Why are green advocates failing in climate debate?

Final results: Among 1292 voters, 64% think that it's because the greens are wrong and one can't defend wrong statements well; 18% think that they're overwhelmed by their "religion" or big ideas and can't see and learn the "details"; 9% think that they're obsessed with the change that prevents them from seeing the status quo (the previous two groups have twenty-seven percent in total); 5% think that the greens are not under the same pressure that forces the skeptics to be good to survive; 4% think that the greens are more ignorant or more stupid; 1% think that the greens have less at stake; 0% or 2 participants think that the greens are less passionate.

There seems to be one question in which the green advocates and climate realists agree, and it is this. Green advocates are failing in the climate debate.

Mark Seal is concerned about the climate. So he decided to create the TalkClimateChange forums where all the fantastic green arguments will be collected. He was afraid that there would be no skeptics. Finally, he summarized his experience on La Marguerite.

When I launched the TalkClimateChange forums last year, I was initially worried as to where I would find people who didn’t believe in global warming. I had planned to create a furious debate, but in my experience global warming was such a universally accepted issue that I expected to have to dredge the slums of the internet in order to find a couple of deniers who could keep the argument thriving.

The first few days were slow going, but following a brief write-up of my site by Junk Science I was swamped by climate skeptics who did a good job of frightening off the few brave Greens who slogged out the debate with. Whilst there was a lot of rubbish written, the truth was that they didn’t so much frighten the Greens away - they comprehensively demolished them with a more in depth understanding of the science, cleverly thought out arguments, and some very smart answers. If you want to learn about the physics of convection currents, gas chromatography, or any number of climate science topics then read some of the early debates on TalkClimateChange. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I had to admit that these guys were good.

In the following months the situation hardly changed. As the forum continued to grow, as the blog began to catch traffic, and as I continued to try and recruit green members I continued to be disappointed with the debate. In short, and I am sorry to say it, anti-greens (Reds, as we call them) appear to be more willing to comment, more structured, more able to quote peer reviewed research, more apparently rational and apparently wider read and better informed.

And it’s not just TalkClimateChange. Since we re-launched the forums on Green Options and promoted the “Live Debate“ on Nuclear Power, the pro-nuclear crowd have outclassed the few brave souls that have attempted to take them on (with the exception of our own Matt from TalkClimateChange). So how can this be? Where are all these bright Green champions, and why have I failed to recruit them into the debate? Either it’s down to poor online marketing skills, or there is something else missing. I’ve considered a range of theories as to the problem, none of which seem to fit - such as:

Greens are less educated? Nope.
Greens have less time? Nope.
Greens are a little reticent? Nope.
Greens are less intelligent? Definitely nope.
Greens are less passionate? Absolutely nope.]
Greens have less at stake? Clearly not.

The only feasible explanation that I can come up with so far is that perhaps Greens are less invested in the status quo, and therefore less motivated to protect it? The other possibility is that we are all completely wrong and we’re deluded - please tell me this isn’t so. So I am hoping that La Marguerite, with its insightful host and enlightened readership may be able to help shed some light on this peculiar phenomenon?

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Via Tom Nelson.

Let us try to figure out what are the main reasons why the skeptics are more well-informed and better debaters. Here is a poll that will expire in 2 weeks, around May 24th. Incidentally, if you want to answer that the Greens are bad in these exchanges because they are religiously motivated, you should vote for "Greens are overwhelmed by their big plans that don't allow them to see the details." If you think a bit, I believe you will agree it is essentially the same thing.

I tried to choose options that are more structured, well-informed, and organized. Oops. Once again I revealed that I am a skeptic. ;-)

The option "I disagree with Mark Seal because the Greens are actually very good" was intentionally omitted because it would transform the poll into the usual emotional battle of two sides. This poll is designed to encourage us, the readers, to think about slightly less emotional, more subtle, and less widely discussed questions.

After 1,000+ people have voted, around 60% say that "Greens are not right" while almost 20% say that "their huge plans (or religion) prevents them from seeing the details". A similar answer with "change and status quo" has 10%. 3% voted for "less intelligent or educated", 1% for "less at stake", and 0% (2 people) for "less passionate".

Australian ABC: Al Gore should die at age 3

Some news from the Goremon religion.

Planet Slayer (click!)

is a new website designed by the Australian ABC television station for children that calculates when a kid or another person should die (a newspaper report). A Mr Schpinkee who is clearly mentally challenged and who looks like a rabbit but who has nevertheless been hired as a professor ;-) asks you about the person's meat and gasoline consumption, his income, and flying habits, among similar quantities.

A capitalist imperialist pig on the picture is growing according to the person's "carbon footprint". At the end, it tells you when the person should die.

I've checked Al Gore and he should die at age 3 or so (even though the correct inverse proportionality law would probably lead to the result of a few weeks). While I tend to qualitatively agree with this particular conclusion (yes, it seems that it's already too late), I don't think it is ethical to feed Australian children with this morbid garbage. The best thing I can advise the creators of the website is to follow their own recommendation when they should die. Thank you very much: the average Aussie is told to die at age 9.3 years and the website is dedicated to 9-year old kids, giving the lucky average ones 4 more months to live. Incidentally, your humble correspondent would probably have some additional years to live. ;-)

Is this exercise really expected from 9-year-old kids? At that age, I cared about differential equations and the exponentials of complex numbers.

Hat tip: Anthony Watts

Good science is a slightly macho subject

Sean Carroll wrote a new, somewhat frightening, politically correct attack on Richard Feynman in particular and old-fashioned scientists in general and about 1/3 of his readers have joined the mudslinging campaign:

Charming (Cosmic Variance)

He begins with a story showing that Feynman had a truly egalitarian approach to women - he treated cooks, engineers, and presidents of companies in the same way. ;-)

Later in Carroll's text, Richard Feynman and similar people are blamed for the fact that women tend to leave science, engineering, and technology. Needless to say, it is Nature, not man-made atmosphere ;-), that is responsible for a vast majority of the observed sex differences. The main "culprit" is not only the innate aptitude discussed below but also - obviously - the care that women thankfully decide to dedicate to their children and families.

And the presence of Richard Feynman was mostly a reason for women to stay. Feynman has brought his love and care to several special women, starting from Arlene Feynman (whom he married despite her tuberculosis; I doubt that one of the PC champions is able to love this much), and he has propagated the excitement about physics and his sharp explanations into many corners, including his friends among prostitutes. Do these achievements sound too remote to you, Sean? Well, you might have no prostitute friends and you have contributed nothing to the path integral either. These are two defects of yours, Sean, that can't be compensated against each other.

In fact, Sean and his source criticize Feynman for giving several women the honor to bring a bowl of soup to Feynman himself. That opportunity had to be the ultimate crime that dwarves all events that ever took place in Nazi concentration camps! (At least if you measure them by the contempt printed on Cosmic Variance.) You can see that it is Feynman's implicit disagreement with the ideology of feminism, not his acts that would actually hurt a woman, that lead Sean and others to defame Feynman's character.

And who feels irritated by Feynman's inability to stand pompous fools? The pompous fools surely do. Meanwhile, due to the favorable social atmosphere, these fools became not only pompous but literally aggressive - I talk about various pompous, politically correct pseudointellectuals and crackpots of the Lee Smolin type. Among other things, that's the true primary reason why Smolin attacks the atmosphere of particle physics and mixes it with silly debates about feminism in his dumb book addressed to other pompous fools.

Feynman enjoyed the traditional rules of the game. But he didn't excessively differ from many other typical men of his era because his era wasn't yet poisoned by political correctness. Men and women preferred (and were allowed to prefer) to do whatever they were passionate about and whatever made them happy over the things that look politically correct. Here I don't want to talk about Feynman's stories how he bought a drink to a girl - "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: will you sleep with me tonight?" And she answered Yes. :-) This was just one of dozens of stories of this "sexist pig" that I always found hilarious.

Instead, I want to talk about a more serious subject - the true correlation between gender and science. The following title was chosen for this brief analysis:

Good science is a macho subject

During the years, I have met many scientists, including girls and women, and I remember very well that a vast majority of the women who were serious about science have agreed that science has certain rules and values that must be respected even if the distribution of the people who do science ends up being asymmetric.

In fact, the girls and women I have met have appreciated that certain principles of feminism - and not only the extreme feminism - are incompatible with the scientific method more than the men did. Perhaps, the reason behind this observation is that the women were not afraid to say what they think.

This "women in science" debate is not about the real life and interests of the female scientists who like science because most of them - the "silent majority" - agree with me, not with Sean Carroll. This is a purely ideological debate about a left-wing ideology that Sean Carroll and other feminists who put their ideology above the scientific method decided to aggressively advocate.

Why is it macho?

OK, why is science a macho subject? Could we think about a sentence that succintly summarizes the principle of the scientific method? Open this video and listen to Richard Feynman:

If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.

That simple statement is a key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful it is, how smart you are, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. ;-)

Think about this comment for a while. It sounds cruel, doesn't it? In fact, it is cruel. And it is essential, too. There's no room for compassion or for the promotion of the "enhanced diversity of ideas". Theories that can't agree with experience must be abandoned. It's their death. It doesn't matter whether the author of the theory is male or female, whether he or she had a difficult life, or whether he or she is going to cry. Science doesn't look at these things.

Once again, my experience shows that the girls and women who like science and who are capable of doing it fully appreciate these basic facts. At the same moment, it is important to notice that in the whole society, it is significantly harder for women to accept these principles.

Most female scientists surely realize very well that they significantly differ - and they have to differ - from the average women in many respects and that Sean is fundamentally wrong when he writes: "Providing equal encouragement to everyone entering into science … would make for better science." The female researchers appreciate the freedom of a modern society - including their freedom to join "mostly male" subjects - much like the other women usually appreciate the freedom from the equations (after a few annoying years with equations at school). :-)

Female scientists may still be attractive and do many great things like other women (and many of them do!) but they surely adopt a part of the "hard hat" (engineering) culture, "lab coat" (biology and chemistry) culture, or "geek" (maths, physics, and IT) culture simply because these characteristically "male" cultures are pre-requisites for these disciplines much like muscles are pre-requisites for wrestling. You can't compensate these essentials by "more encouragement" and even if you could, the price could be too high to be paid. Of course that there exist societies where the division of labor between sexes is absent. But all of these societies are primitive tribes that haven't developed much simply because their "feminist friendly" arrangement doesn't work too well.

One can be passionate but he or she can't really be compassionate about the theories (and their authors). I can tell you, it is a non-trivial requirement because I often feel compassionate myself. You may know these feelings. It is a bad feeling if you have been working on a project and you find out that it doesn't work and it cannot work.

It is an equally bad feeling if you obtain/learn evidence that proves that thousands of amateur scientists (and, indeed, it is frequently the professional scientists, too) have wasted decades of their lives by working on a wrong theory - luminiferous aether, loop quantum gravity, or any other wrong theory you may think of. But the cold facts must eventually win over emotions if you are a science-oriented person. And once you learn that the authors of provably wrong theories usually don't care that their theories are wrong - and many of them get away with it much more smoothly than you get away with saying the obvious truth - you lose your compassion, too. Once you see it, there is nothing to be compassionate about!

Average women are probably much less passionate but much more compassionate when it comes to theories. ;-) It is an approach that is valuable in other contexts but it usually hurts in science.

The origin of the differences

Where does the "male" character of the scientific method originate? Science was indisputably born as a male subject. Today, we live in a modern free society where disciplines are opened to anyone, not only the traditional groups, but the discrepancy hasn't disappeared. And it will actually never disappear. Wise female scientists realize that even if they are very good, they are still playing a traditionally male game.

People often talk about the natural selection during the most recent millenia. If you allow me to paraphrase Franziska Michor's attitude, men typically tended to be hunters and warriors while women were mothers and cooks. Consequently, women became better with emotions, empathy, organization of objects on a two-dimensional board, and memorization of frequently repeated procedures. Stronger three-dimensional graphics cards and computational units have evolved in men. They became better in visual perception, dynamics, confrontation, strategies, abstract reasoning, and quantitative analysis.

The female factor gives our society (and the families) the certainty and safety. The male factor gives it the trials and errors, unexpected twists and turns, and the true diversity in complex behavioral patterns. None of us is 100% male or 100% female in this sense but these idealized factors surely do exist.

Such a different evolution of the two sexes was possible because the effect of the sexual hormones on the brain development can be "trained" (and affected by natural selection) somewhat separately for men and women. Each of us has a DNA code that remembers what both the male and female hormones should do with the brain. These effects are surely not the most important processes underlying life but they equally certainly exist.

Most of these observations are probably kind of true but I find it obvious that many of the sex differences originated much earlier, in the era of primitive organisms. In fact, even a sperm is a small Christopher Columbus who tries to discover a new continent on an egg, or the Earth. There also exist exceptions to this rule but the signal supporting this correlation is far too strong to be neglected.

