardian explains that according to Nicholas Stern's calculations, a U.S. climate bill would cost USD 212 billion per year while its EU counterpart would cost USD 164 billion. Add a few more countries that could also participate and you are well above USD half a trillion.

These are huge numbers that are completely comparable to trade surpluses and deficits of various countries. And as you know, these surpluses and deficits are no details or small perturbations of the economies. Their small changes add whole percentage points to the GDP growth. One percent of the world's GDP is a lot. If you assume that companies and societies invest and increase their capacities only from the "last" resources after everything else is subtracted, you would conclude that the annual costs around one percent of the GDP are equivalent to a reduction of the GDP growth by one percentage point.

Such a percentage point makes a huge difference. For many developed countries with the growth potential about 2 percent, it means that their growth rate is reduced to one-half. For countries that would otherwise grow a bit more slowly than at the one-percent annual rate, it means recession. Even the countries that used to have a three-percent GDP growth might switch to a two-percent regime, changing the time needed to double their GDP from 25 years to 35 years.

And we are still talking about CO2 policies that will have no discernible and demonstrable effect on the climate.

The article in the Guardian argues that one must carefully divide the CO2 emissions into the "politically correct ones", for example those in India, and the "luxurious ones", a point repeated by The Independent and others. Let me ask a rhetorical question: do you think that such a classification of CO2 emissions can be scientifically derived from physics or climatology? These things show that this whole hysteria about a "dangerous climate change" is politically driven. The greenhouse effect and all these things are just cheap tricks that are blown out of proportion in order to justify completely different things that those people actually care about.

But as Václav Klaus has emphasized, no country in the world is safe. If these CO2-regulating proposals win in some countries, their proponents will gain self-confidence and propagate the policies to ever broader set of countries.

Propagation of guilt

The Wall Street Journal explains that China, the country that generates the highest amount of CO2 emissions, might start to blame its rising CO2 emissions on the Western buyers. This question about the propagation of "guilt" is another important aspect of this whole debate. Imagine, for a little while, that CO2 emissions are harmful. Who is responsible for the Chinese emissions? Is it the buyers?



One of the comparative advantages of Asia is that a marketplace can be unified with a train station. Isn't it practical?

Well, the transactions between the Chinese producers and the Western buyers is arguably a contract that benefits both parties, much like most other contracts. But when the product is already completed, the hypothetical harm to the environment has already been made. It is very hard to realize this obvious fact in the case of CO2 that really causes no harm. But if you replace CO2 by mercury, you won't have any doubts who is guilty.

The Chinese products usually don't contain dangerous concentrations of mercury which makes it OK for consumers to buy them. In the same way, the products don't emit additional CO2 - except for cars that are made in China. So I find it obvious that if someone were guilty, it is the Chinese producers who could have used clean technologies or produce something completely different. One simply can't be viewed as a criminal for buying a legitimate product from a criminal, if you want me to amplify this language.

Of course that one can feel somewhat bad for having something - or anything - to do with some bad guys. But one of the principles of an enlightened modern society is that guilt simply cannot propagate in this way. For example, you shouldn't be held responsible for your parents' being killers even though you have had relationships of many kinds with your parents.

Guilt for well-defined sins must be localized to those who are really responsible. Indirect relations between these people and others cannot become a justification for the government to control those other people because if it became one, the government could control everyone. Why? Because everyone is indirectly connected to some people who do bad things, either more directly or less directly.

There are many other subtleties associated with these ambitious projects to regulate the carbon cycle. But if the goal were really to reduce total CO2 emissions, it is clear that their price would have to be universal for the whole planet, much like the price of oil. This conclusion might be controversial for those who mix science and economics with politics and religion. But a universal price would be necessary for these policies to regulate the net emissions instead of just moving them from one place to another.

Let me emphasize. These considerations are hypothetical in character because I don't believe that any CO2 regulation is rational.

Incidentally, the coal-oil price ratio is about 5 times smaller than what it was a decade ago. If this situation persists, I think that people, companies, and societies start to realize that. Someone should work on modern versions of gadgets that burn coal - for example 21st century steam engines in cars. ;-)

Thanks to Benny Peiser for the links.

Lord Rayleigh born 165 years ago

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, was born on November 12th, 1842. Even though this white male aristocrat ;-) received his 1904 Nobel prize for the discovery of argon and geologists know him for Rayleigh-Lamb waves, most physicists would almost certainly think of the Rayleigh scattering.

