Superheating: fun in a microwave oven

Superheating (Wikipedia) may be fun but it may also be dangerous.

U.S. poll: Global warming 8th environmental problem

Some social scientists in Missouri made

a survey (UPI report)

in which people located environmental issues that deserve, in their opinion, more effort from the government. Despite the intense media hysteria, CO2 emissions do not belong among the top environmental issues. The most important issues (some of them written positively, some of them negatively, the context makes it clear) according to the U.S. citizens are

1. drinking water
2. pollution of rivers, lakes, and ecosystems
3. smog
   
4. forest preservation
5. acid rain
6. tropical rain forests
7. national parks
8. greenhouse emissions
9. ozone layer
10. nature around "my" home
11. urban sprawl
12. extinction.

Well, I would surely put greenhouse emissions at the last place here (and below many other environmental topics) but the 8th place is what the U.S. citizens think. If the governments planned to spend 1% of the GDP for the 8th environmental problem, it is not hard to see that the governments would probably need more than 100% of the GDP for all environmental issues combined. And how would you pay for the other sectors?

Because people are still not buying this weird fashionable propaganda about a dangerous global warming, it is not too surprising that Al Gore, the de facto leader of the IPCC and similar disgraceful institutions, is planning to strengthen his attempts to brainwash the people. His new threat is that he wants to waste USD 300 million for pure propaganda.

His commercials will create unlikely bedfellows - for example, Pat Robertson will sleep with Al Sharpton; see NewsBusters' comments. I suppose that Al Gore assumes that he will cover the "whole" political spectrum. Well, I guess that the spectrum is not wide enough for me. Most likely, some dimensions such as intelligence (and uncorruptability by rich quasireligious zealots) might be absent on the Sharpton-Robertson axis. But frankly speaking, it is likely that millions of Americans will perceive themselves as a certain linear combination of these two Gentlemen - as Sharpertsons and Roberptons of various kinds. ;-/

LHC alarmists ask judge to save the world

Dennis Overbye has an entertaining - or stunning, depending on your perspective - article in

The New York Times,

the most e-mailed article of the Times today. See also MSNBC's Alan Boyle. Nima, Lisa, and a few others are among the serious sources. Overbye follows physics and certainly its sociological structure.

A poor judge in Honolulu was ordered by two alternative physicists who have visited this blog several times and who have written some inappropriate and impolite comments, namely Walter Wagner (left, click) and Luis Sancho, to prevent the CERN - an institution at a completely different continent :-) - from launching the LHC collider which is expected to begin operations at 10 TeV in July.

A short time ago, I discussed the topic about the LHC alarmists and won't repeat myself. But let me say that I have recently seen so much monstrous stupidity among ordinary people and even not-so-ordinary people that I wouldn't really be shocked if the two loons mentioned above were able and allowed to kill the USD 6 billion experiment or at least delay it by 4 months, as they plan now. More precisely, I would be shocked but rationally speaking, I wouldn't be completely surprised. ;-)

What can the poor judge do if he can't go through the scientific arguments and the hypothetical catastrophic Lorentz violation effects himself? He must trust other people. One half of them, including the blog "Freedom of Science" (where it is claimed that physicists have taken the absurd so far into the twilight zone so that their claims can't be trusted by the courts), tell him that our planet may be destroyed. He simply has to act! :-)



Luis Sancho's unification theory based on superorganisms looks much like Lee Smolin's octopi theory. Click the image for more details of read a "preprint". While LS (U.S. edition) has only thought about the cosmic natural selection and reproduction through black holes, his LS (Spain) counterpart has also discovered star nurseries and reproductive curves of galactic herds. ;-)

We live in a world that respects an obsessed megalomaniac and a frequent prophet of doom, Al Gore, as a prominent climate scientist and that copies the opinions of Lee Smolin and similar cranks about high-energy physics. If you combine the two examples from the previous sentence, it shouldn't be excessively surprising if a federal judge decided that the Mr Wagner and Mr Sancho have a point and that we face a catastrophic threat that should be avoided. ;-)

According to a Discover Magazine blogger, Wagner's greatest achievement is that he has appeared on the paranormal-matters talk show "Coast to Coast" in which he claimed a discovery of magnetic monopoles in his balloon. Wagner has apparently worked in nuclear medicine and is currently accused (together with his wife) of an identity theft designed to steal pieces of the World Botanical Gardens.