The three-dimensional visualization may be an interesting issue to discuss but I still think that a more elementary and typical male characteristic, namely the innate aptitude for confrontation and competition (and the correspondingly reduced talent for empathy), is the most important driver behind the different attitudes of men and women to sciences. Again, I feel it is necessary to repeat that all these observations are statistical propositions, not universal rules that are valid for every single person.

Also, honest men and women are comparably likely to agree with me. Most men and most women in science - the silent majority - do agree with me. However, almost everyone is being intimidated by the PC Gestapo these days.

Ordinary human relationships

Finally, I want to say a few words about the regulation of dating and other traditional relationships between men and women in the Academia. I have always found these regulations absolutely incredible and outrageous. In 2008, many people want to actively support homosexual marriages but they also want to actively ban some of the most natural heterosexual relationships you can imagine. Here I talk about the policies justified by the propaganda that a "senior" person cannot date a "junior" person because it would be a case of exploitation, discrimination, a clash of interest, or one of many PC buzzwords like that. Give me a break.

I think that in the private sector, the relationships between directors and their secretaries have become kind of "classical" and there is nothing universally wrong about them. Quite on the contrary, these relationships are frequently supported by deep feelings and they often work well, too. Similar comments apply to professors and students or other combinations. My uncle married his former student and it's been a nearly perfect marriage for many decades until it was brutally terminated by my auntie's serious disease.

But even if you thought that these relationships are bad in average, you have no right to impose this opinion of yours upon others - as a universal ban - because such a regulation is a flagrant violation of the freedom of both groups of people. Let me emphasize that I am talking about both groups because senior(ish) scientists are surely not universal scum that the rest of the society should be protected against ;-) - even though this is exactly the impression that the policymakers probably had in mind. Quite on the contrary: scientists, especially the achieved ones, have something that should give their owners a certain new degree of respect and legitimate attractivity (that is still unlikely to compensate the repulsive force that the word "scientist" exerts upon most ordinary people).

The regulation of the relationships in the Academia is a policy that contradicts the presumption of innocence, too.

It is absurd when e.g. a senior(ish) scientist cannot date a person that everyone else - every janitor, for example - can. It is also very insulting - and false - if an institution automatically expects that a senior(ish) scientist has to be a nasty jerk who is going to mix professional and personal issues into unwelcome combinations. I wonder why the universities keep on hiring new people if they assume that all of the new hires are jerks, rapists, or criminals. ;-)

It is also very bad if an institution - or a policymaker - expects that it is always one side that benefits from a relationship while the other side always loses. Relationships usually have two (or more) sides. The statements that it is always one side that loses is Marxist in character. Just like the working class was "exploited" by the evil capitalists, the nice female people were (or even are?) apparently being "exploited" and "discriminated against" by their male counterparts. Sorry but I think that Marxism and feminism are two comparably false and dangerous ideologies. The workers have always been paid for their work and the women get a lot from the relationships, too. I would say that they usually get too much but some women are more modest and they would surely feel happy if they could fetch a bowl of soup to Richard Feynman! Who is protecting the rights of these women? I do - while Sean is a sexist pig who finds all women too undignified to do the job!

Does political correctness hurt someone?

Some left-wing people have argued that the political correctness doesn't hurt anyone. They must live in a different Universe. For example, the good name of one of the best scientists of the 20th century would be at risk unless the people realized that Sean Carroll is just an extreme feminist brown shirt who should be ignored. (Not even the communists have tried to pollute the name of the great "non-socialist" scientists and engineers from the history textbooks - even though not all classical scientists were early communists! Feminists are obviously much nastier in this respect.)

But this controversy is not just about the internet activities of Sean Carroll and about the good name of scientists who have been gone for 20 years. It affects the real life, too.

Real people are being intimidated, threatened, and unjustly accused all the time. Every teacher whose female students have a lower score than the male ones - and it is about 50% of teachers or more - is at risk that the inequality will cause problems to him or her (especially if some people have other reasons for her or usually him to be attacked). Instructors and managers, especially the male ones, are being routinely blamed for the laws of Nature. They are often forced - or effectively forced - to leave. You don't have to go too far to find many obvious examples.

Everyone who says that the excessively politically correct Academia of 2008 is still discriminating against the women is a dangerous lunatic because he or she clearly plans to make the atmosphere even more suffocating and hypocritical than it is today.

And that's the memo.

Hat tip: Rod

Chinese IQ river test: SWF

Via Arcade Temple

Full screen... (click)

The Japanese employers use this test to hire employees in the IT sector. You should get all the people to the other side of the river. Either learn Chinese (in which the game above is written) or click the blue disk for the game to start. Clicking a person moves him or her to or from the boat. Right-click the Flash and choose "rewind" to start from the scratch.

Rules:

• The boat only operates with 1 or 2 people aboard; press a stick with the red button(s) to move
• The mother, the father, or cop are needed for the boat to move
• The prisoner kills any member of the family if the cop is not there as well
• The mother kills a son if the father is not around
• The father kills a daughter if the mother is not around

If you can't solve it for hours and it drives you up the wall, I recommend you to draw the tree of all possible moves. ;-) It is a very simple tree.

As Peter points out, there are only two solutions that are charge (=sex, except for the cop and prisoner who are sex-neutral) conjugate to each other. Each solution by itself is CPT-symmetric. ;-) When you run it backwards in time (time reversal), replace the two sides of the river (parity), and exchange the sexes (charge conjugation), you get the same thing.

A simpler version with cabbage, goat, and wolf has been known for years.

The Colbert Report with Brian Greene II

It's amusing although these Gentlemen might be laughing too much and too stupidly. But so was I. ;-)

See NY Times story about the science festival

Hat tip: Clifford Johnson

Václav Klaus: Blue planet in green shackles

What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?

Update: In D.C., Václav Klaus explained that he is no skeptic - instead, he is resolutely against it and the word "skeptic" is an understatement - and invited Al Gore to debate climate change (video of the full NPC event). Thanks to Benjamin, DrudgeReport

Finally, here are some facts about the new book written by the Czech President. English is finally joining Dutch, German, and Czech. When you're reading this sentence, Polish, Russian, and Spanish translations exist, too. Unfortunately, the clever picture of the blue planet in green chains doesn't appear on the cover.

CEI, the publisher, is now selling the book for USD 13 via Amazon.com, click on the left side! Only 17,000 copies are printed to start with. Because of an efficient use of paper, it only has 100 pages.

The witty book is looking at all kinds of environmentalist questions from a well-known economist's viewpoint: why resources can't really be exhausted (the Stone Age didn't end when people ran out of stones - Lomborg), why people's desire for a better life drives and will drive the technological progress, why politicians have no credentials (and abilities) to deterimne how life should look like in the far future, what costs-benefit analysis tells us about global warming, why a decent warming would be beneficial for mankind, why we need to discount the future, what crazy things the greens have said throughout the decades and what is their common mistake, what are the analogies between environmentalism and communism, and so on.

Many interesting quotes by both sides are included. The author gives a lot of evidence for his assertion that it is freedom, not the climate, that is endangered. Fred Smith, the president of CEI that published the book, wrote the foreword.

On Tuesday, May 27th, Mr Klaus presented the book at 12:30 pm at the

National Press Club

in Washington D.C.: see the video. He met Ben Bernanke, the Fed boss, and Edwin Feulner who is the president of the Heritage Foundation.

On Wednesday, he will receive the Julian Simon Award from the

Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Klaus's keynote speech is titled "Is Schumpeter's Vision of the End of Capitalism Relevant?" Sorry, the dinner ticket costs USD 25,000 if you want the standard platinum quality. I hesitated a bit and finally decided to have some salami instead. ;-)

On Thursday, Mr Klaus will meet the American journalists and Brookings Institution's Strobe Talbott.

Osama bin Laden on K2

Click to zoom in...

CIA finally began to think a bit creatively. The second highest peak in the world, K2 in Northern Pakistan, is such a natural place for such a mountaineer!

See a funny video.

Mount Everest Ascent

Fifty-five years ago, on May 29th, 1953, Edmund Hillary Clinton ;-) reached the summit of the world's highest peak together with Tenzing Norgay.

See equally or more exciting things at this blog.

One-loop moduli in Schnabl gauge

The hep-th papers on the arXiv.ORG are much more interesting today than they are on the average day, even on the average Tuesday (which usually attracts more papers, submitted during the weekend and on Mondays).

I declare the paper by Zwiebach and Kiermeier to be the most interesting paper. But we will mention all 22 papers and classify them into groups.

String field theory

Michael Kiermaier and Barton Zwiebach discuss one-loop amplitudes calculated from string field theory, using Schnabl gauge. There are several "field-theoretical" approaches where the moduli can be extracted in various ways. For example, in the light-cone gauge, they are identified as functions of the interaction times and the fractions of p+, the longitudinal momentum, divided between various virtual strings.

In Siegel gauge, they are expressed as functions of the Schwinger parameters.

The same thing is true in Schnabl gauge. But there is one shocking surprise. In the previous two pictures, the functions mapping the moduli in different languages are messy. In Schnabl gauge, they can be explicitly calculated in closed form as functions of extra degrees of freedom resulting from the special midpoint of the open string! So Schnabl gauge is "simpler" and more natural to calculate amplitudes - and maybe even off-shell amplitudes - than both light-cone gauge and the old Siegel gauge of covariant string field theory.

Yutaka Baba, Nobuyuki Ishibashi, Koichi Murakami also study string field theory and they calculate the annulus diagram, too. They construct a state describing a collection of D-branes at different places in an OSp theory and calculate the annulus diagram out of these concepts, obtaining the same result of the first-quantized setup.

Information loss

Samir Mathur has figured out a new catchy slogan explaining how the information is preserved during black hole evaporation. With horizons, the information should be lost. For his fuzzballs, it is preserved. His reconciliation of these two answers is that a black hole has a finite probability of tunneling into a fuzzball (a small probability times many channels is finite). So already before the hole radiates a significant fraction of the mass, it is already turned into a fuzzball. It sounds sexy except that there is some kind of double-counting here.

If he describes the black hole microstates as fuzzball configurations, he shouldn't talk about "ordinary" old-fashioned black hole states at the same moment, should he? He is really tunneling from one description to another, isn't he? Also, I don't know whether the infalling observers notice the tunneling. In my opinion, they shouldn't.

Another case of tunneling: landscape

Matthew C Johnson and Magdalena Larfors discuss tunneling in a toy model of the landscape, namely the complex structure moduli space of the mirror quintic. They find two basins of attraction and no slow-roll inflation. For multi-dimensional moduli spaces, they approximately construct tunneling instantons, finding that they are typically thick-wall instantons, and discuss various consequences.

Inflation and cosmology

Steven Weinberg proves a theorem dictating how to calculate tree amplitudes in the in-in formalism for inflation from a generating function that solves certain classical equations. A lot of new results from Steven Weinberg...

Masato Minamitsuji discusses FRW-like cosmology in KK braneworlds with extra dimensions. The result seems to coincide with the early RS II cosmology. I am not sure whether I understand the problem being solved here.

String and SUSY phenomenology

Mary Gaillard and Bruno Zumino wrote a basic review of supersymmetry, its history, its relationships to string theory, and the reasons why these tools are likely to be relevant for physics beyond the Standard Model. The paper was dedicated to Julius Wess who died recently. Yes, he was the superpartner of Zumino even though some people could have expected Bruno Zumon.

Pure geometry

Tsuyoshi Houri, Takeshi Oota, Yukinori Yasui write a proof that completes their paper we discussed previously. Now they prove that their generalized Kerr-NUT-deSitter solutions are the most general geometries that preserve the rank-2 conformal CKY tensor.

Dmitri V. Gal'tsov and Nikolai G. Scherbluk present a technique to generate solutions to low-energy (supergravity) equations of M-theory on T^6 such as various black hole and black ring solutions. It is important for them to parameterize the cosets nicely.

Calabi-Yau structures

Michael R. Douglas and Gonzalo Torroba show how to calculate the kinetic terms of various 4D fields obtained as modes on Calabi-Yau manifolds, e.g. the complex structure modulus of a deformed conifold with flux (Klebanov-Strassler solution inside a larger compact Calabi-Yau space). Previous power-law guesses are confirmed qualitatively but their numbers are slightly different.

Constantin Bachas, Massimo Bianchi, Ralph Blumenhagen, Dieter Lust, Timo Weigand look at various Calabi-Yau compactifications with orientifolds but without vector structure, their consistency, and their T-duals (intersecting IIA braneworlds).