This scattering is the main reason why the sky is blue: short-wavelength electromagnetic waves (e.g. blue photons) are scattered much more strongly which is why they arrive from random directions of the sky rather than the Sun. Rayleigh scattering is a good description when the impurities are much smaller than the wavelength of the light. Their calculable effect on radiation increases with the fourth power of the frequency.



This is probably not the best example but believe me - the sky is usually blue.

Two students of Lord Rayleigh were called Thomson and both of them were great physicists who won a Nobel prize. J.J. Thomson discovered isotopes, the mass spectrometer, and especially the electron for which he received the 1906 prize. George Paget Thomson shared the 1937 prize with Clinton Davisson for their observation of electron diffraction, a major experimental pillar of wave mechanics. If you want to be sure that the world of great physicists was really small, notice that George Paget Thomson was a son of J.J. Thomson. ;-)

Hugh Everett: 77th birthday

Hugh Everett was born on November 11th, 1930. He proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and because no one cared, he left physics right after his PhD. More precisely, the term "many-worlds interpretation" comes from DeWitt who interpreted Everett in this way in 1971.

Later, he applied Lagrange multipliers in the commercial sector and earned some big bucks. As a chain smoker and drinker, he died at the age of 51. However, he believed in quantum immortality so the death was probably not such a big issue. His daughter, Elizabeth, suffered from schizophrenia and committed suicide in 1996, claiming that she was moving into a parallel universe to spend time with her dad.

Everett's wife, born as Nancy Gore, died of cancer in 1998. Unless we deal with a closed time-like curve connecting different parallel universes, she shouldn't be confused with Nancy Gore Hunger, Al Gore's sister, who also died of cancer but in 1984. Everett's son, Mark Oliver Everett, is a rock musician with "Eeels" and some of his songs were inspired by the deaths in his family.

Everett's main contribution was written in the article called

'Relative state' formulation of quantum mechanics

See also a philosophical meditation about the paper at Stanford. OK, I have never understood how the branching tree of the parallel universes is supposed to look like when we measure many quantities at different points of spacetime, how it is reconciled with relativity, how it is guaranteed that the probabilities of different outcomes are what they should be, and what this breathtaking superconstruction is supposed to solve. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that Everett's picture was an ancient suggestion of decohering histories. He can also be credited with the elimination of the redundant concept of a "collapse of the wave function" from quantum mechanics.

The different parallel universes should be identified with decohering histories as studied in my favorite neo-Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics due to Gell-Mann, Hartle, and others. If we adopt this interpretation, Everett needed to assume the existence of a privileged basis of the Hilbert space describing the whole Universe. But he correctly led physicists to understand that the preferred basis is not assigned to a microscopic object per se but it is only assigned relatively to the decision of the experimenters or another macroscopic object that interacts with the microscopic one.

Anyway, I still don't think that Everett really understood how decoherence works. That's why I would say that his work has much greater impact on the popular perception of science than science itself.

Also, 103 years ago, J.H.C. Whitehead (Henry) was born. This mathematician was one of the founders of homotopy theory and other disciplines of mathematical topology.

Snow returns to Pilsen

So far, the amount of snow is not high enough to make it beautiful. Instead of photographs, I include a videoclip "Snow" from Richard Müller, a Slovak singer. The song is in Czech.



The scientific content of the song is small - we are so fresh and clean when it is snowing around. ;-) But it looks pretty.

Klaus: Merkel is the new 5-year planner

Abstract from the Czech Press Agency
Full text in German
Another interview in German for DPA about his book
Reuters news story

Interview of the President of the Czech Republic for the Wirtschaftswoche

---

Mr. President, German chancellor Angela Merkel fights for climate protection during her state visits throughout the world. She finds listeners in all countries except for yours. Why?

The unfair and irrational debate on global warming annoys me. The topic is increasingly turning into the fundamental ideological conflict of our times.

Has Mrs Merkel been caught into an ideology?

She probably thinks about these ideas. That surprises me. Because as a trained physicist, she should be undoubtedly able to test controversial hypotheses. But it also shows that this is not about science. The movement for the protection of the atmosphere embodies a new ideology. Surprisingly, it is espoused by Mrs Merkel who herself lived in socialist society. But she should know the risks associated with those ideologies that are directed against freedom.

Do you consider the chancellor to be a savior of the world?