Sancho, who has no degrees either, is a "time theory expert" who used to live in Barcelona, Spain (see rafa's comments). It seems that he has moved to Hawaii as well, to learn some surfing in order to be accepted as a new Albert Einstein or even a new Garrett Lisi by the world. ;-) FoxNews says that Sancho's presence makes the entire case a bit quixotic. :-)

The judges could also approve the opinion of another commenter on this blog, Lawrence Krauss, that the astronomers are ruining the Universe by looking at it and ban cosmology. Incidentally, Krauss recently wrote an article in Nude Socialist about the destruction of the Universe and Boltzmann's brains in particular and called it "String theory's latest folly" (update: in the slow comments, he argues that the title was chosen by the editors) even though string theorists are pretty much the only group of theoretical physicists who - unlike Sean Carroll or Don Page - doesn't collectively study this 19th century extremely speculative topic.

The only major exception (of a string theorist who likes to write about Boltzmann's brains) I know of is Lenny Susskind (and a small number of his very young collaborators) and Susskind surely enjoys freedom for his occasionally idiosyncratic opinions, without losing his exceptional name. However, the key point that should be obvious is that Boltzmann's brains have nothing to do with two-dimensional conformal field theory coupled to gravity or any other technical aspect connected with string theory.

Because of these simple reasons, "String Theory's Latest Folly" is what I call a dishonest title for an article criticizing speculative papers about cosmology - something that Krauss likes to write himself (besides neverending preprint conversations about fractal analyses of paintings of Jackson Pollock whose details resemble Luis Sancho's fractal argument from the image above where the longest distance scale i=9 agrees with i=1).

Hat tip (LHC): Steve Heston

P.S.: Let me say something about the titles. Of course, I do know that the title is routinely chosen by the editor or the publisher. That was the case of "The Bogdanov Equation", too. On the other hand, I am convinced that the author always has to approve it. Although it was a bit of a shock to see the cover of the book for the first time, I of course fully confess that I approved it after a little thought accompanied by mixed feelings even though this title is arguably not the most accurate description of the content of the book. Whether someone including myself likes it or not, I am responsible for the title. In the very same way, I am convinced that the titles such as "The Trouble With Physics" and "String Theory's Latest Folly" were approved by the authors, too. Trying to get rid of the responsibility - whenever the title becomes inconvenient - is an unfair game.

Earth Hour: turn your lights on at 8 p.m.

Tonight, at 8 p.m. local time, you should turn on all the light bulbs you have for 60 minutes (it will only cost you 3 cents per light bulb in average for the whole hour) to fight global obscurantism. You should look how many lights are on around. Every light bulb you see will be a sign of the audacity of hope, as Jeremiah Wright would say.

An article about the event.
Official U.S. page.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a group of wild animals pretending to be humans, is trying to return our civilization to the Dark Ages. They urge everyone to turn their lights off. But as Financial Post recommends: don't have a sexual intercourse with pandas.



The event was tried in Sydney a year ago and now it goes global. A month ago, a similar event in the U.K. saved statistically insignificant 0.1% of the energy, despite loud and hysterical threats by the London bishop, Richard Anti-Christ Chartres.

Tonight, the officials in many cities, including Atlanta, Phoenix, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, Bangkok, Dubai, Tel Aviv, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Mexico City, Ottawa, Warsaw, Copenhagen, and Dublin, joined the activists. The Chicago skyline will probably disappear, too. All Czech cities, towns, and villages unanimously rejected the idea. TVs will likely be on, too: Sexy Pistols are on TV NOVA since 8 p.m. ;-) India won't join, either.