Amihay Hanany and Noppadol Mekareeya encounter the Calabi-Yau geometry in a context that is related to the following category - super-QCD. The geometry, the Calabi-Yau cone over a weighted projective variety, appears as a classical moduli space of a super-QCD theory. But the main goal is actually to count gauge-invariant operators in various theories, using generating functions, Hilbert series, and the Molien-Weyl formula - in the context of SU and (by orientifolding) SO and Sp groups.

Holography and AdS/CFT

Yasuaki Hikida and Volker Schomerus prove the FZZ duality: the cigar conformal field theory is now officially equivalent to the Sine-Liouville model! It is enough to check all the tachyon vertex operators. They use some methods based on the sl(2) Langlands program.

M.Bonini, G.M.Cicuta, E.Onofri study the spectrum of the dilatation operator in the post-BMN description of gauge theory, using the algebraic definition by Minahan et al., using the scalar and single-trace character of the objects. A lot of eigenstates is found.

Michal P. Heller, R. Loganayagam, Michal Spalinski, Piotr Surowka, Samuel E. Vazquez use a new parameterization to remove a divergence from the late time expansion of a boost-invariant plasma in AdS/CFT of the N=4 super Yang-Mills.

Matthew M. Roberts and Sean A. Hartnoll use AdS4/CFT3 to study superconductors, finding a pseudogap at low temperatures and a positive Hall conductivity.

R. Fukuda "derives" the 't Hooft - Kogut-Susskind dielectric model of confinement from the stability of the condensed vacuum and I don't understand how such a proof is possible and whether there is some circular reasoning involved.

Cosmological billiards

Marc Henneaux, Daniel Persson, Daniel H. Wesley decided to study cosmological billiards systematically. They look at various things such as the Coxeter group to see whether a particular case exhibits chaotic dynamics or not, among other questions.

Membrane minirevolution

Hai Lin claims to construct new 3-algebras that are positively definite, by decoupling a negative mode from an indefinite solution. The author also discusses Kač-Moody, infinite-dimensional versions of 3-algebras (including central charges that appear automatically).

Shamik Banerjee and Ashoke Sen write something that I realized since the first papers about the Bagger-Lambert-Gustavsson Lagrangian: the extra scalar field is the position of the M2-brane center of mass in cylindrical coordinates.

Assorted papers

A. Lewis Licht is motivated by the unparticle physics but ends up investigating open Wilson lines (needed to make the unparticle action gauge-invariant). It is claimed that the Mandelstam derivative of an open Wilson line is "mathematically inconsistent". What can this statement about a derivative mean? What is really meant is that Mandelstam has omitted one term. But I don't understand the paper.

Kazuo Fujikawa studies the non-Hermitean character of the radial component of the momentum, P_r, in polar coordinates and its links to the extra power-law repulsive potential that appears in the path-integral description. For different dimensions, there are different qualitative behaviors. I can't quite imagine that there is something new - beyond the homework in courses of quantum mechanics - in this paper.

Freeman Dyson vs RealClimate.ORG

Freeman Dyson reviews two books about the climate change policies - books written by William Nordhaus and Ernesto Zedillo, respectively.

David Archer of RealClimate.ORG responds. This exchange is mostly about policies which is why the extreme political colors of the RealClimate.ORG activists become even more obvious.

Let us talk about four main topics as summarized by Archer:

1. Waiting for carbon sequestering technologies
2. Estimating costs of removing CO2 emissions
   
3. The validity of discounting in economics
4. Attacks against climate realists

Carbon sequestering

Freeman Dyson expects that genetic engineering will soon lead to artificial plants that are able to remove CO2 from the atmosphere efficiently. Well, I find it conceivable but not guaranteed. At any rate, the possibility of a similar technological breakthrough should be considered as carefully as the possibility of a new efficient and widely usable energy source. Sometime in the future, one (or both) of these breakthroughs may take place. I don't know which one is going to be the first one. It is wrong to assume that we know it.

Archer also attacks Dyson for daring to consider the business-as-usual at all. Well, there is one thing I am pretty certain about: the business-as-usual is going to continue at least for a few more decades. A few countries may be affected by weird policies but the whole world won't notice. For example, the global CO2 emissions will only begin to drop once a new viable technology is found. Dreaming about something else means dreaming about the control over the whole world. The last man who was doing something like that was Adolf Hitler and even this guy didn't succeed.

I assure Mr Archer and similar fanatics that people like me have learned some lessons from the failed assassination of the Führer and we are unlikely to repeat the same mistakes again. The business-as-usual, also known as freedom of the other people, is a fact that you will have to learn to live with or your very existence will become marginally incompatible with the basic security of the world.

Costs of regulation and their impact

Archer confirms that the costs of carbon regulation represent a few percent of the global GDP (multiples of half a trillion dollars a year) and he thinks it is a detail (...) because such a payment will simply delay the attainment of a certain net wealth by a few years because the growth is a few percent, too. His comrades are used to stealing billions of dollars from the budgets so why not trillions? It's not a problem, is it?

He must be joking.

When we say that the costs of carbon regulation are a few percent of the global GDP, it means that this amount must be paid every single year and such a permanent reduction will clearly reduce the growth rate, too. If everyone has to pay 2% of his income for hot air, then 2% of his resources will be missing for the usual things he does - for consumption and for investment.

So he may reduce his consumption of cigarettes or other non-investment products that you don't care about by 1% of the income. Certain kinds of consumption simply won't be reduced. But the investment comes from the money that is left. There will be fewer resources for investment, too. The growth rate will be smaller, too. In fact, if the growth rate in a certain region is 1% in average, it is reasonable to expect that carbon regulation will change it into permanent stagnation (or even recession). Those 2% of income that have to be paid will be paid from reduced consumption (1% of income) and reduced investment and growth (1% of income).

I don't know what the exact distribution of those 2% should be (between reduced consumption and reduced investment to the future) but I am absolutely certain that the extra expenses will inevitably reduce the growth rate. For example, there will be less money for scientific research - because science is only paid after it is guaranteed that most people have something to eat. With the exception of the carbon-related research that is directly funded from those 2%, there will be less money for scientific research and for technological progress. Similar kinds of investment that affect the future growth will be affected, too.

Discounting

Archer says that he understands discounting as long as it only influences a few years but when it comes to centuries, one shouldn't discount at all. Wow! That's a rather dramatic modification to the rules of economics. While a 4% annual discount rate reduces the value of money to 2% of their original value in 100 years, Archer would apparently want the result to be raised by a factor of 50. Where is this incredible discontinuity supposed to occur?

If one dollar in 2000 is equivalent to 1.04^Y dollars after Y years, according to the laws of economics, and if Archer claims to agree with this exponential rule for small values of Y, what is exactly going to happen with his rule after a few decades? Will the discount rate change the sign? It seems to be necessary. How does he expect to return to one dollar after 100 years? A rational person understands very well that the exponential profile is a direct consequence of the "transitivity" and of the constancy of the growth rate.

Archer also revives the analogy between climate realists and the defenders of slavery. What a nice analogy - it is not emotional at all, is it? ;-) The abolition of slavery was also costly, he says, but it had to be done. Well, his statement is simply wrong. The abolition of slavery was costly for the slaveowners but they were using resources that didn't actually belong to them - namely the work of the slaves that was used for free.

Once the former slaves could have done the same work for a salary, it simply means that some money had to be paid for this work. When we calculate the benefits of the whole economy, the difference between the two arrangements was pretty much equal to zero. The only unwelcome costs were the temporary costs of the transformation. And when the former slaves learned how to get new jobs and move to other places, they became more flexible, efficient, and the whole economy benefitted. The economy becomes healthier when people are more free - a fact that Archer is clearly unable to understand.

But these conclusions simply do not apply to carbon regulation. If consumers and companies are forced - by the law - to buy much more expensive products that are otherwise doing the same thing as the cheap ones, they are simply losing money. No one is getting them, with a possible exception of subjects that are participating in the carbon regulation game. It follows that the living standards in all respects - except for the amount of CO2 emissions - will be getting worse (or will be getting better more slowly than before).

If you count the GDP in such a way that the hot air (without CO2) actually has a certain value, then the GDP might continue to grow. But that's not how sane people count their income.

Attacks against realists

Dysons says: "... Lindzen represents the small minority who are skeptical. Their conversation is a dialogue of the deaf. The majority responds to the minority with open contempt."

What does Archer say about this point? Well, he says that the "denialists" such as Lindzen are essentially killing his (Archer's) kids which is why he must be contemptuous. Well, I personally find it unethical if children are used as hostages in similar discussions. Richard Lindzen also has kids: what is Archer's argument supposed to mean? I am somewhat sorry about Archer's children that their father is an al-Qaeda-style fanatic who is ready to pay his children as a price to defend his undefendable fundamentalist ideology.

I am almost sure that it will only take a few years before these kids will realize that their father was an unreasonable person who was abusing their name and dignity to be able to continue to steal the money from the taxpayers for his pseudoscientific enterprises. They will have better tools to address any problem that they may face in the future - and it is very unlikely that it will be a similar kind of a problem that Archer is dreaming about. And they will be using a positive discount rate, not a negative one that their father wants to impose upon them.

And that's the memo.

NASA: Phoenix's Mars landing

NASA TV: click (there was a video here, I removed it to avoid unexpected noise)

Double-click the video for full screen

Live coverage of the landing of the Phoenix spacecraft - that is expected to study water and conditions for primitive life on the planet - should begin here, on NASA TV, at 6:00 pm Eastern Daylight Saving Time (midnight Central European summer time). Signals about atmospheric entry should arrive to Earth around 7:46 pm EDT.

Landing should occur seven minutes later, assuming that they successfully reduce the speed from 3.5 miles per second to zero.

The probability that the USD 325 million gadget - by far the largest grant awarded to the University of Arizona - successfully lands is measured, in a frequentist fashion based on landing attempts since 1971, to be 5/11. Good luck. :-)

Update: It worked! See five minutes of growing excitement in NASA.

Meanwhile, NASA TV talks about the GLAST experiment, the greenness of (and everyday life at) the International Space Station ;-) etc.

Engineering bonus: Rotating car, Nissan Pivo ("pivo" means "beer" in Czech), has no reverse.

London-Brooklyn: a wormhole

If you're in London or New York, you should definitely check the telectroscope, a wormhole built by St George ;-) and connecting the Brooklyn Bridge with the Tower Bridge, and tell us how it works.



They say that there are no displays involved but probably a lot of optical fibers. Officially, there is a long tunnel. ;-) If this is not a kind of webcam, then I have no idea how it works. Can you imitate a lot of mirrors by fibers?

OK, I will stick to the old kind of physics that I know and prefer to believe that it is a webcam, after all. ;-)

Christina Romer: Berkeley vs Harvard

Update: On November 24th, 2008, Romer was said to be nominated as the head of the Council of Economic Advisors by Barack Obama. You should also read a lot of stuff on this blog about Lawrence Summers.

Christina Romer is one of the most achieved female economists in the world. I wouldn't necessarily be thrilled by her politics (Obama's campaign etc.) but if you read some of her papers, it is clear that she is the real deal. You will have a hard time to find another female economist with papers with hundreds of citations and over 20 papers with more than 20 citations.

Together with her husband, they were planning to move from Berkeley to Harvard because the place had all kinds of logistic advantages (aging parents on both sides living in Massachusetts, kids moving to MIT). Everything seemed to work up to the moment when Drew Gilpin Faust, the new Harvard president who replaced Lawrence Summers after the feminists' uprising against his ability to think, vetoed the move.

Harvard Crimson

The new Harvard president remained silent about her motives, no one else knows the reason either, and no one has even suggested an understandable hypothetical justification. The people who know Romer seem to be upset.

We don't have the complete information but I would still offer two general comments:

• Quite generally, it is strange and counterproductive whenever relative dwarves - profesionally speaking - are deciding about relative giants, especially when the criteria should be related to the very matters in which the dwarves are dwarves - in this case, we talk about scholarly matters. This is where the governments usually converge and this fact is the true tragedy of the commons. Lawrence Summers would have credentials for such a veto (that he would be unlikely to use in this case) but Drew Gilpin Faust doesn't.
• It is a widespread myth that women in executive jobs are more likely to hire other women. My experience - that is also supported by an obvious theory - says exactly the opposite. It is the men who typically (96 percent?) prefer to be surrounded by the opposite sex. When the employees are more achieved than the officials (or at least comparable), the female officials are more affected by jealousy. When the employees are less competent than the officials, women are more likely to notice and to figure out that the difference is not due to a different "image" of the two sexes.