I don't want to analyze Ms Merkel. The utopians are those who want to improve the world. However, politicians may find utopias to be an excellent thing because these politicians may start to talk about the distant future and avoid their everyday business. Such politicians are "escapists" because they want to escape reality. The issue of climate change is ideally suited for this purpose because we can spend 50 or even 100 years in the future by developing visions - while voters remain unable to control the consequences.

What are they escaping?

Politicians flee away from the emptiness of their own imagination. They have no ideas rich in content that could fill the present.

Does this also apply to the U.S. President George W. Bush who has apparently also warmed up to the climate debate?

I have talked about this topic with Bush several times. During our last meeting in the context of the U.N. high climate event in September, he asked me: "Václav, where is your book? I look forward (laughs)." As many Americans, he views the topic a bit more pragmatically. Americans have never been truly interested in utopias.

In your book, "Blue, Not a Green Planet", you only describe the environmentalists, as you call them, vaguely. Who are those conspirators whom you find so dangerous?

The climate debate itself deserves a sociological analysis. The politicians come first; they use the climate for the reasons explained above. Then we see the journalists who use the issue as a free ticket for a catchy theme on the title page. And finally the climate researchers only act to benefit and to maximize their profit by looking for subjects with the most promising funding situation.

Serious and prestigious researchers are among those who attack you. Are all of them opportunistic small minds?

Let's take for example the United Nations report on the climate. The presidium of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) decides on what is in it. People like IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri may have been scientifically active in the past, but since then they have become bureaucrats. These people published their last journal article years ago. Today they work on policymaking. And among the real scientists, there are many who can't offer any new approaches. They simply follow the mainstream.

One can analyze scientists ad hominem. But if there is a critic with a legitimate criticism, why is he not heard?

Whatever the climatologists find incompatible with the so-called consensus is even not included in the U.N. climate report. Every day, I receive letters from all around the world in which scientists disagree with the prevailing opinion but no one wants to listen to or print their hypotheses. They are simply unfashionable.

You seem to suppose that the climate research is being censored.

You know, the whole thing is very familiar to me. After the Warsaw Pact troops intervened to terminate the Prague Spring, I was dismissed from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences as an enemy of Marxism. In the 1970s, I couldn't write any articles on economics.

You are trained as en economist, not a climate researcher - are you able to judge the scientific debate?

As an unemployed economist, I had a job in the State Bank of Czechoslovakia. We had the first computer over there. My task was to work on statistical and econometric models and against my will, I became busy with things that are important and relevant for climatology. Climatology is not one of the fields of physics and chemistry where a controlled experiment can be repeated a thousand times. It deals with data and hypotheses which can either be accepted or not. It works with time series that require statistical analysis.

Do you therefore distrust the method of climate researchers?

I have played with similar models for years. In hundreds or thousands of similar equations, I could always see that a slight change of a parameter or the addition of another parameter may radically change the outcome of complex models. That is why I am very critical about this methodology.

Do you flatly disagree that climate is changing?

No, of course not. The fact is that the climate is changing but every child knows that. There have to be no Nobel prize winners or a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Of course, humans also play a role. But the crucial question is: How big is the influence of people on this process? The dispute is about orders of magnitude. Is the induced temperature change nonzero in the third, fourth, or fifth digit after the decimal point? This is a serious question that we must answer. And there is no consensus.

You say that the environmentalists such as the former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore threaten the freedom of thought. It is easy to argue against it. Who would be against freedom? What do you actually mean?

It is hard to answer in a few sentences. I have both political as well as economic and scientific freedom in mind. It is important that we don't lose either of them. Communism was another version of this ideology that placed something else as a "sacred" value above freedom. Environmentalism follows the same logic. First, the climate, then comes freedom followed by prosperity. Such priorities are wrong. For me, freedom is an important value. We Czechs have some experience with a lack of freedom. We sensitively and perhaps oversensitively respond to the threats to freedom - including those that the people in Western Europe don't understand too well.

The European Union has set - with the approval by the Czech government - ambitious climate targets. Your views make you totally lonely.

I am not alone. But I do find the current situation in Europe and the U.S. somewhat tragic. During the recent climate change conference in New York, my speech was the only one that criticized the climate policies. I didn't hear applause. Only after the dinner, many heads of state came to me and congratulated me. "There must have been someone to tell it," they said. One already probably needs political courage to speak against the policy of climate.

Who has thanked you?

I can't give you the names. It wouldn't have the right effect.

You argue that the economy and technological progress has the capacity to solve all problems resulting from climate change. What makes you so sure?