Incidentally, the believers who will replace light bulbs by candles should know that a candle produces as much CO2 as a 20W light bulb powered by average energy sources during the same time. Five candles replace the CO2 output of a 100W light bulb.

Last February, Jiří Hájek, the spokesman for the Prague Castle described a similar 5-minute event well:

You talk in categories of holocaust deniers which is clearly absolute nonsense. If you were right, we could return to the trees and deny the whole civilization. The 'five minutes without power' campaign is a ridiculous political event and people who believe these warnings are naive. We can't see obscurantism [in Czech: darkism] in natura frequently but this is an example.

Alexander Grothendieck: 80th birthday

Today, Alexander Grothendieck probably and hopefully celebrates his 80th birthday.

Congratulations to his cabin in the Pyrenees.

The romantic home doesn't prevent him from doing some great mathematics. For example, in Fall 2007, Chien-Hao Liu and Shing-Tung Yau clarified the new Polchinski-Grothendieck D-brane Ansatz on page 17 (19 of 59). ;-)

How did the Polchinski-Grothendieck collaboration work? Well, Grothendieck was having fun with his garden in the mountains while Joe listened to a Grothendieck-related talk and this is what he, not to be confused with Ginger, heard. :-)

Superdelegates

Bolshevik guerilla groups such as MoveOn.ORG and other fans of a particular presidential candidate are trying to intimidate the whole Democratic Party into disregarding its own rules.

In 1982, a commission chaired by North Carolina governor Jim Hunt analyzed the reasons behind humiliating losses of McGovern against Nixon (1972) and Carter against Reagan (1980) and they determined that an important reason was that the party leaders who actually have some political skills have lost the influence over the Democratic Party.

Hunt et al. invented the superdelegates. Their intended share was 30%, the figure dropped to 14% instantly, but grew to roughly 20% today.

One could probably live without these rules but there certainly exists a rational justification of these new rules: without such an explicit influence of the party officials, the whole primaries reduce to a new round of general elections. The party would effectively disappear. More importantly, they are the current rules of the game. A certain fraction of the delegates are unpledged and they vote independently of the popular vote.

I find it kind of amazing that so many people are ready to question these rules in the middle of the game - just because they suddenly find superdelegates inconvenient. When rules are ignored but no one is hurt, one can sometimes understand such a careless approach. But that's certainly not the case right now.

If the Democratic Party thought that the superdelegates were such a bad policy, they should have abolished them - for example, after 2000, when the Democratic nutjobs promoted the popular vote into a holy principle by ad hoc and ridiculous claims that their Gore should have won the 2000 elections that he lost. But they didn't abolish them which makes a difference.

I have no idea how they want to justify such a position and I have no clue how they actually want to guarantee that the rules will be pissed upon because it is not such a trivial thing to do something that blatantly contradicts their own law. Will they blackmail or assassinate the superdelegates? What they want to do is nothing less than a coup or a new October Revolution.

Needless to say, the potential inability of the Democratic Party to obey its own rules will eventually lead to a backlash. Sponsors might be lost and the 2008 Democratic nominee may easily repeat the fate of McGovern and Carter in the general elections.

And that's the memo.

Al Gore, the flat Earth, and a tiny, tiny minority

On Sunday, 7 p.m. ET/PT, CBS will broadcast

Al Gore's message (CBS)

to us, a "tiny, tiny minority" of climate realists. We are so tiny, in fact, that we are almost like those who believe that the Moon landing was shot in Arizona and the world is flat, this monster mind tells us.



Thank you so much for your revealing message, Mr Gore, even though you are not exactly the only person at your intellectual level who is sending me similar messages.



When you listen to him, you can see that this guy must genuinely believe that it is possible to learn how Nature works or settle an argument by sticking with a majority. That's the scientific method, Gore edition.

For example, if you want to know whether the mankind or the German nation can survive without exterminating the Jews, you listen to the leader and to the majority who says "It can't" and to be really sure that you are right, you send the tiny, tiny minority to the same camps as the Jews.