RealClimate vs Roy Spencer: non-feedback changes in clouds

Roy Spencer is a rising star and public face of climatology - not only because of his topseller, Climate Confusion, and occasionally inconvenient UAH MSU satellite data, but also because of his perfectionist recent theoretical work (including their recent work on cloud oscillations and several new papers that will be published soon) - and RealClimate.ORG has provided him with a positive feedback. ;-)

Ray Pierrehumbert: How to cook a graph in three easy lessons

When RealClimate.ORG starts to dedicate special articles to you (and plans to publish new ones), you know that you have made it. ;-)



Spencer's talk in New York overlapping with this text

When you Google search for Roy Spencer's name, the third hit leads to RealClimate.ORG's friends at ExxonSecrets.ORG and the fourth hit goes to DeSmogBlog.COM but Prof Spencer has surely learned how to live with similar things and he's doing fine.

Commercial break: Roy Spencer's answer to RealClimate.ORG is here

Pierrehumbert begins with an expected verbal procedure to mildly defame Spencer. Because Spencer's publications are rather impressive and, despite the huge recent alarmist bias, comparable to Pierrehumbert's record (which Gentleman is better depends on how you do the search), Pierrehumbert chooses a combination of the argument "Spencer is not so special" and "Spencer's papers don't contain any evidence of the skeptical viewpoints anyway".

Oh, really?

The first point by Pierrehumbert is that he - Pierrehumbert - completely misunderstands what the "internal radiative forcing" is and why it is something different than the "feedbacks". While I am no universal specialist in these matters, Pierrehumbert's comments (and graphs) make it very clear that he really has no clue, so let me give him a crash course.

Radiative forcing is the average imbalance of incoming and outgoing energy (in Watts per squared meter) that is expected to lead to warming (increase of the equilibrium temperature) or cooling (decrease), depending on the sign. Various effects lead to their radiative forcings. When these effects change, the equilibrium temperature changes as well.

For example, the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide contributes some bare radiative forcing that can be amplified or reduced by positive and negative feedbacks, respectively. Water vapor is a positive feedback (they add additional greenhouse gas - H2O - when it's warmer), low-lying clouds are a negative feedback (water vapor also creates extra droplets, and when they're low-lying, the temperature cools down), and the high-lying clouds are likely to be a positive feedback.

The IPCC whose task is to "prove" a dangerous man-made climate change assumes that a lot of effort should be given to study the positive, catastrophic feedbacks, especially to methods that would suggest that these feedbacks are really strong, and that the negative feedbacks either don't exist or should be neglected.

What do we mean by a feedback?

Feedback is a process that transforms the incoming signal (a variation of some quantity) into other forms and eventually into the same kind of signal that is subsequently "fed back" (therefore the name) as the input, with some delay (usually expressed as a fuzzy number only).

Imagine that the temperature anomaly, Delta T, is a "chaotic" function of time, noise(t), that oscillates around zero. It has some color etc. but let us ignore these subtleties. But there is also another driver of the temperature that reflects what was happening with the temperature a moment (epsilon) earlier. We have something like

Delta T(t) = noise(t) + C . Delta T(t-epsilon)

What is the effect of the last, feedback term? Well, it primarily depends on the sign of the coefficient "C". Imagine it is positive: we deal with a positive feedback. If it is so, the following thing has to happen sooner or later. The value of the signal, Delta T(t), eventually exceeds the typical (time-averaged) magnitude of noise(t), or even the typical magnitude of noise(t) divided by C.

Once it happens, the noise(t) term can be essentially neglected and the feedback term dominates. The solution is an exponential of time. In the equation above, it is only increasing if C is greater than one. In reality, the correct equation has a time derivative on the left-hand side, guaranteeing continuity of Delta T(t). Consequently, the exponential is increasing for any positive feedback, as soon as the other terms become negligible.

Because the Earth hasn't seen any exponential growth of the temperature anomaly for nearly 5 billion years (it would be incompatible with the continuous existence of life for billions of years), it is very likely that such a runaway behavior cannot occur and the feedbacks that control the behavior at large variations (anomalies) are negative feedbacks.

How are feedbacks created?

The example of clouds is instructive. The temperature helps to create some clouds, after some delay, and these clouds influence the temperature, after another delay. The total delay is essentially the sum of the two delays while the total feedback coefficient "C" is essentially a product of the two. You need the causal relationships in both directions to get a feedback. Such a feedback may explain why the temperature and the cloud cover are correlated. You would expect a very high correlation coefficient: it should be close to one.

However, you may obtain correlation even if the relationship goes in one direction only. Clouds may influence the temperature even if the influence of temperature on the total cloud cover happens to be negligible. You still obtain a correlation but it is not as strong. Also, in this case, you cannot meaningfully eliminate one of the quantities (e.g. clouds) because it is a true system with (at least) two degrees of freedom, even if you're interested in the effective theory at long time scales only.

When the temperature doesn't affect the clouds too much, you can still ask what drives them. There is a lot of other things that can drive them, including ENSO patterns, PDO oscillations, and un-averaged artifacts of daily stochastic changes of the weather. These might be the dominant terms on the right-hand side of the equation for the cloud cover.

Now, it is damn important whether the temperature drives the clouds or the clouds drive the temperature or both.

While it is damn important, the observed correlation itself is usually insufficient to determine the coefficients separately. Certain observations can only determine a combination of these two, let me call it the product. But even if the product is zero - if there is no feedback - there can still be a substantial correlation. When you look at high-frequency data, you can perhaps see a lag that will reveal what is the cause and what is the consequence or, at least, which of the two causal relationships is stronger.

But because there are other terms in the "cloud equation" as well as the "temperature equation", even the measurement based on lags can be subtle.

Now, Spencer's argument - as I understand it - is that various climatologists are making an unjustified assumption that there exists a strong influence in both directions - one that essentially allows you to eliminate the cloud cover and study the temperature equation separately. Consequently, we can talk about the behavior of clouds as a feedback and only the coefficients from the feedback equation are important. Instead, Spencer says that it is important to know both coefficients separately - i.e. to know which of these two, clouds or temperature, is the cause or the driver and which of them is effect or the consequence.

More concretely, he says that ENSO, PDO, unaveraged daily variations etc. can be the drivers of the clouds cover and the cloud cover also helps to change the temperature. This extreme description clearly refers to a non-feedback mechanism because when things only go in one direction, there is no feedback (this very sentence already seems to be too high-tech for Pierrehumbert).

When someone tries to measure the feedback coefficient only - from one measured quantity in reality (or one function of them) - it is very clear that he must make some assumptions about the relative magnitudes of the coefficient of "clouds drive temperature" and "temperature drives clouds" effects in the equations. Spencer simply says that people have been making an incorrect assumption about this point.

Fine-tuning and discrete choices

Finally, Pierrehumbert is spending hours by showing that he is unable to reproduce Spencer's graphs. I find it pretty obvious that with some chosen coefficients that couple clouds, temperature, ENSO, PDO, and some weather effects with each other in all directions, one can qualitatively reproduce the graphs of both Gentlemen. Whether the corresponding models are consistent with everything else is a different question.

While Pierrehumbert suggests that Spencer has "cooked the data", he is more specific about the accusations in one paragraph that I choose to reproduce in its entirety:

My graph is not absolutely identical to Roy's, because there are minor differences in the initialization, the temperature offset used to define anomalies, and the temperature data set I'm using as a basis for comparision. My point though, is that this is not an exacting recipe: it's hash — or Hamburger Helper — not soufflé. Following Roy's recipe, you can get a reasonable-looking fit to data with very little fine-tuning because Roy has given himself a lot of elbow room to play around in: you have the choice of any two variability indices among dozens available, you make an arbitrary linear combination of them to suit your purposes, you choose whatever mixed layer depth you want, and you finish it all off by allowing yourself the luxury of diddling the initial condition. With all those degrees of freedom, I daresay you could fit the temperature record using hog-belly futures and New Zealand sheep population. Anybody want to try?

Well, yes, exactly. Many skeptics have been saying similar things for quite some time! ;-) If you want to obtain a graph of some shape, to support a theory, choose your two favorite variability indices, make an arbitrary linear combination, etc. etc. Then you can reproduce the temperature record using the New Zealand sheep population or the number of SUVs in the U.S., if you prefer the latter. And many high-school dropouts who own more private jets than SUVs surely prefer the latter. ;-)

For example, choose the surface temperature instead of the tropospheric temperatures to determine the sensitivity (even though the greenhouse effect is clearly more linked to the tropospheric temperature), choose the principal component analysis that mines for hockey sticks to get the hockey stick graph of the reconstructed temperatures since 1000 AD, and put dozens of coefficients in your equations (except for the CO2 greenhouse effect - especially those that could generate natural variations whose ultimate driver is not CO2) equal to zero. Then you may easily conclude that the temperature is driven by the SUVs in the U.S. And dozens of people have actually done so.

It is not a new insight that one can obtain many qualitatively different kinds of predictions not only by "fine-tuning" legitimate physical continuous parameters but also by "fine-tuning" of parameters that superficially seem to be pure conventions or by making various "discrete choices". This observation has been repeated in the string-theory debates many times, too.

Nevertheless, one collection of ideas which of these hundreds of relationships are really important, which of the coefficients are high enough to decide about the qualitative behavior, and which of the indices for various quantities are optimal to describe the phenomena accurately at the fundamental level has to be better than others. And it is far from obvious that Pierrehumbert's choices are better than Spencer's choices and that the SUVs or the sheep in New Zealand are better than the galactic cosmic rays or the ocean turbulence.

Some detailed analyses in Spencer's papers indicate that just the opposite is true. Moreover, the alarmist region of the parameter space is really of measure (essentially) zero, so to say, because you must assume that all the effects that don't boil down to CO2 at the end are (essentially) absent and that all the data are processed in such a way that you avoid the otherwise inevitable contradictions.

Climatologists should do their best to rationally determine - while avoiding preconceptions about the "right predictions for the future" - what these individual coefficients actually are, which of the effects are actually important, which altitude is most natural for defining the "climate sensitivity", and which of the indices or their linear combinations are most accurate as players in the equations, besides many other question marks.

And that's the memo.

SciAm prints Sean Carroll's fragmented pottery

At the beginning of the 21st century, fragmented pots are immensenly popular with the media. The old-fashioned discrimination of wrong ideas by the correct and promising ones, also known as the scientific method, has to go. There is urge to undo all this "injustice", previously known as science. Positive discrimination must be put firmly in place, most journalists think.

Thermodynamics and statistical physics

When it comes to thermodynamics and statistical physics, Sean Carroll is indisputably a good example of a fragmented pot. That's probably why the Scientific American magazine published his incredibly ill-informed piece:

Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?

One of the most basic facts of life is that the future looks different from the past. But on a grand cosmological scale, they may look the same

Now, we have already seen his crazy statement that cosmology is behind the laws of thermodynamics. In this context, however, he has brought his basic ignorance to a completely new level of insanity. Not only cosmology is supposed to be the driver behind the thermodynamical phenomena. In fact, the regime where the difference between the past and the future is supposed to disappear is the "grand cosmological scale" itself!

You should probably imagine cosmic deflation initiated by re-cooling and supernovae that are unexploding, sucking huge amounts of photons from the environment directly to their center, or - even more dramatically - black holes (OK, "white holes" because Sean Carroll also misunderstands that it's the same thing at the quantum level, Hawking 1975, 600+ citations) that are spontaneously decaying into pairs of black holes or black holes that smoothly become stars where dead complex animals are resurrected, begin to get younger, and end their evolutionary journey as microorganisms. ;-)

The previous paragraph is not an exaggerated joke: Sean Carroll wrote a blog article promoting his SciAm work whose only content is the statement that the processes we mentioned are "real" in some "other Universes". He even thinks that there is a mystery why it's different in ours!

Do the concepts and propositions of thermodynamics, including the second law, break down in the cosmological regime, as Sean Carroll tells us?

Some undergraduate basic facts

As every undergraduate student of thermodynamics and statistical physics knows or should know, just the opposite statement holds in reality. It is the microscopic laws, directly relevant for the very small, simple, and fully described states of matter, where the difference between the past and the future is absent (or where the CPT theorem holds, to say the least). In all greater systems, namely systems with nonzero entropy, the difference between the past and the future is inevitable.

In a sharp contradiction with Carroll's assertions, the greater systems you consider, the more dramatic the difference between the past and the future you experience (or you can derive). This difference is obviously maximized when you consider the whole Universe.

Why is it so? Well, some of the students mentioned above may still remember the notion of thermodynamic limit of statistical mechanics in which the number of particles (more precisely their entropy) goes to infinity.

In this limit, the equations of statistical physics simplify, the effect of conventions and detailed assumptions (for example, the choice of microcanonical or canonical ensembles) vanishes, and all the important quantities converge to some limiting values. These values are the same values that are also described by other laws of physics known as thermodynamics - approximate laws that don't have to assume (but also cannot say anything about) the atomic character of matter.

In thermodynamics, the symmetry between the past and the future is always broken. All kinds of time-reversal-asymmetric terms, including those that govern friction, diffusion, or decoherence, arise in these effective laws relevant for the thermodynamic limit. Neverthless, these laws can still be derived by the methods of statistical physics applied to the microscopic, fundamental laws (describing the same system we study, not cosmology!).