I didn't say the economy, I mean the market! This difference is fundamental. I believe in the market. Throughout my life, I have studied the economy in all of its manifestations, including communism. Plans vs market, external control vs spontaneity - these have been the eternal debates since Adam Smith. Why am I so confident? Because of my life experience. I have seen governments being mistaken hundreds of times. The market is not perfect, but its shortcomings are slight in comparison with the mistakes governments make. I lived in the regime of the planned economy - I consider the 50-year long plans of Angela Merkel just as misleading as the former five-year-plans.

What do you think about emissions trading? If carbon dioxide gets a price, the forces of the market will operate freely.

That's nonsense. This is a fraud by climatologists and environmentalists. Only fake economists could say what you did. This is about dirigism and not a free market. This method only pretends to be market-friendly. Emissions trading is just a game that looks like a market and as a classical liberal, I disagree with it.

There are entrepreneurs who earn money with the help of the environment. Germany has become the market leader in environmental technologies. It seems that the environment and the entrepreunerial spirit fit together wonderfully.

It is completely appropriate when entrepreneurs earn money by their effort to save energy. All of us should be thrifty regarding the energy, after all. Something else happens when entrepreneurs make profits out of alternative technologies. Transactions involving solar and wind energy are only possible because of the high subsidies paid for by the governments. These companies thus have political objectives and they don't play according to the rules of the free market.

No one doubts that we need traffic signs. Without minimal rules, chaos would threaten whole societies. Don't we need a couple of warning signs for the environment as well?

It depends on whether we talk about the environment or climate change. I have nothing against laws that protect ponds against waste disposal. But the environment protection laws, especially those in the EU, now go too far. But in this case we at least know what are the negative consequences of our actions or sins, if you wish. When the lake is polluted, it becomes contaminated. On the other hand, one cannot see how large and important the human influence on climate change is. It is an equation with too many unknowns - I am against climate restrictive laws and other forms of dirigism.

Václav Klaus, Wirtschaftswoche, November 10th, 2007

IQ: Slovakia beats Czechia again

Czech TV Nova and Slovak TV Markíza were just broadcasting the second annual Czecho-Slovak knowledge contest, ČR-SR, the Test of the Nation. In this show, TV audiences and hundreds of representatives in the TV building had to answer 50 questions from various fields, using the a/b/c/d template.

Your humble correspondent sent them his answers as SMS messages - and the answer was "50 answers were right, the grade is 1*". They translated 50 correct answers as "knowledge IQ = 155". ;-) The best internet user, Mr Josef Šedivý of Podlesí (CZ), had knowledge IQ = 153. They called him not me - I didn't know that the SMS messages were so inferior!

The most educated occupations that participated in the contest were

1. celebrities
2. journalists
3. firefighters
4. mayors
5. cheerleaders / majorettes
6. gym instructors
7. garbage collectors

Men with knowledge IQ at 117 beat women with knowledge IQ at 115. But more importantly, Slovakia at 119 has defeated Czechia at 115 once again, by the same four points as one year ago! ;-)

Let's hope that Alexander Ač's self-confidence will be at least renormalizable. :-)

If I wanted to offer an excuse, I would guess that Slovaks know Czech culture, geography, and history more than Czechs know Slovak culture, geography, and history simply because the Czech facts are more important than their Slovak counterparts while the distribution of characteristically Czech and characteristically Slovak questions was 50:50! ;-) But this hypothesis could be falsified if detailed answers in different disciplines were investigated.

The pure g-factor IQ in Czechia is systematically higher than in Slovakia by 1 point, 97-98-102 vs 96-97-101 according to three different datasets. The U.S. have 98-98-97 according to these datasets. It's a well-known story that men are 3.6 points above women.

The best individual in the TV building was a Czech male firefighter! Among the celebrities, two Slovak women, Miriam Kalisová (147) and Marta Sládečková (145), were ahead of Tomáš Dvořák (143), the Czech male decathlon superchampion. If Kalisová, the Slovak news babe, only had 4 incorrect answers, I am really impressed.

LHC: cooling system completed

ScienceDaily informs that Robert Aymar, the boss of CERN, personally sealed the last interconnect in the world's largest cryogenic system.



36,800 tons of material have to be cooled down to 1.9 Kelvin (about -271°C), cooler than the microwave background. This seemingly difficult task to fight against global warming in 27 kilometers of Switzerland and France is achieved by 10,000 tons of liquid nitrogen and 130 tons of liquid helium. Over 40,000 welds must be leak-tight to make it work.