But are those who disagree with Gore a minority? Read the comments at the CBS link above or below a similar article in

USA TODAY.

An overwhelming majority of the commenters criticize Al Gore, the scientists who follow him, Gore's hypocrisy, Gore's politicization of science, and they offer link to skeptical resources. Some of their wise comments and jokes are pretty good:

Following scientists who back Al Gore is like following the lead lemming to the see, glub glub glub. He didn't run for the president because he didn't want to take the pay cut. Who believes Al Gore's climate science must also believe that he invented the Internet. Al Gore is a moron who has never contributed anything worthwhile when he had a chance. Now he's jumping on any bandwagon that will give him the time to utter his mindless drivel. There is so much in common with religion. The earth has been warming since 1847. Hey Al, greetings from the "tiny" minority that whipped you and Kerry like red headed stepchildren. In reality, after you peel the left wing liberal Hollywood cretins from his bandwagon, the "tiny" group is actually Al's.



Al Gore should be finally "realized" that his 15 minutes of fame are up.

2008 Abel Prize: Thompson and Tits

The 2008 Abel Prize for mathematics

is shared by John Griggs Thompson (Florida) and Jacques Tits (France). It is a great victory for group theory and symmetries.



Both mathematicians have played a key role in the multi-decadal project of the classification of all finite groups.

John Griggs Thompson (*1932) has also solved the problem of the nilpotency of Frobenius kernels. He proved the even parity of the order of simple non-Abelian groups, classified various groups satisfying constraints on various normalizers. The Thompson group is one of the sporadic groups. It may be obtained from a centralizer of a type 3C element of the monster group or as a subgroup of the Chevalley group E8(F3), a reason why the Thompson group has a 248-dimensional representation.

You might think that giving an Abel prize for non-Abelian groups is paradoxical but believe me, giving USD 1.2 million for Abelian groups would be even more crazy. ;-)

Jacques Tits (*1930), a Belgian mathematician, was an honorary member of the infamous ultra-rigorous Nicolas Bourbaki group. However, not everything is an excrement if it looks dark. ;-) Tits is the guy who has coined the terms such as "Coxeter number", "Coxeter group", and "Coxeter graph". You may have heard of the Tits group, the "simplest" or "most classical" among the sporadic groups (occasionally included among groups of Lie type): it is the derived subgroup of the twisted Chevalley group 2F4(2).

BMW 520d: more efficient than Toyota Prius

Many celebrities and folks who want to look green like to buy Toyota Prius these days.



The Sunday Times organized a test and it seems to imply that Prius is just what it seems to be - a fashionable symbolic bubble for hypocrites that actually consumes more fuel than ordinary big cars and enjoys undeserved special rights on the superhighways.



On their trip from London to Geneva (plus 100 urban miles), the BMW pictured above played music and ran air-conditioning while the Prius driver turned off both as he tried to drive very carefully. Nevertheless, the BMW consumed 4.7 liters per 100 km (41.9 mpg) while the Prius has burned 4.9 liters per 100 km in average (40.1 mpg). Subtle BMW gadgets to save fuel seem to be more important than the hybrid core of the Prius as well as its 500 missing pounds.

The Prius driver was disappointed and plans to buy a V8 Range Rover and to open his own oil well in protest against the would-be environmentalist silliness that began to influence the car industry and traffic rules.

See also TechnoRide, Autoblog.

D2-branes from M2-branes, three-algebras, and associators

Today, I certainly recommend you the hep-th paper by

Sunil Mukhi, Constantinos Papageorgakis

who investigate a new type of a Higgs mechanism in a new type of theory relevant for M-theory membranes. A condensate of a 3-algebra-valued eighth scalar is claimed to convert a topological field theory from M2-branes to the conventional Yang-Mills theory defined on D2-branes.

The authors wisely posted the paper as the first paper on the hep-th archive. They did the right thing because the paper is arguably the most important one.