Normally, I wouldn't believe that a physics PhD could be ignorant about these basic facts. And a publication of nonsense that contradicts them by a magazine that is not supposed to be a completely dumb tabloid would be unthinkable. Clearly, it is not unthinkable in the Scientific American magazine.

The emergence of the past-future asymmetry

The microscopic laws are typically time-reversal-symmetric. In quantum field theory, the T symmetry may be broken (in reality, it is broken by weak effects associated with the mixing of quarks). But as Wolfgang Pauli has proven in his CPT theorem, Lorentz-invariant theories always obey the symmetry with respect to the transformation that combines the time reversal with parity and charge conjugation, namely the CPT conjugation.

OK, I think that all people who write about physics understand this CPT-symmetric starting point. What many people apparently misunderstand is the emergence of the asymmetry between the past and the future. All of this asymmetry can be linked to the second law of thermodynamics that says that the entropy of macroscopic systems is smaller in the past than it is in the future.

Because we have reduced the asymmetry to a statement about entropy, we should understand what entropy is. For our purposes, it is the natural logarithm of the number of microstates "N" that are macroscopically indistinguishable. This logarithm used to be multiplied by Boltzmann's constant, "k", but modern theoretical physicists typically use units of temperature where "k" equals one. Nevertheless, I want this point to be really powerful so let us restore "k" so that we can look at Boltzmann's tomb:



This is a dead giant of physics who has figured out most of these things more than a century ago. The letter "W" represents the volume of the classical phase space but when you correctly relate the concepts of classical physics and quantum physics, it should be replaced by the number of quantum microstates, "N".

In the previous paragraphs, I talked about the "number of states that are indistinguishable". You might say that it depends on your abilities (and conventions) to distinguish. And you would be right. It does depend. But in the thermodynamic limit, the logarithm of such a huge number is actually universal. The details how you define "indistinguishable states" can only influence the entropy of physical systems by subleading corrections that become negligible in comparison with the overall entropy, as long as the entropy itself is large.

Below, I will explain why the entropy always increases. The statement is relevant whenever the entropy is nonzero and it becomes very important and exact whenever the entropy is large. I emphasize that the conclusion - and the laws of thermodynamics - apply to all systems with nonzero entropy, even though the "visual" character of low-entropy states and high-entropy states may depend on the context.

For example, high-entropy states of gases look uniform but high-entropy states in systems where the gravitational force is the king look very non-uniform and the black holes, in fact, maximize the entropy in the gravitational context. But this difference is only "visual" while there are more invariant facts that are universal.

It is always true that there are some microstates, their number determines the entropy, the entropy increases with time, and other thermodynamic laws (about the relationships between temperature, entropy, and heat capacity, among other things) can be derived from the spectrum and dynamics of the underlying microscopic theory, as long as we know how to use the fact that the number of microstates is very high (i.e. to take the thermodynamic limit).

Time-reversal asymmetric toy model

Because the asymmetry between the past and the future doesn't exist when the entropy is zero and when we consider very simple and exactly described microscopic systems, and because the asymmetry is clearly huge for high-entropy systems, it should "emerge" when the entropy is "somewhere in between", so to say - nonzero but comparable to one.

Indeed, it does emerge. Let us see how.

The concept of entropy referred to the notion of "macroscopically indistinguishable states". So we need to be asking questions about a subset of physical concepts only. We need to deal with "incomplete information", if you wish. At the same moment, we want the toy model to be simple enough for its microscopic description to be transparent.

The best thing I can offer you is the evolution of a physical system with one bit of missing information in the past and one bit of missing information in the future. ;-) You might try to invent examples where the information would be smaller than 1 bit but they would be more subtle conceptually.

Higgs-electron scattering

Consider the initial state with one spinless particle, for example a Higgs boson, colliding with a spin-1/2 particle, an electron. The velocities of both particles are known. The polarization of the electron's spin is not: that's the uncertain bit. I deliberately chose the second particle to be spinless in order to reduce the incomplete information to one bit.

These two particles scatter and the final state contains one Higgs boson and one electron, too. The velocities are known, the spin of the electron is not. The latter is the uncertain information that gets vastly expanded if we consider macroscopic systems: it contains all the unknown and/or irrelevant atomic degrees of freedom of the pieces of matter.

Probabilities: computation

Now, what is the probability that the scattering occurs, with the known velocities but unknown or unreported spins? If the spin were absent, we would simply calculate the complex amplitude "M" for the evolution (between the normalized initial and final states) and

P = |M|²

would be the probability. But here we have four different complex scattering amplitudes, depending on the electron's spin,

M = {M _fi}, f,i = up or down

Which of them we should square and how should we add them if we're only interested in the question what is the probability of the scattering amplitude with given initial and final velocities but unreported polarizations of the spin?

The key point is this. We must average the squared amplitude over the "N_i = 2" initial states but we must sum it up over final states:

P = (1/N_i) ∑ _i,f |M _fi|²

If you're a particle physicist who has never studied any thermodynamics but you attend courses of quantum field theory ;-), this is the first formula where the past (=the initial state, by definition) and the future (=the final state, by definition) enter asymmetrically. In fact, all the asymmetry in the world can be reduced to the formula above and its obvious generalizations. So it is important to understand its origin and its consequences in detail.

Consequences

Let me start with the consequences. In our toy example, the number of indistinguishable (or indistinguished) microstates was 2 both in the future and in the past. But we could have clearly considered situations where "N_i" and "N_f" are different. For macroscopic systems, both of these numbers are huge - comparable to Avogadro's number.

You can see that it is "1/N_i", not "1/N_f", that appears as a prefactor (the time-reversed partner of the formulae would have "1/N_f"; it would be a different formula that is however isomorphic as long as you switch your terminology what you mean by the the initial states & the past and by the final states & the future; in physics, we define the initial states and the past to be those that generate the "1/N_i" prefactor).

You could also hypothetically imagine a different world where the prefactor is the geometric average of the two possible prefactors, "1/sqrt(N_i.N_f)". Such a world would be time-reversal symmetric at the macroscopic level. But it not our world. In that world, the rule that the probability of (final states) "A or B" equals the probability of "A" plus the probability of "B" minus the probability of "A and B" (which is zero for mutually exclusive "A, B") would be violated because the square roots don't obey linear laws such as "sqrt(2)+sqrt(3) = sqrt(5)". ;-)

I will explain the origin of the prefactor later. But what does it mean that the prefactor is "1/N_i" and not "1/N_f"? It means that the probability gets (vastly) smaller if the number of indistinguishable initial states is too high (or vast). In other words, the formula implies that the evolution is much more likely if the initial state has a very small number of indistinguishable microstates, i.e. a very small entropy.

On the other hand, the formula doesn't "punish" you for having too many final states: "1/N_f" doesn't appear as a prefactor. Because we still sum over the final states, we get a higher number if we sum over many of them. That's why the final states with a high number of indistinguishable counterparts - with a high-entropy - are favored.

So far, the qualitative comments above have neglected the value of "M_{fi}". Let us imagine that we deal with a basis of microstates in which all matrix elements "M_{fi}" are equal to "m" (up to a phase), a small number, which is of course inaccurate but if gives us reasonable ideas about the scaling of the probability. Then the sum over the initial states and the final states give us simple factors of "N_i" and "N_f", respectively. In other words, the previous displayed formula reduces to

P = (1/N_i) N_i N_f |m|² = N_f |m|²

In this parameterization, the probability only depends on the number of final states, and not the number of the initial states. The more indistinguishable final states you have, the higher the probability is. Because the number of indistinguishable final states is dictated by the entropy, we have

P = exp(S _final) |m|²

The probability increases with the exponential of the final entropy (in the "k=1" units), as long as the complex amplitudes "m" are kept constant and universal. That's why the evolution always favors high-entropy states in the future but it doesn't care about the entropy in the past.

We can parameterize the formula in one more way. Imagine, for example, that "m_{fi}" is the square matrix of the discrete Fourier transform. All of its entries satisfy

|m|² = 1/N _total

where "N_{total}" is the total dimension of the relevant (or effective) Hilbert space which is common for the initial states and the final states. We may see that that

N _total = exp(S _maximal),

the total effective Hilbert space can store a certain maximum entropy. Then the probability of a particular evolution is

P = exp(S _maximal - S _f).

Clearly, the evolution is completely dominated by the macroscopic final states of the highest entropy - whose "S_f" is as close to "S_{maximum}" as possible. Let me emphasize once again that the value of the initial entropy, "S_{i}", doesn't matter. Just look at the formula. Anyway, I am certain that dozens of insufficiently bright readers will tell us in the fast comments that "my theory" predicts that the entropy must be maximized at all times.

Depending on the way how we parameterize the time-reversal-symmetric, microscopic matrix elements "m_{fi}", the formula either means that low-entropy initial states are preferred or high-entropy final states are preferred. At any rate, the processes whose final entropy (strongly) exceeds the initial entropy have a (much) higher probability.

Incidentally, if you want a parameterization in which the difference of the entropies appears explicitly, here it is. Write the "universal" value of "|m|^2" as "h / sqrt(N_i N_f)" which is still time-reversal symmetric. Then one of the previous formulae becomes

P = N _f |m|² = sqrt(N _f/N_i) h =
= exp((S _f - S _i)/2) h

where "h" was defined in a time-reversal-symmetric fashion. Nevertheless, you see that the probability explicitly tries to maximize the increase of the entropy. The factor of "1/2" in the exponent may look surprising but it never appears in answers to more specific questions because more specific questions always treat the past and the future asymmetrically.

At this moment, you should understand that all of the observed effects where entropy increases can be reduced to the understanding of the formula above; we will be justifying it later. But I want to say that even before you understand thermodynamics and statistical physics, certain statements may be seen to be incompatible with rational reasoning a priori. In his SciAm article, Sean Carroll writes:

Nevertheless, over the years we have developed a strong intuition for what counts as "natural"—and the universe we see does not qualify.

I apologize but if you develop a certain intuition (or methods or a theory) that implies that most processes in the Universe - including the breaking of eggs, explosions of supernovae, as well as virtually everything else we have observed - are "unnatural" according to your intuition, then your intuition (or methods or a theory) is falsified. And rational scientists couldn't have "developed" such a completely bad intuition by following the scientific method and by taking the observations into account. You could have seen that Carroll's speculations are wrong even before you understood the formula for "P" simply because they contradict almost every observation we have ever made, indeed.

But it is of course not a defect of the laws of physics as understood in the 21st century; it is a fault of Sean Carroll's (mis)understanding of them. Physics is ultimately based on observations so it is able to prove that certain "theories" are just pure bunk and that certain cosmologists are fragmented pots.

Justification of the asymmetric formula for "P"

Now, once we have seen that the formula arising from our toy model is behind the universal increase of entropy in all high-entropy systems in the world and behind the corresponding asymmetry between the past and the future, we should discuss the question of its origin a bit more comprehensively.

So why do we divide the sum of the square amplitudes by the number of initial states, but we don't divide it by the number of the final states?

Let me start with the final states. We are literally asking the question "what is the probability that a process occurs, with the final state being one of several mutually exclusive states?" It is very clear how this probability must be determined. We compute the probabilities of the individual final microstates and add them up. This is not a shocking new rule found by physics but a basic law of logic. If two possible events, "A" and "B", are mutually exclusive, then the probability is additive:

P(A or B) = P(A) + P(B).

So it is clear how to deal with the final states. If we don't care about some details of the final state, we take the probabilities for the individual microstates - and they didn't have anything in the denominator, recall the first simple "|M|^2" formula for the case where both initial and final states are exactly known - and we sum them over the final microstates that are indistinguishable. This result follows from a rule of mathematical logic.

So how is it possible that the factor "1/N_i" is there? Shouldn't our approach to the initial states follow the same formulae? Shouldn't we sum over the initial states instead of taking the average? The answer is a resounding No.

Why? When we were calculating the probabilities involving one of many possible indistinguishable final states, none of them had to occur. Instead, a completely different state - from a different ensemble - could have been chosen. When we're interested in two final states, "Final_1" and "Final_2", it is not yet true that

P(Final ₁) + P(Final ₂) = 1 (no!).

It is not true that one of the states we're interested in will have to occur. On the other hand, when we're asking the same probabilistic question about a class of initial states, one of them has to occur:

P(Initial ₁) + P(Initial ₂) = 1 (yes!).