LHC: Collider, Demo 2000

Things are going very smoothly. All eight sectors should now be cooled down: I really mean that the hardware work is finished. The process of cooling could also be straightforward because one of the sectors has already been cooled down and warmed up in the first half of 2007, for pedagogical reasons. Most of the sectors will be largely cooled by the Christmas and the rest will follow at the beginning of 2008.



CERN's 3-minute self-promotion

Unless unexpected hurdles occur, first beams could be injected in May 2008. They will start to circulate in June or July. The physicists will therefore have several long days to find SUSY before the fuzzy deadline of our USD 1,000 bet in Summer 2008 that I hope will be extended. ;-)

ExistentialistCat, a beautiful 19-year-old girl and musician called Kim (see her 39 videos) who thinks that she doesn't have a terribly technical brain, describes the rate of Higgs, mini-black-hole, and strangelet production at the LHC and astrophysical bounds constraining these rates. She also mentions that they have a comparable but smaller collider in New York. ;-)

Will the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapse?

Cliff Ollier has written a text about the mechanisms underlying the flow of glaciers. James Hansen uses very naive models of the flow which is the main technical reason for his catastrophic predictions.



Ollier argues that the most important process behind the flow is "creep" that dominates whenever the stress exceeds a limit (yield stress). This motion explains why ice crystals at the lowest end of glaciers grow faster than others. Other aspects of glacier dynamics are discussed, too.

Hermann Weyl & Theodor Kaluza: 122th birthday

Exactly 122 years before yesterday, on November 9th, 1885, two well-known German mathematical physicists were born almost simultaneously.

Hermann Weyl (not to be confused with André Weil), born near Hamburg, was a great universalist mathematician who has influenced number theory, logic, philosophy, history of science, and theoretical physics.

Weyl was a fan of Hilbert and one of the first researchers in general relativity. He can be credited for the concept of "gauge" and "gauge theory", at least in the context of Abelian gauge theories. Weyl also wanted to unify general relativity with electromagnetism by extending the gravitational connection with a non-compact U(1) gauge connection. That was not quite correct but it has inspired many people to think about the relations between geometry and unification. In general relativity, Weyl has also defined the Weyl tensor, a separable component of the Riemann tensor that is invariant under the scaling of the metric tensor - let's say it, we mean the Weyl scaling. ;-)

Weyl has introduced the point set topology into geometry of manifolds - something that I don't really like but that is probably necessary to make manifolds and Riemann's results really rigorous. He defined the Weyl spinors and the Weyl algebra and found many new important results about Lie groups and Lie algebras, including some character formulae and the Weyl group of a root system. He was one of a small group that transformed Lie groups from a bizarre fringe topic into a mainstream topic of mathematics and mathematical physics.

In number theory, he utilized exponential sums to study diophantine equations. Weyl's opinions about the intuitionism (Brouwer) vs formalism (Hilbert) vs Platonism (Gödel) dispute were changing over time but he has contributed ideas to each.

To summarize, Weyl was clearly one of the greatest mathematical physicists of the 20th century and he is an honorable string theorist. Why? Virtually all laws of physics, equations of motion, the equivalence principle, the critical dimensions, and many other results of perturbative string theory follow from the Weyl symmetry on the worldsheet. And the massless spinors in all ten-dimensional superstring vacua except for type IIA are Weyl spinors, after all. ;-)

Theodor Kaluza, born in Silesia that belonged to Greater Prussia, gave us only one great idea but it has become increasingly important. In 1919, he figured out that Maxwell's equations and general relativity may be unified in terms of general relativity tailored for a five-dimensional metric tensor. Einstein, the referee, wanted to kill the paper but he eventually allowed it to be published in 1921. As far as I can say, it has become the best unification idea for electromagnetism and gravity that Einstein could have seen during his life.

After I read Kaluza's paper and especially Einstein's followups, I felt that neither Kaluza nor Einstein really knew that the fifth dimension should be compact. They assumed that the dependence of the fields on the fifth dimension is eliminated by an additional assumption but didn't know what the assumption was. Oskar Klein of Sweden who was much more powerful a theoretical physicist than Kaluza completed these gaps, reconciled Kaluza's theory with the postulates of quantum mechanics, and added Kaluza-Klein-charged fields. The Kaluza-Klein theory was established and within a short period of time, its simplest version could have been falsified.

Nevertheless, a generalized version of those concepts has become one of the key topics of modern theoretical physics and string theory in particular. There are no doubts that both Kaluza and Klein were string theorists.