Review

Because I haven't yet written about these cool things, let me say a few words. The main resource I recommend you about this new theory is a paper by

Jonathan Bagger and Neil Lambert

that defines a very promising candidate for a theory describing N M2-branes because it has the required supersymmetries, conformal symmetry, SO(8) R-symmetry, and - according to the Mukhi & Papageorgakis paper - also the correct Yang-Mills correct limit after the Higgsing. That looks like a really non-trivial body of evidence for such an unusual theory.

For the sake of order, I won't link to the papers by Basu and Harvey (2004), Bagger and Lambert (2006), and Gustavsson (2007) who, especially in the latter case, also deserve credit. Instead, I will only discuss the story as presented by Bagger and Lambert (2007) mentioned above. David Berman has been playing with similar things. So was I. And Shiraz Minwalla was very helpful for the Mukhi & Papageorgakis new paper.

Mysterious triple structures of M-theory

Conventional physics uses quadratic Lagrangians, two-dimensional worldsheets, second-rank tensors under Yang-Mills groups, commutators between two objects, and similar structures based on the number "2" all the time. We know them quite well.

Still, it looks likely that there exists a whole realm of wisdom that remains mostly hidden in a cloud of mystery. Even though a great deal of the physics is known, we don't know of any simple covariant descriptions of M-theory in 11 dimensions, multiple M2-branes, and multiple M5-branes. We know how to study many physical phenomena in their context but our degree of understanding simply doesn't seem to match the Yang-Mills, worldsheet, free theories discussed in the previous paragraph.

There exist hints that these largely unknown structures might be based on the number "3" in a similar way as the known theories are based on the number "2". This comment looks extremely vague but there are many reasons to see this prophesy. Exceptional groups frequently appearing in M-theory have cubic invariants. Membrane worldvolumes have three, not two dimensions. The number of degrees of freedom of an M5-brane seems to scale with the third, not second power of N. And all these insights could be relevant for the third superstring revolution just like D-branes and Yang-Mills theories were for the second. ;-)

We understand the low-energy limit of a single M2-brane and a single M5-brane. In the former case, the theory has 8 transverse dimensions (2+1 + 8 = 11 as in M-theory). One of the dimensions can be electromagnetically dualized to a gauge field in 2+1 dimensions, obtainining a gauge theory in 2+1 dimensions with 7 additional transverse scalars, a description of D2-branes in type IIA string theory. That's how the Yang-Mills terms for the D2-brane gauge field is generating from the eleventh dimension of M-theory that gets compactified.

The non-Abelian case generalizing the simple construction above to the case of multiple M2-branes or D2-branes is not understood. Or at least, it wasn't understood until recently, until the end of 2007. ;-)

You might think of many ways how the number "2" in the well-known theories should be replaced by "3". Certain people keep on constructing 2-groups, gerbes, and similar superconstructions that never work at all. The Bagger-Lambert-Gustavsson construction is different because it actually seems to have all the required symmetries and the correct Yang-Mills limit after the Higgsing!

So how does the Bagger-Lambert-Gustavsson construction work? It will sound as a sort of kindergarten game but believe me, I am serious. ;-)

Well, the commutator [A,B] uses two letters. It vanishes if A,B commute with one another. The generalization to three objects must clearly be [A,B,C]. It vanishes if the associativity holds, so choose

< A,B,C > = (A.B).C - A.(B.C)

That's the associator, extending the commutator. ;-) For certain reasons, it is more useful to use the completely antisymmetrized associator

[A,B,C] = < A,B,C > +- 5 other terms

A trace form (behaving "democratically" with respect to three objects in a product) and a Hermitean conjugation must exist. The trace of A and the antisymmetrized associator [B,C,D] gives you an antisymmetrized object with four indices. Now you can write down a lot of mutated versions of well-known equations with an additional index, including the mutated Jacobi identity.

Mutated Lie rules and actions

The parameter Lambda of gauge transformation in this three-algebra realm have two "adjoint" indices instead of one. The mutated gauge fields and mutated gauge transformations look pretty much identical as in the Yang-Mills case if you write them in terms of two indices attached to every gauge field. The three-algebras are "more powerful" than the normal Lie algebras but one can construct a Lie algebra "imprint" of every three-algebras - a potential Lie algebras that can occur in D-brane Yang-Mills limits of it.