The total probability that an initial macroscopic state evolves into a final macroscopic state is given by the probabilities that particular microscopic representatives of the initial state evolve as they should; but we must also multiply them by the probability that the initial state occurred in the first place. And the latter probability is not one. The most typical "prior" probability corresponding to a maximal ignorance about the initial state puts

P(Initial ₁) = P(Initial ₂) = 1/2

So here we have a new way to write the formula for "adding over final" and "averaging over initial" microstates:

P = ∑ _i,f P(Initial _i) |M _fi|²

Here, "P(Initial_i)" is the prior probability that the particular initial states was realized in the first place and it is equal to "1/N_{initial}" in the case of complete ignorance among "N_{initial}" indistinguishable states. The squared amplitude is the conditional probability that a given final state occurs for a given initial state.

Why is there no factor of the "prior probability" for the final states? Because a "prior" for "final" states is an oxymoron. Prior means "earlier" or "first" in Latin. Priors can't be final. This is not just about linguistics. It is about the laws of logic. What are the formulae? See e.g. this definition of conditional probability:

P(A and B) = P(B) P(A given B).

Replace the symbols "A, B" by "Final, Initial":

P(Final_f and Initial_i) = P(Initial_i) P(Final_f given Initial_i)

This is just a basic identity of mathematical logic. If you want to calculate the probability involving an initial state and a final state, you must know the probabilities that the evolution occurs (or that the implication is valid) but you must also know the prior probabilities that occur as prefactors.

If you decided to switch the role of the "initial" and "final" adjectives in the latest formula, you would still get a formula that is correct at the abstract logical level but you wouldn't obtain a new usable recipe to calculate probabilities of evolution. Why? Simply because the "prior" probabilities of the final states, "P(Final)", would appear in your formulae. They are not only linguistically inconsistent but also unknown. ;-) It's just how the world works. The future evolves from the past and the only way how the future can be determined (predicted, at least partially) is to know the laws of evolution and to know (something about) the past.

Whoever is using "prior probabilities" of future events to say something about the future - for example, whoever says that the future must be dim because of the illogical premises of environmentalism - is a bigot. The only thing that can be known, at least partially, is the past, and it is therefore the past assumptions only that can occur as arguments of "prior probabilities". The future is free and must be free - it is whatever the present will lead to - and it is impossible to assume probabilities about the future by "priors". This statement of mine is not ideological in any sense, it is an inevitable result of logic combined with causality, and this is where the time-reversal asymmetry of all processes involving incomplete information resides.

Science vs time-reversed science

To make it very clear why science needs to assume prior probabilities of the past (or events at time "t") but not prior probabilities of the future (or events at later times after "t" that are being linked to "t"), here is a couple of examples how explanations look in science and how they look in Sean Carroll's time-reversed science. In conventional science,

• the existence of simple organic compounds or simple organisms billions of years ago can be shown to lead to more complex compounds of organisms, because of the natural processes including natural selection, but the exact structure of the complex organisms is hard to predict accurately
  
• the current configuration of the Earth's climate is used as an assumption (different configurations are given different prior probabilities) and together with the - very inaccurately known - dynamical laws, we may try to calculate the probabilities whether all the humans will be fried by 2100 ;-)
• using the laws of genetics, simulations of natural selection in the past, and the observed social patterns of humans (and other mammals), we may try to calculate (or estimate) the probability that a woman wins the Fields medal; the result will be roughly 2 orders of magnitude below the same probability for a man
• the observations and theories constructed out of them (including the explanations in this article) seem to imply that the entropy universally increases with time; this insight may also be applied - by extrapolation or generalization - to extreme parts of cosmology, including the early Universe, to argue that the entropy of the early Universe was much smaller than today and maybe very small
  

And here are the corresponding examples of Sean Carroll's time-reversed science (T-science):

• the existence of humans today (or in the future) is an assumption because it is a purpose of the Universe; we use this knowledge, a prior probability, to deduce statements about the past; for example, one of the consequences is that there had to be God who created the humans by hand: the entropy increases into the past so the humans had to evolve backwards into something even better, and God is the only option
• the human activity apparently ruins the planet; it is thus T-reasonable to expect that we will be burned by 2100: this statement has a high prior T-probability; using the T-scientific methods, we can T-derive all kinds of T-theorems, for example that all climate skeptics are stooges of the oil industry
• we may T-reasonably assume that the T-natural outcome of the life in the society is that all people are equal; for example, there should be as many female Fields medal winners as the male ones; because this T-fact doesn't seem to be satisfied, we may T-scientifically derive that the Fields medal committee (plus all other committees and individuals who influence anything about women in maths) are made out of sexist pigs who should be arrested; we also know that the working class will be ruling in the future where everyone will be equal and where the private ownership will be abolished; this "future prior" can be T-scientifically used to execute everyone who prevents Nature from evolving into Her future, as proved by the T-scientific ideology of Marxism
  
• it is T-reasonable to assume that generic states are always preferred, without adding any detailed disclaimer; it T-implies that the entropy had to be higher in the past than what it is today; we may ignore all data from the past - including all macroscopic phenomena we have ever observed - that contradict this proposition because we have already chosen priors about the past and about the character of physical laws that are philosophically pleasing ;-)
  

I could give you many more examples but the message should be clear. When we're doing science, it is only the data about the present and the past that are available. The data about the future are not available right now, by the very definition of future. So the assumptions about the future can never be directly justified by observational evidence; they cannot enter our formulae as "independent variables". It is always the observations from the past that can be used by science to construct theories and to use them to both reconstruct the past and predict the future.

In this process, the evaluation of evidence from the past is used to refine our knowledge about all the priors - about the other, directly unobserved, features of the initial state as well as the dynamical laws of Nature. These insights can be subsequently used both to retrodict other things and to predict the future. But if you read this paragraph carefully and think about it, one thing is clear. At the end, all calculated features (and probabilities) of the past world as well as the future world are functions of quantities in the past (or their probabilities) as long as you are doing science.

The only way how one can "seemingly" revert the role of the past and the future is to switch the definitions of these two words (and "imagine" that the processes run backwards). What you end up with is a mathematically isomorphic logical framework. But such a change of notation is a trivial linguistic (or "psychological") exercise that obviously cannot have any physical consequences. It cannot teach us anything. It cannot predict anything. It is a redundant choice of conventions, much like if we decided to switch the meaning of the symbols "+" and "-" or to write the words in papers backwards. There is only one inequivalent meaningful logical framework, one that is sketched above, and it cannot "co-exist" with its mirror images in any way.

If you use "time-reversed" formulae where things are calculated ("predicted") from the future that you assumed to look in one way or another (or to have certain probabilities of some outcomes), without calculating them from the information residing in their past, then you are a fragmented pot. And if you're an editor of a journal who prints an article about this topic written by a fragmented pot, you are a fragmented pot, too.

And that's the memo.

Root for America

CNN Money thinks that Wayne Root will be the likely presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party - out of 5 options they consider. So I opened his campaign website,

Root for America

and he seems to be a fun candidate. He may be saying similar things as Ron Paul did but he seems more charismatic and articulate.

From his free-market-based recipes, I chose his comments about global warming:



Isn't it an energizing speech? By the way, Nigel Calder, a fellow skeptic as of 2008, is included among the environmentalists who have predicted crazy things in the past. ;-) Some of these examples (and many more) are summarized in Václav Klaus's new book. It almost looks like Root has already read it.

Now, I find it unlikely that a third party candidate would be chosen in November. Also, I respect many readers who are faithful voters of the GOP. But in my opinion, 2008 could be the appropriate time when many people could gather and vote for a third party candidate to show their disagreement with certain tendencies of the current America.

Frank Shoemaker & encrypted message

Fermilab's Wilson Hall after the discovery of the top quark; note the mysterious reflection in the water...

In March 2007, the Fermilab has received a mysterious, hand-written, encrypted message:

medium resolution, very high resolution.

It is apparently constructed out of three or four parts. The first part and the last part have been apparently decoded. At least "most of the information" in them has been translated into a "much more comprehensible" message than the gibberish you see on the paper.

Commercial: Chicago Tribune published a story about the cryptogram on July 11th, 2008

In the first part, the symbols I,II,III are interpreted as ternary (base-three) digits 1,2,0. These digits are subsequently clustered into triplets and the triplets 000, 001, 002, ..., 221, 222 are translated as [space], A, B, ..., Y, Z: note that there are exactly 26+1 = 3^3 letters in the English alphabet including the [space].

The third part uses a similar ternary code except that the ternary digits must be first extracted from the number of the individual I lines in between the separators II that isolate the ternary digits from each other. So even though you could think that the last part is binary in character, a simple pre-processing shows that it is ternary, too.

When you use all the insights above that have been independently figured out by two IT geeks who interact with the blogosphere (see the links at the bottom), you decode parts of the letter as:

1. FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE
   
2. [cryptic hexadecimal digits with corresponding symbols]; sFC
   
3. EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN

I can imagine that the remark about "noise" refers to the overhyped statements that the Fermilab has discovered the Higgs boson exactly at the beginning of 2007. Much like Frank Shoemaker, a retired Fermilab employee, and perhaps plus another person, the author of this letter, I would have called the "discovery" noise, too. ;-)



The middle part with the symbols - see above - hasn't yet been cracked; I've dedicated the task a few hours, too. There are numerous hypotheses what this part - and the three characters at the end of it - mean. People talk about the misspelled word "BASSE", too. It means "low" or "below" in French. I would bet it is an irrelevant typo (much like some slightly irregular spacing in the understood portions of the text). It just emphasizes that the middle part of the letter is probably written in the hexadecimal form.

The three characters at the bottom part of the middle portion contain "s" and the symbolic codes associated with "FC". Because the symbol "s" isn't defined in the symbolic alphabet in the previous two lines of the middle portion, it is widely believed that it could stand for one of the two hexadecimal characters that are missing at the previous two lines, namely 1 or A. So the three letters mean either SFC, 1FC, or AFC. Or just FC because you should ignore one "S" much like you should ignore it in the word "BASSE" (is it a hint and not just a typo?).

Consequently, 1FC or AFC can be hexadecimal codes of the employee number of a relevant Fermilab employees. The employee whose code is FC only denies any relationship with the letter.

I am convinced that the people who play with this letter should focus on decoding the long hexadecimal middle portion of the letter. I've tried to convert it (and various substrings - individual lines - or permutations of it - e.g. string read vertically) from the hexadecimal form to the decimal digits, ternary digits, trying to use the same cute code based on the ternary triplets that is used in the well-known parts of the message. So far, no clear result. (Be careful, the converter I linked is only accurate in the first 30 ternary digits or so, because of rounding.)

Of course, it is possible that the hexadecimal sequences are UUencoded, or that they even give you a small JPG or MP3 or ZIP or otherwise compressed file. ;-) I find it is unlikely. The text should mean something and my bet is that the middle segment is not radically more difficult than the two segments that have already been cracked. In my opinion, the hexadecimal character of the text together with the ternary code should be taken very seriously and combined or recombined in a way that no one has tried so far.

Codes and physics

I would like to argue that this cracking process is somewhat - remotely - analogous to decoding the mysteries of Nature. The mysteries may be deep but when you find something nontrivial, you are usually damn certain that you are on the right track.

For example, at some moment, the people got pretty certain that it is a ternary code even though they had no idea what it was saying. At a different moment, when they saw the letters "FRANK" or "EMPLOYEE" for the first time, they had to be almost certain that they are approaching a full understanding of the relevant portion of the text. The probability that such an agreement of decoded observations with a simple theory (based on "special" words) works by chance is negligible.

You don't need any new experiments. It had to work. Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not. (And the author of the letter could be somewhat more malicious and disordered than the Lord but not too much.) Theoretical physicists are often comparably certain. You often need a few hints only - hints that couldn't occur by chance.

Nature makes sense but most theories one could invent predict gibberish. If a theory predicts meaningful results that moreover agree with a couple of facts about Nature that couldn't really occur accidentally, you know that there is something about it. Sometimes you know that you have learned the whole theory; sometimes you know that you have cracked a part of the mystery and reduced the task to a much more specific and more well-defined task than one you faced previously.

Via John Conway, Fermilab Today, Symmetry Magazine, SlashDot, Geoff Milburn (a successful cracker), John Graham-Cumming (another successful cracker).

LHC: Every proton of you

Click for the lyrics and other information.

While the LHC band above is pretty hot, most of the other LHC is already rather cool:

LHC home page

31,072 American scientists against AGW

The Global Warming Petition (click!) was signed by 9,021 American PhD's and 22,051 additional American scientists.