Incidentally, Oskar Klein was perhaps the most realistic physicist in the 1930s who has almost constructed the electroweak gauge theory that we know from the 1960s. If you want to read about Klein's remarkably modern approach and intuition about particle physics, even in comparison with much more famous names of his era, you should find a source that has the right credentials to talk about him. And who has the credentials to talk about Klein? Well, German speakers surely know that the only possible answer is Gross. Read it, it is a fascinating story.

ClimateAudit and Bad Astronomy: a tie

Update: The number of votes for BA, CA were almost identical. The organizers decided to propose a tie and both BA, CA agreed.

Best science blog poll - link

I don't think that Bad Astronomy, the current silver medalist, is a worthless blog but still, it is too influenced by ideological preconceptions and it is arguably too superficial.



The Reference Frame that wasn't nominated votes for ClimateAudit that is almost 2,000 votes ahead of Bad Astronomy and thousands of votes ahead of Pharyngula, an anti-Christian blog occassionally dedicated to biology that was more successful a year ago. JunkScience will remain fourth. Other well-known and not-too-well-known blogs don't have a chance.

ClimateAudit is the front-runner now but it hasn't yet won.

You can also vote for whomever you want - one vote per computer and 24 hours. I endorse ClimateAudit because it is a very substantial blog that always tries to go deeply into its favorite topics and avoids ideology. If you think that the science blogosphere is dangerously influenced by a certain way of thinking and you consider, much like I do, ClimateAudit as a refreshing exception, try to convince other people to vote for ClimateAudit.

Most importantly, Steve McIntyre has achieved rather remarkable results in which his blog played an important role. The well-known co-debunker of the hockey stick has also found rather serious problems with the U.S. temperature record.

Steve McIntyre and his blog undoubtedly contribute to an increase of quality of climate science.

The polls end tonight, American time.

AUGER: millions of TeV cosmic rays from black holes

The Pierre Auger Collaboration has just released their report:

Press release
Summary in Science
Technical article (subscribers)
The New York Times
Reuters

Their detectors in Argentina have recorded a million of cosmic rays since 2004 and 80 of them or so had a really high energy. Note that the cute stamp shows a lot of progress: in 1989, it would be much more likely that a stamp would boast 75 eV of energy and cost 10^20 cents, because of their inflation. Today it's the other way around.

The highest energy of these cosmic rays exceeds 50 billion GeV.

The members of the collaboration claim that these huge energy events must be connected with violent processes associated with black holes.

Note that the energy 1 billion GeV or 1 million TeV or 1 EeV (exaelectronvolt) is literally at the intermediate scale, somewhere in the middle between the current colliders and the Planck scale. We have no chance to produce such a high energy with accelerators that we can imagine today. It is the kinetic energy of a bullet from a rifle concentrated into one elementary particle.

Auger is trying to build additional arrays in Colorado.

The direction of the very high-energy cosmic rays is not random. In all cases, the very high-energy events (white crosses) seem to coincide pretty well with the direction of an active galactic nucleus (AGN, blue dots, and to a lesser extent, green dot) so closely that according to the authors, AGNs are almost certainly the source. We talk about AGNs of rather nearby galaxies. AGNs have black holes in them.



Based on a visual analysis of the picture, I am somewhat unimpressed by this claimed correlation between the directions but their calculation indicates that the hypothesis that the directions are correlated "by chance" is excluded at the 99% confidence level.

The energy of the observed particles denoted by the cross, above 57 EeV or so, exceed the GZK cutoff. Above this limit, cosmic rays - assuming that they are protons or something similar - should rapidly start to interact with photons in the cosmic microwave background and produce pions: such high-energy rays shouldn't get too far. It is almost impossible that their density would be so high that even this exponentially reduced number would give us dozens of events (in a different galaxy!).

I think that it more or less means that these cosmic rays don't interact with photons or they are not elementary or they are not coming from a large distance. Nevertheless, they must surely be subject to the strong interaction (probably) because they interact with nuclei on Earth: the resulting showers are what Auger observes.

Alternatively, of course, one might conjecture that the particles are heavy nuclei if not bullets from a rifle ;-), heavily composite objects. Concerning the last possibility, it is not clear why people from other galaxies would be shooting at us with rifles. ;-)

Finally, the particles might be created in our galaxy - not sure where - or there might be something wrong with our theories at high energy or something wrong with the experiment or its interpretation.