An expert could think that all of these games are childish and probably won't lead to sensible theories. The first shock occurs on page 7 of Bagger & Lambert where a supersymmetric action based on these things is found. It literally looks like the three-generalizations of the usual formulae. For example, the supersymmetry variation of a fermion has the normal term proportional to "X" but also an additional non-linear term proportional to the associator [X_I, X_J, X_K]. Wow. The 4-index mutated structure constant tensors appear elsewhere.

The final Lagrangian looks as expected. There is no kinetic term for the gauge field, normal kinetic terms for the scalars and fermions, a mutated Yukawa term with Psi.X.X.Psi replacing the usual Yukawa Psi.X.Psi term, and a Chern-Simons action for the gauge field. The final Lagrangian has no free parameters at all, assuming that certain quantization rules constrain the mutated structure constants f^{bcd}_a.

Now, what are these bizarre three-algebras? Do they exist at all? In fact, there is at least one non-trivial one, with four "colors" and f_{abcd} being proportional to the completely antisymmetrized epsilon_{abcd}. However, Bandres, Lipstein, Schwartz argue that it is difficult - at least for them - to generalize the four-color SO(4) into a more general case. Not even otherwise natural structure constants of the octonions seem to satisfy the required mutated Jacobi identity.

Higgsing and applications to M5-branes and M-theory

After you absorb all these novel three-algebra insights, you should read the new paper by Mukhi and Papageorgakis, fully deriving the D2-brane supersymmetric action from a mutated Higgsing of the M2-brane three-algebra action. That's pretty fascinating unless there is a hidden catch somewhere. The four-color Bagger-Lambert SO(4) algebra is eventually broken to the diagonal SU(2) inside SU(2) x SU(2), ending up with the U(2) supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory including the center-of-mass degrees of freedom.

Mukhi and Papageorgakis had to correct a confusion in the literature - some people expected, by counting the moduli, that the SO(2) 3-algebra theory should have led to the SU(3) theory for three M2-branes. Shiraz Minwalla importantly told them that this couldn't be the case because such a reduction would imply that there exists no non-trivial theory for two M2-branes.

I haven't known the supersymmetric action but I have already worked on a similar setup a year or two years ago and I think that I slightly know how an analysis of M5-branes using these M2-brane degrees of freedom can be made, including the mutated 3-version of the 't Hooft limit. Tomorrow, Berman, Tadrowski, Thompson will study open membranes and fivebranes in this framework. One day later, Mark van Raamsdonk will frustratingly argue that the moduli space of the BL theory has an unwanted O(2) quotient (missing dimension) and superconformal primaries can't be easily constructed.

So if some readers don't know what topics are hot right now, let me declare three-algebras of M2-branes to be the hottest topic right now. ;-)

And that's the memo.

Scientific American interviews climate realists

Includes Gray, Morano, Spencer...

Joseph Liouville: an anniversary

Joseph Liouville, a 19th century string theorist and politician, was born 199 years ago, on March 24th, 1809.

He lived with his uncle for a few years, showed his talents as a kid, attended all kinds of schools, and met important French mathematicians and physicists. Throughout his life, he wrote about 400 technical papers.

He was also a science official. At some moments of his life, Liouville was defeated by Count Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja, a guy who escaped France during the 1848 revolution to avoid prison sentence for stealing precious books and manuscripts. ;-)

As a moderate republican politician, Liouville was depressed for years after 1849 when he lost an election because working-class socialist radicals and similar political foam became "hot" at that time. He recovered and 1856 and 1857 were among his most scientifically fruitful years.