Technical break: Firefox 3.0 RC 1 recommended

For the sake of balance, here is the list of 100 or so most prominent climatologists who believe man-made catastrophic global warming:

Celebrities

Al Gore, B.A. Government (no science degree)
Alanis Morissette, High School Diploma
Bill Maher, B.A. English (no science degree)
Bono (Paul Hewson), High School Diploma
Daryl Hanna, B.F.A. Theater (no science degree)
Ed Begley Jr., High School Diploma
Jackson Browne, High School Diploma
Jon Bon Jovi (John Bongiovi), High School Diploma
Oprah Winfrey, B.A. Speech and Drama (no science degree)
Prince Charles of Whales, B.A. (no science degree)
Sheryl Crow, B.A. Music Education (no science degree)
Sienna Miller, High School Diploma

ABC - Sam Champion, B.A. Broadcast News (no science degree, not a meteorologist)
CBS - Harry Smith, B.A. Communications and Theater (no science degree)
CBS - Katie Couric, B.A. English (no science degree)
CBS - Scott Pelley, College Dropout
NBC - Ann Curry, B.A. Journalism (no science degree)
NBC - Anne Thompson, B.A. American studies (no science degree)
NBC - Matt Lauer. B.A. Communications (no science degree)
NBC - Meredith Vieira, B.A. English (no science degree)

Al Sharpton, College Dropout
Alicia Keys, College Dropout
Alicia Silverstone, High School Dropout
Art Bell, College Dropout
Ben Affleck, College Dropout
Ben Stiller, College Dropout
Billy Jean King, College Dropout
Brad Pitt, College Dropout
Britney Spears, High School Dropout
Bruce Springsteen, College Dropout
Cameron Diaz, High School Dropout
Cindy Crawford, College Dropout
Diane Keaton, College Dropout
Drew Barrymore, High School Dropout
George Clooney, College Dropout
Gwyneth Paltrow, College Dropout
Jason Biggs, College Dropout
Jennifer Connelly, College Dropout
Jessica Simpson, High School Dropout
John Travolta, High School Dropout
Joshua Jackson, High School Dropout
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, College Dropout
Julia Roberts, College Dropout
Kanye West, College Dropout
Keanu Reeves, High School Dropout
Kevin Bacon, High School Dropout
Kiefer Sutherland, High School Dropout
Leonardo DiCaprio, High School Dropout
Lindsay Lohan, High School Dropout
Ludacris (Christopher Bridges), College Dropout
Madonna (Madonna Ciccone), College Dropout
Matt Damon, College Dropout
Matthew Modine, College Dropout
Michael Moore, College Dropout
Nicole Richie, College Dropout
Neve Campbell, High School Dropout
Olivia Newton-John, High School Dropout
Orlando Bloom, High School Dropout
Paris Hilton, High School Dropout
Pierce Brosnan. High School Dropout
Queen Latifah (Dana Elaine Owens), College Dropout
Richard Branson, High School Dropout
Robert Redford, College Dropout
Rosie O'Donnell, College Dropout
Sarah Silverman, College Dropout
Sean Penn, College Dropout
Ted Turner, College Dropout
Tommy Lee (Thomas Lee Bass), High School Dropout
Uma Thurman, High School Dropout
Willie Nelson, High School Dropout

Politicians:

John McCain, B.S. (Graduated 894th out of 899 in his class)
Newt Gingrich, Ph.D. Modern European History (no science degree) (Hypocrite)
Pat Robertson, B.A., J.D., M.A. Divinity (no science degree)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, B.A. Government, J.D. Law (no science degree, 'recovered' Heroin addict)

Scientists:

Bill Nye, B.S. Mechanical Engineering (Bill Nye the Science Guy)
Gavin Schmidt, B.A. Ph.D. Applied Mathematics (RealClimate.org)
James Hansen, B.A. Physics and Mathematics, M.S. Astronomy, Ph.D. Physics (NASA, Gavin Schmidt's Boss)
James Lovelock, Ph.D. Medicine, D.Sc. Biophysics
Lonnie Thompson, Ph.D. Geological Sciences
Michael Mann, A.B. Applied Math, Physics, M.S. Physics, Ph.D. Geology & Geophysics (RealClimate.org)
Michael Oppenheimer, S.B. Chemistry, Ph.D. Chemical Physics
Richard C. J. Somerville, Ph.D. Meteorology
Steven Schneider, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering and Plasma Physics

Social Scientists:

Ronald Bailey, B.A. Philosophy and Economics (Science Correspondent, Reason Magazine)

Monad CICY heterotic landscape: 7118

There are several hep-th papers today that I find very interesting.

Ho, Imamura, Matsuo, Shiba (Taiwan and Tokyo) continue in the membrane minirevolution and interpret the Bagger-Lambert-Gustavsson action as an M5-brane action in a 3-form magnetic field, with all kinds of the obvious answers you would like or expect.

Alex Buchel (Perimeter Institute) argues that their 2005 claims about a different subleading correction to the AdS/CFT-derived entropy-density-to-viscosity ratio were caused by a mistaken choice of the boundary conditions at the horizon. He fixes the mistake and the problem goes away: the new coefficient is confirmed.

Ding-fang Zeng (Beijing) calculates heavy quark potentials in three simple AdS/QCD models.

There are also papers about B-brane superpotentials, trace anomaly from AdS/CFT, heavy ion colissions from AdS/CFT, topologically charged membranes in AdS/CFT, N=8 SUGRA amplitudes, uniqueness of higher-spin gauge theories, supertwistors, solutions to modified Bianchi identity, Wess-Zumino gauge, RG flows applied to gravity (only dimensionless couplings can have universal behavior), and many others.

But I chose the following winner.



Lara Anderson, Yang-Hui He, and André Lukas (Oxford) classify positive monad heterotic E8 x E8 bundles on CICYs (complete intersection Calabi-Yau manifolds), topologies that can be defined - analogously to the quintic hypersurface - by polynomial equations in products of ordinary projective spaces and that still represent the most famous large ensemble of Calabi-Yau manifolds.

The paper is another fascinating example how dramatically the number of points on the landscape is reduced once certain conditions are imposed. Incidentally, Lara Anderson is an ingenious homeschooler originally from Utah but she was hijacked by Oxford via Rhodes.

First, they have to choose the geometric background - the CICYs. They have been classified: there are 7890 of them in total (although the present authors claim that 435 of them are redundant at the end of their paper). Anderson et al. make a pre-selection of those that have a chance to admit symmetry breaking by the Wilson lines: they only find 4515 "favorable" CICY geometries out of the 7890.

However, it must also be possible to construct a stable, anomaly-free bundle on them. Remember that they're searching for positive monad bundles; monad bundles are essentially kernels of maps between direct sums of line bundles (defined through short exact sequences). It turns out that only 36 out of the 4515 favorable CICYs admit positive monad bundles. However, there are typically several possible bundles for one CICY: in total, they find 7118 models.

They know how to calculate the particle spectrum for each. The Higgs fields only appear at special subspaces of the moduli spaces. There are never any anti-families. Among the 7118 models, 559 of them can lead to 3-generation models either directly or by orbifolding by a discrete group of order "k" (the Euler character must be a multiple of "k" and the original number of families must be "3k"). Most of these 559 models have a high value of "k", only 21 models have "k" smaller than 14.

When one deals with some classes of vacua that can be generated by an algorithm or simple enough rules and constraints, it is often rather straightforward (although with very fancy calculations only) to classify physics of all of them. A general question is whether we have any reason to expect that the compactification describing the world belongs to this special class or similar ones.

I think that this question is very important for our decision "where to look" and both answers are conceivable. The default "anthropic" answer is that we shouldn't expect anything like that. On the other hand, there can exist some very crisp dynamical mechanisms (or unknown consistency constraints) that make a constructible class much more likely or inevitable. Of course it would be nice to find such a rule. It is also important to avoid wishful thinking.

In summary, I find it very healthy if a subgroup of mathematicians and physicists focuses on the special cases because special cases are relevant more frequently than the generic ones.

And that's the memo.

Unipetrol: we bet that common sense will prevail

In an online discussion, I asked the CEO of Unipetrol, a large Czech petrochemical and oil-distributing company owned by Polish PKN Orlen, about the impact of carbon regulation on their business. Here is the question and the answer.

LM: Good afternoon, up to what extent will Unipetrol be affected by global efforts to regulate carbon emissions and what do you think about the Kyoto protocol and similar policies?

François Vleugels: We have an extensive program underway to analyze our energy need-and-efficiency and develop a strategy that will address these questions. Basically, we assume that the post-Kyoto EU measures will be challenged and that common sense will prevail. What we try to do is to minimize our usage of energy, improve the efficiency of our energy production, and look at the combined impact of energy feedstock cost, feedstock availability/security, and carbon emission taxation to come to the 'right answer'. We clearly need extensive dialogue with the policy makers in Prague and Brussels to come to the right formula of 'preserving the world' and preserving our ability to be competitive.

Presentism vs eternalism

Sabine Hossenfelder who has demanded theories to be falsifiable in hundreds of her texts wrote an essay about

The Block Universe

that tries to solve the conflict between presentism and eternalism. Oops.

What do these words mean? These ideas in philosophy try to answer the question(s)

whether the past and/or the future exist.

Now, presentism claims that only the present exists while eternalism (also called "The Block Universe paradigm") claims that the whole spacetime including the past and future exists as well.

Who is right?

It is not hard to see that both opinions are textbook examples of unfalsifiable statements. How are you supposed to decide that the past doesn't (or didn't) exist? Clearly, this question depends on the definition of the word "exist" in a particular context. This word was not designed to settle similar ill-defined questions.

It was invented for people to be able to say whether a mammoth could be found somewhere in their local forest before they die of hunger. They didn't care whether they would find the animal in 5 minutes or 10 minutes but it had to take place before they starved to death. Later, people tried to give the verb a more accurate definition but it doesn't mean that they succeeded.

Analogously, the sentence "is the world three-dimensional or four-dimensional?" is a canonical example of sloppy formulations. The answer depends on whether "the world" in the sentence means a "slice of spacetime" or the "spacetime" itself. Both concepts, the slice as well as the spacetime, "exist" in the space of concepts. A priori, we can mean both things. Why the hell do some people find it important to answer questions that are clearly (and perhaps deliberately) ambiguously formulated?

So I find it kind of mind-boggling (it not mind-blogging) that the very same people who like to say that statements in science must be falsifiable - and who even enjoy to lead their impressionable readers to the completely wrong conclusion that even very accurate, quantitative, and a priori incredibly strong scientific statements are not falsifiable - are usually the very same people who are absolutely excited about meaningless philosophical babbling about questions that can be given no operational meaning. Suddenly, they can't even think of the idea that these pet theories of theirs could be unfalsifiable, that they could be vacuous piles of crap.

The same thing can be said about Lee Smolin. He has written thousands of pages defending outdated and bizarre philosophical dogmas about relationism. There exists no scientific reason why "relationism" should be generally true.

Moreover, this concept is generally ill-defined. In specific contexts, its more concrete mutations - such as Mach's principle - can be shown incorrect. More generally, these hypotheses can be shown contrived and unlikely because they make too strong, unjustified assumptions about the laws of physics. Once the correct laws are actually found by the scientific method (e.g. general relativity as the right classical theory of gravity and inertia), we can see why the old philosophical statements were mostly wrong and almost universally ill-defined.

But certain people still mentally live in the 12th century scholasticism when concepts were ill-defined, statements involving these statements were both ill-defined and unsubstantiated, but the "scholars of good faith" wanted these statements to control the thinking of all people.

The presentism vs eternalism debate is another great example. What experiment can I do - even in principle - that would prove that the past doesn't exist or that the future does exist? Even though the question can't be sharply answered in science, we can still talk about the relationships between the presentism vs eternalism debate and science.

Early humans and the existence of spacetime

Most animals don't remember too much. In the past, people tended to forget things, too. They had to struggle to survive every day and sometimes every minute. Their immediate present was what was controlling their emotions and what they cared about. That's why by the "existence", they meant the existence "at the same moment" only. Sometimes they would be thinking about the past and the future as well. But these concepts were mysterious and "unreal". The realm of the past and the realm of the future was full of gods and dragons.

As the people were getting better in remembering and archiving the past, the past was becoming "more real" for them. And as they were getting better in predicting the future, the future was becoming "more real" as well. Moreover, the past and the future should be treated in a similar way as soon as you accept the existence of positive and negative real numbers.

Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas were two early figures who began to promote eternalism. Because the cutting-edge cosmological model of their era involved God who created the world, they were saying that the world was created including the time. God is above time. There's no way to ask what was before the world was created because the word "before" only works inside God's creation i.e. inside the spacetime.

Now, these theological ideas couldn't change the fact that people were primarily perceiving their present and they cared about it. But it is fair to say that the perspective of the two Gentlemen was closer to the spirit of Einstein's relativity.

Presentism and relativity

Once we understand relativity, we find one obvious problem about presentism. If we want to say that only the "present 3D slice of spacetime exists", we are obliged to clarify the proposition by choosing a reference frame. In the blogosphere, there exists a preferred reference frame but in the real world, there doesn't.