So there are many question marks and possibilities concerning the apparent GZK paradox. However, even if this paradox is solved in one way or another, we will still not be certain what astrophysical processes or other processes can accelerate particles to such an enormous energy.

For example, if you thought that this high energy is caused by global warming, the required temperature would be over 1 trillion trillion °C. ;-) Of course, the temperature known in any astrophysical object we understand is way smaller.

Well, particles might be hypothetically forced to orbit a black hole and accelerate at the same moment.

Diversity of opinions in the IPCC

Steven Milloy received answers to his questions from 54 U.S. members of the IPCC. While some questions might be a bit vague and different answers shouldn't be unexpected, there are others - such as those about the ideal temperature - where you would expect agreement if there were a "consensus".

Among the two PC fashionable but completely opposite words, there is much more diversity than consensus inside the IPCC. Look at their answers. We always sketch the question and write the percentages of people who chose particular answers. See the full report.

The main driver of climate change is

• 63% mainly human plus nature
• 20% human
• 11% mainly nature plus human
• 4% natural
• 2% no opinion

The role of CO2 emissions is

• 70% the greatest among other important reasons
• 17% the key
• 6% also important among other key effects
• 6% not among the important ones
• 2% no opinion

The impact of CO2 regulation on the climate would be

• 72% strong
• 19% some
• 7% undiscernible
• 2% no opinion
• 0% none

Current mean temperature is

• 56% unprecedentedly warm and increasing
• 31% within natural variability but getting unprecedented
• 5% no opinion
• 4% within natural limits and stable
• 4% not a useful metric

Average warming by 1° C is

• 48% undesirable
• 39% desirable for some not others
• 7% too difficult to say
• 4% desirable
• 2% no opinion

The ideal global climate

• 61% doesn't exist
• 17% is today
• 13% is cooler than today
• 7% no opinion
• 2% is warmer than today

Moreover, the answers that almost all environmental journalists would probably give you - with a lot of certainty on their faces - are supported by random percentages of scientists, sometimes more than 50% and sometimes less than 50%.

One more comment. Another source of bias in Milloy's results is the fact that only some people chose to participate. The most alarmist members told him f*ck o*f, some of them explicitly. So there is a selection bias in his results. But at the same moment, we must realize that there exists precisely the same kind of selection bias of the opposite sign that determines which people chose to collaborate with an institution that turned out to be as shameful as the IPCC.

And that's the memo.

Ford Escape hybrid SUV: commercial

Max dislikes this ad. What do I think about this ad?

Well, I think that unfortunately, it is an honest description of the present reality. The father is a normal person who apparently bought the 2008 Ford Escape hybrid SUV simply because it is the most fuel-efficient SUV in the world.

His daughter wants to be dropped a few blocks away from her final destination, a theater. Why? Because she is ashamed to use a normal car, especially her dad's SUV. She explains that the whole part of the town around the theater actually uses hybrids and bikes. That's how her friends choose their friends. That must be a really interesting town if it has such neighborhoods.

Just nuke it.

Her father tells her that their car is a hybrid. She seems stunned even though the word "hybrid" is clearly written on the rear side of the car (look when she opens the door). "Do you mean a hybrid hybrid?" Well, I don't know what a hybrid hybrid means, he says, but yes. "Why didn't you tell me it was a hybrid?" Well, her father didn't find it necessary to shout that he is driving a hybrid because it is not such a big deal. I suppose that the Ford Motor Company doesn't find it appropriate to shout and brag either.

The father is smiling a bit while the daughter seems really unpleasant to me: she directs the discussions as if it were an interview with KGB. Nevertheless, it seems that the commercial tries to paint the father as the losing side, morally speaking. The genuinely concerned daughter is apparently forced by her teachers (or classmates?) to impose strict environmental rules at home. She is led to be ashamed of her father because he is not like one of those fathers from that "part of the town". It just happens that she learns that she has no reason.

Except for the bragging. Should fathers be explaining their small daughters what kind of motors their cars have? It is extremely likely that she couldn't follow it. So should people talk about hybrids because it is fashionable? Driving hybrids is not so environmentally friendly, after all. This one has 34 miles per gallon. She should have used mass transportation or a bike if she is so concerned.

Finally, let us ask. Is the commercial effective? I morally support the father who probably represents the whole company. But what is so amazing about a commercial that essentially says that your car is not such a big deal? Is it supposed to increase the sales? Does the company really believe that even the fathers who buy the cars are deciding according to sentiments in some bizarre "parts of the town"?