Science

There have been many different disciplines of mathematical sciences where Liouville left us valuable insights. For example, he was the first man to prove the existence of transcendental numbers (that are not solutions to any algebraic, polynomial equation with rational coefficients). The simplest (but later) example he found is

0.1100010000000000000000010000...

that only has "1" in place "n!". It is so close to the rational numbers that approximate it yet so different that he could show it was not algebraic. An older example he found used continued fractions. Liouville also investigated number theory.

In theoretical physics, he is known for Liouville's theorem, the local continuity equation for a probability distribution function on the phase space (with the current explicitly expressed in terms of derivatives of the probability density, as dictated by the Hamiltonian equations of motion).

He studied various differential equations involving eigenvalues. See, for example, the Sturm-Liouville problem. Many of the problems he studied resemble the tasks one must routinely solve in quantum mechanics - even though he lived 100 years earlier.

Liouville and string theory

But string theorists will surely know him for the Liouville action, also known as the Liouville theory. How the hell could a 19th century mathematician write down an equation for two-dimensional non-critical string theory including the linear dilaton and the exponentially increasing tachyonic wall? Something that is a frequent ingredient of many perturbative string-theoretical constructions? And believe me, he did so. ;-)

The answer is that Liouville's equation is truly natural and someone who studies how to solve partial differential equations and what non-trivial pieces they are made out of will inevitably run into such an equation.

The string-theoretical terminology for Liouville's equation arises from a more general type of a differential equation that Liouville studied, namely the equation requiring that the Laplacian (or d'Alembertian) of the function "u" is equal to the exponential of "u". When "u" is interpreted as the coordinate "X_1(sigma,tau)" in spacetime along which the dilaton is linear, a coordinate that is mixed with the exponent encoding a Weyl scaling and a coordinate treated as a function of the worldsheet variables, Liouville's 19th century equation becomes the same thing as the equation of motion for "X_1(sigma,tau)" in non-critical string theory.

In fact, Liouville didn't just encounter the same equation: he studied it in the context of very similar mathematical procedures that string theorists do before they end up with Liouville's equation, namely an analysis of conformal transformations.

More generally, all kinds of similar, generalized, or nearly-equivalent equations of this kind are referred to as Liouville's equation, for example

y'' + g(y) y'² + f(x)y' = 0

You shouldn't confuse non-linear Liouville's equations with the linear equations that appear in Liouville's theorem or the Sturm-Liouville problem discussed above.

I have emphasized this point many times but let me say it once again. String theory naturally incorporates, explains, interprets, and unifies most of the deep mathematical ideas, concepts, and equations inspired by and/or indirectly or directly connected with the laws governing the physical Universe. There is really no way for a real 21st century mathematical or theoretical physicist to "cut string theory off" without amputating his whole brain.

And that's the memo.

ABC's eco-fundamentalists attack Fred Singer

TV segment, HTML, News Busters comments

I know this kind of TV programs too well from the era of communism - when the target wasn't Fred Singer but people like Václav Havel - and some old films I have watched indicate that the Nazis used to create a very similar stuff. The content is pretty much isomorphic. In both cases, the people who would agree with Havel or Singer are intimidated by the powerful "majorities" or a "working class". The technical arguments are not discussed at all.

Havel would be indirectly connected with the Nazi regime through his family and through the people who collaborated with it; Singer is linked with the oil industry (that currently contains a lot of dishonest and cowardly CEOs co-operating with the environmentalist ideologues anyway). The details are different but structurally speaking, it is the very same type of propaganda. While I surely admit that the communists were bad, I really don't remember a single hit piece at this degree of bloodiness, especially not against a scientist who is 84 years old.

A smiling Dan Harris asks Dr Fred Singer a highly "intelligent" question: "How would you describe yourself, as a skeptic, a denier, a doubter?" And Fred Singer is also smiling and gives him the correct answer: "a realist". We've been recently discussing these terminological matters. An alternative description is "cool heads" vs "hot heads".

I just admire Singer's nerves, balance, and courage. If I were asked the same "question", my face would turn red - in fact, it turned red even when Singer was attacked :-) - and I would probably ask the jerk: "And how would you describe yourself, a brown shirt, a religious bigot, a terrorist, or just a plain idiot?"