I am probably too old-fashioned but those simple old ads paid for by Henry Ford were more meaningful than the recent ads building on psychological intimidation and political correctness. People buy cars and should buy them because they are powerful, fast, cheap, efficient, pretty, and because they have other good objective features, not because they are politically correct in a "part of the town". It's very bad if the people in car companies don't get it.

Also, if Ford wanted to offer a model that would be bought by similar hypocritical jerks as some of those who buy Prii (which I suppose is plural of Prius) because it is politically correct, my opinion is that they have failed, too. The advertisement is just not sufficiently "politically correct" to become a symbol of those people. To summarize, I don't know who is the target audience and I think it is sad that this is how the thinking about products and commercials start to look like.

And that's the memo.

But one more link here: GM, Ford, and Toyota answer whether they plan to produce flying cars. They seem skeptical. Maybe they should hire this 12-year-old Korean string theorist.

Males cause global warming

Feminism gets unified with the global warming theory

Nude Socialist informs us that the Swedish ministry of sustainable development led by Gerd Johnsson-Latham has determined that global warming is mostly man-made and not so much woman-made.

A survey has shown that three quarters of Swedish drivers are male. The top 10 percent of drivers generate 60 percent of car emissions.

The additional Y chromosome thus triples car CO2 emissions. There exists another piece of evidence that women's lives are more clean: they spend 20 times as much as men on hygiene products. More generally, they spend 4 times as much as men on consumer goods.

You can also see the same thing on the symbols of both sexes:



Figure 1: the old logos prove that the two sexes are created equal, especially the women

Females (left), much likes eggs, sit still, while males (right), much like sperms, are little drivers who drive around and emit dangerous CO2 emissions.

The United Nations and all environmentally conscious nations in the world should promote clean technologies. In the hospitals all over the world, they should only give birth to girls and not boys who could move both the mankind and womankind closer to a cataclysm.

Mrs Kyoto protocols

It has been calculated by the leading international climate experts that if the gender composition of the society is improved from 50(f):50(m) to 90(f):10(m), the CO2 car emissions will drop to 60 percent of the present values. If the figure 90 increases to 100, we will be at 50 percent of present emissions - a huge progress.

Sexmission

The Polish ministry of sustainable development has created a documentary called "Sexmission" (IMDB, trailer) that shows how this ideal state of affairs should be achieved.

The freely available parts of the documentary explain several basic points:

• the last men should first be hibernated
  and the daughter is told to remember her father's face
• girls must be properly educated about the evils of the former patriarchal society
• trials against the two remaining polluters, men, must be held by the Council of Women and they must be explained that Copernicus and Einstein were both women when they mention that the history of progress is a history of males
  
• later, the naturalization (sex-changing) surgery is performed by the unlucky daughter who had a male parent
• the passwords must be chosen so that no women who could collaborate with men in the future say it by chance (includes English subtitles)
  

I have always liked the movie. It is very entertaining. If you don't know, it is a Polish 1984 science-fiction cult movie about the future purely female, feminist totalitarian society living under the ground in a post-nuclear-war world. Two men are previously hibernated (before the war, in the first hibernation experiment) and wake up in that future society.

They eventually manage to convince the beautiful Lamia in the last clip that the feminist world is bad and teach them some old fashioned methods. :-) They liberate it and restore boy production in the children-producing factories. But when they escape from the underground, it turns out that life didn't end on the surface and many people were living decent lives while the most prominent woman was not really female. (See 40 extra minutes in Czech dubbing.)

The movie was a subtle criticism of communism but it was allowed in post-Solidarnosc Poland, except for three "anti-Soviet" minutes that had to be cut.

While the movie is a great comedy, I also realized at Harvard that it is actually very realistic. For example, the third clip among the five clips in the list above is virtually identical to the Harvard FAS faculty meetings during the Summers controversy.

The Swedish ministry adds one more reason to think that the movie may be more than just a pure fantasy.

Hat tip for the link to NS: Marc Morano

Garrett Lisi: An exceptionally simple theory of everything

The most entertaining paper that managed to creep into hep-th today is called

An exceptionally simple theory of everything (PDF).

---

Update I: the preprint was re-classified from the professional hep-th archive to gen-ph, general physics, an archive mostly dedicated to laymen's fantasies. Thanks God. Comment for general readers: this preprint is of course not peer-reviewed and probably won't get published anywhere.

Update II: Roger Highfield whom we know from his article attacking the scientific method and claiming that Einstein may have started the rot has returned. In a new, equally