The whole hit piece is an amazing demonstration of brainwashing and irrationality. For example, the first sentence says:

One of the most influential scientists in what's been called "The Denial Machine," for decades, Fred Singer has argued loudly that global warming is not dangerous despite the vast majority of scientists who agree it is.

First of all, it has never been called a "Denial Machine" by any serious person, only by one or a few would-be journalists and a couple of their undemanding readers. Just because a scientifically illiterate layperson such as Sharon Begley uses an insulting term for a scientist who knows roughly 500 times more than she does, is not enough to make the statement "it has been called..." on TV honest or correct. Why did Mr Harris hide that it has been called this way only by a scientifically illiterate environmental activist, not by a serious person and certainly not by a good scientist?

Well, it is not hard to guess. An idiot from Greenpeace is later used as a kind of authority in the show. He doesn't know anything and he can't really speak but he shows the would-be journalists a page ("Exxon Secrets") with smears and irrelevant indirect "links" in a combinatorial graph. When did it exactly happen that TV channels in the U.S. consider activists from extreme environmentalist organizations to be more reliable sources of facts about science than John Wheeler's famous students from Princeton?

Second, the sentence clearly includes the assumption that scientists are determining - and have to be determining - their opinions by aligning themselves with "vast majorities": they repeat this assumption roughly four times in the program. Well, some of the scientists do it this way which is why their "scientific" opinion should be completely discarded: they haven't used the scientific method to obtain their opinion and as far as I can say, they are just worthless parrots and parasites robbing the taxpayers who simply defend a party line in science - something that shouldn't exist at all.

Moreover, it is not really the consensus that decides about the opinions of irrational propaganda makers such as Sharon Begley. Among many other disgraceful things, she has also run a hit piece against something that could also be called the "majority opinion" in high-energy physics; recall Barton Zwiebach's reply to it. How is it possible that in that case, the majority doesn't matter? What actually drives her rants is left-wing politics. The more leftist side is always the "winner" in her propaganda pieces. Whenever her opinions and interests are in a minority, she promotes clichés about the discrimination by a majority. But once her opinions become a majority somewhere, she uses the "principles" about the need to completely eliminate the minorities and heretics. There is never any substance in her writings. And these days, there are literally thousands of "journalists" of this kind around. We are all immersed in a gigantic ocean of dumb, ideological garbage.

The double standards in judging minorities and majorities is how the totalitarian ideologues have always been thinking and acting which is why they have crippled whole portions of the world so many times in the past and why they are so dangerous today, too. Those parties - such as NSDAP or the communist parties - would once pretend to be small, suppressed, and cute groups that deserved support. But once they exceeded (or fluctuated above) 50%, they took over and the competition, democracy, and debate was all over. In this respect, there is no difference whatsoever between the Nazis and the environmentalists.

Nuclear winter

The program also says that Singer has disagreed with "mainstream science" in the past. One of their shocking examples is nuclear winter. Well, it's plausible that a majority of scientists counted in a certain irrelevant way supported this theory at some moment in the past. But I wouldn't expect nuclear winter to be a good example to defend majorities or attack Singer because he has been definitely right on this one. Nuclear winter was mainly defended by media-savvy quasi-scientists such as Carl Sagan or Paul Ehrlich.

But many of those who would be labeled as "very good scientists" always agreed with Singer. Richard Feynman said "I really don't think these guys know what they're talking about" and Freeman Dyson said "it's an absolutely atrocious piece of science but ... who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?" The question was pretty much settled in 1991 when the nuclear winter theorists predicted "a year without summers" following Kuwaiti oil fires in 1991. Well, that didn't happen. See more details in Michael Crichton's speech.

Not only the scientific consensus has a bad record in science but Fred Singer himself already has a pretty good record in his disagreements with various fads sold as "consensus science".

Let us hope that the ABC's ratings will continue to plummet towards zero because in a decent society, constant promotion of this garbage should be a serious obstacle to survival.