The old-fashioned presentism seems to be in trouble. If we want the word "exist" to have a universal meaning that the 6.5 billions of people on Earth could agree with, there are actually many ways to define the verb - one for each reference frame. In special relativity, we could argue that only the inertial ones are legitimate. But in general relativity, we can say even that each (generally curved) spacelike slice through spacetime produces a new definition of presentism. Does it mean that no form of interpersonal presentism can survive in relativity?

Actually, there is a natural relativitistic counterpart of presentism. You may say that not only the other moments of spacetime are unreal: the other places in space are unreal as well. Only the particular point (or small region) in spacetime where you live "exists". Such a definition of "local presentism" is Lorentz-covariant. In fact, it follows the usual thinking in mechanics and field theory.

In mechanics, the degrees of freedom are viewed as functions of the variable "t", the time. In relativistic field theory, the degrees of freedom (fields) are functions of "t,x,y,z" (plus six or seven extra coordinates). In mechanics, "x,y,z" could have been degrees of freedom (positions of particles) that become operators in quantum mechanics but in field theory, they are just variables that are treated on equal footing with "t". Integrals over "t" in mechanics (such as the action) are replaced by integrals over "t,x,y,z" (of the Lagrangian density).

So the "local presentism" is a natural relativistic version of the old "presentism". Our ability to construct this framework shows that the presentism vs eternalism debate cannot be really solved forever by the arguments based on the Lorentz invariance only.

In reality, we don't live at a "point" of spacetime. We occupy a region of spacetime. Even our brains do. It is not just a technical limitation caused by a low density of our brains; the holographic principle implies that nonzero information must always occupy a non-infinitesimal region whose surface can't be smaller than the information inside (in Planck units). So these are new subtleties.

Even though I have written a lot of words by now, it is important to emphasize again that neither of these questions has any real impact on anything. If you use a curved, non-canonical slice to define the word "exist", it may be ugly but this ugliness doesn't influence any phenomena. Phenomena are not influenced by things that are defined to "exist". Instead, they are influenced by the other phenomena in their past light cone and by the probabilistic laws of physics.

If you ask a more accurate question than the question "What exists?" - for example the question "what degrees of freedom must be taken into account when you predict the event XY" - you may obtain a much more accurate answer.

And even if you win the silly battle for the meaning of the ambiguous verb "exist", the answer to the more meaningful question is not necessarily identical to the answer to the question "what exists?". For example, the brain activity depends on various processes and the signals propagate by subluminal speeds. Whether we define the word "exist" in one way or another has no impact on the question what information our brains can actually process. These are very different issues; the meaning of the word "exist" is a purely linguistic exercise without any impact on physics, neurobiology, or other sciences and without any impact on our ability to manipulate with information about the Universe.

Higher-dimensional geometry = new definitions

There are many other relativistically well-behaved definitions that an observer could adopt for the "existence". He may say that only his past light cone exists, both light cone exists, whole spacetime exists, only the space-like-separated region exists, and so forth. ;-) Once again, neither of these linguistic choices has any physical impact on anything.

And if a physicist wants to avoid confusion, there is a simple recipe. Instead of using the word "exist", he may say "exist in spacetime" or "exist in the past light cone of XY". Or he may say whatever he means. The ambiguity of the word "exist" (without additional specifications) is man-made and it is easy to fix it: simply use a more accurate language. And the fact that other people can use (and often do use) imprecise language doesn't mean that there "exists" any physical mystery to be solved. ;-)

Noam Chomsky, a linguist, asked in 1957 whether colorless green ideas sleep furiously. It was meaningless to answer such questions because the words were combined in a context that they were not designed for. No sane answer could exist at that time. Incidentally, in 2008, the answer to Chomsky's question is Yes because the largely homogenized (colorless) mobs of green activists are unable to think rationally (their ideas are sleeping). Their severe limitation can make us furious, indeed. But because the word "green" wasn't understood in this way in 1957, the question made no sense fifty years ago.

Is there an actual mystery surrounding the "existence" of the past and the future?

In fact, no mystery of this kind exists, neither on the present slice nor in spacetime! More precisely, this mystery existed in the past because people were silly and it also exists today because many people still can't distinguish vacuous verbal games from physical questions. It may also exist in the future if the people will be getting less sensible again or if the words will be given a different meaning. But the mystery shouldn't exist today if the people were thinking scientifically! ;-)

You may also say whether you conciousness is connected with a point in spacetime or a region. Obviously, it is a region and one can make various experiments - for example, to quickly burn a portion of your brain - to check whether your consciousness is affected. Disclaimer: you can only test it once. You might still say that these physiological tests don't tell you where (and when) the consciousness is "really" located. But even though the word "consciousness" is supposed to sound mysterious, the sensible scientist's approach is to accept the operational definition and to distrust theories about souls flying outside the body.

Human consciousness, despite its mysterious connotations, is linked with structures and processes in the brain. Less complex structures can also have some "consciousness" but they are unable to reliably manipulate with its products - namely with macroscopic amounts of the information.

Eternalism vs causality in quantum mechanics

While the presentism vs eternalism debate is pretty much vacuous, ambiguous, and confusing - and relativity adds some new twists that perhaps make the debate even more ambiguous - there exist related questions that are slightly more physical.

One of them is the question

What events influence the present - or a particular event at this moment?

In classical mechanics, you needed to know all the degrees of freedom at some moment "t_0" and you could have calculated all the degrees of freedom at a different moment "t_1". Typically, you would choose "t_0" to occur before "t_1" but it wasn't strictly necessary. (Don't forget that retrodictions become exponentially difficult for complex systems due to the increasing entropy!)

At any rate, the future was determined by the past.

The same thing is true in field theory. If you know the value of all fields in space at "t_0", you may calculate their values at a different moment "t_1". But for relativistic, local field theories, there exists an additional choice. It is enough to know the degrees of freedom at "t_0" in some region "R" of space and you may still calculate something, namely all the degrees of freedom in the intersection of the future light cones of the points in the region "R".

Once again, relativity adds new ways how the information can be organized. Why? It is because it is adding new dimensions of spacetime that may be treated in analogy with time (even though they are spatial). And the four-dimensional geometry is richer and more interesting than the one-dimensional geometry of intervals on the "t" axis.

In quantum mechanics, only the probabilities may be predicted. If we know something about the past, the squared absolute values of some complex amplitudes determine the probabilities of various things in the future. Even though Sean Carroll can't get it, this procedure only follows these rules in the forward time direction: it depends on an intrinsic logical arrow of time. Retrodictions are calculated differently and they depend on priors; predictions in quantum mechanics don't need any priors.

Relativistic quantum field theory still preserves the causality of relativistic classical field theory: if you know everything about the region "R", you may still calculate everything - i.e. all probabilities of various outcomes of measurements - about the intersection of the future light cones of points in "R". This fact can be easily seen in the Heisenberg picture: the whole evolution in time is encoded in the Heisenberg field equations for the operators that are analogous and equally causal as they were in classical field theory.

However, one can show that the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics is no illusion - it can't be mimicked by hidden variables - as long as we accept the causality principle in the previous paragraph that is almost certainly inevitable in a Lorentz-invariant theory. And the Lorentz invariance is supported by an overwhelming body of evidence: a physicist certainly can't deny it completely because of some philosophical preconceptions and such heavily supported insights (principles of relativity) simply must be taken seriously when a scientist tries to answer some questions about space and time.

Free will theorem and presentism

John Conway and Simon Kochen have proven the free-will theorem that shows that if the experimenters have the free will to decide what buttons they are going to press (and they seem to have it, at least in some countries), the particles (and other objects) measured in their experiments must have the free will, too. This amusing statement means that the outcomes of the experiments can't be calculated as a function of some "hidden variables" in their past light cones, not even in principle.

This conclusion means that the spacetime including all the events that have actually happened - and that will happen - cannot be interpreted as a coherent block that obeys unambiguous laws. The "free will" they derive means that the outcome of an experiment done "now" is not a function of things in the past. In this sense, the results of these experiments are "really" decided now. They were not decided in the past. That's what the free will means. Conway and Kochen's theorem therefore supports presentism, at least morally.

And the future cannot exist now, either. The fate of the Universe (and its particles) in the future hasn't yet been decided. This statement is what the free will actually means. The spacetime may exist in some abstract sense but because the theorem literally says that the future events don't depend on things that exist "now" but also on random decisions that are invariably linked to the future points in spacetime, it is legitimate to say that the future "doesn't exist now". ;-)

We have to ask more accurate questions to decide whether the presentist or eternalist definition of the word "exist" is right in particular contexts. And in different contexts, the answers may be different. But if you are interested in my universal sentiments, I think that both perspectives are partially right. And it's true even in the context of the free will theorem. Conway and Kochen have shown that the humans and particles have the same kind or (qualitatively) the same degree of the free will but they haven't actually shown that both of them have the free will. In some sense, both humans as well as particles only have a partial free will which is also vaguely compatible with their theorem. However, I can't exactly tell you what this mysterious statement means.

Induction & how scientists think

Many people like to promote an interpretation of the scientific method - let me call it the "Popperian interpretation" - that I find naive, oversimplified, and incomplete. In this picture, scientists

1. make guesses (create hypotheses)
   
2. falsify the wrong ones by observations
   

and that's it. Well, in some vague sense, it is always the case. These two procedures may appear at some moments of the scientific process. We make some guesses, we are trying to eliminate the wrong ones, and we may ignore everything else that the scientists are doing if we're not really interested in it. ;-)

Commercial break: Sheldon Glashow's obituary of Sidney Coleman. Via Betsy Devine, thanks!

However, there are serious problems with this simple picture. It doesn't tell you how the scientists actually "invent" or choose their guesses and it doesn't tell you that the guesses are almost never abandoned in their entirety. Also, the very idea that the likelihood that the guesses are right can only decrease - but not increase - is logically untenable because if the probability of "A" decreases, the probability of "non A" must inevitably increase. ;-)

Let me present the scientific process as a more complex sequence or combination of the following procedures that may occur in many different orders and that may influence each other in many different ways:

1. Inductive reasoning (induction)
   
2. Deductive reasoning (deduction)
   
3. Comparisons of the deduced results with experience (verification)
   

The last two points are usually understood by most people who pay some attention to science because there is nothing really deep about them.

Deduction

The second procedure, deductive reasoning, means that you already have a theory or a hypothesis and you deduce (or calculate) what it predicts for a particular situation. You often need to know and develop some mathematical (and numerical) methods. But you might say that in principle, all the wise tricks used in deductive reasoning could be replaced by the brute force of a powerful enough computer. Lattice QCD could be an example that you should have in mind. A computer should tell you what the predictions are and how accurately they have been determined.

Computer-assisted simulation is a kind of deduction. Paradoxically from a linguistic viewpoint, mathematical induction is another good example of deduction ;-) simply because the conclusion for all integers rigorously and certainly follows from the assumptions.

Verification

The third procedure, comparisons of the results with experience, is even more straightforward. You have some numbers that you have deduced from your theory and the experimenters measure the numbers in the real world. If they disagree and if you can trust both the experimenters as well as the deducers, the theory is dead. In reality, such a step usually follows the rules of fuzzy logic. A theory is often "supported" by the evidence or it is "disfavored". Its probability increases or decreases but it doesn't jump all the way up to 100% and it doesn't decrease all the way down to 0% either (although we may often get extremely close to these extreme values).

You might imagine that the Bayesian inference is - openly or secretly - used whenever we refine our opinions about the validity of a theory by checking it against the empirical evidence. Our prior probabilities that hypotheses are correct have to be raised if the hypotheses pass some experimental tests in a better way than expected by chance while they have to be lowered if the agreement is worse than expected by chance.

The best quantitative law is encoded in the Bayes formula but it is fair to say that scientists rarely calculate the probabilities accurately when they are just browsing around and comparing very different hypotheses. It's because the "accurate" probabilities would depend on the priors that are unknown, anyway.

It is not hard to guess that most of this article will be dedicated to the first procedure in the list, namely induction. Many discussions - online discussions as well as the interactions in the real life - have convinced me that most people (including those who claim to be interested in science) completely misunderstand induction: they really fail to grasp what it means to "think" as a scientist.

Induction

I would like to define inductive reasoning as the collection of all "creative" or "not quite mechanical" steps that scientists ever have to make in order to find something new about Nature or at least to get on the right track. Almost everything that has made various theorists "ingenious" or "different from the average people" is hiding in their art of induction.

But experimenters and deducers use induction at various places of their work, too. When a deducer designs her calculational algorithm or an experimenter constructs her new experimental apparatus, they are using a form of induction to achieve their goals, too.

Nevertheless, I will try to focus on the theorists' usage of induction during their search for more correct theories of Nature. But don't forget that if you replace the words "theory" or "statement about reality" by a "calculational framework" or a "useful experimental device" in the text below (and you replace "more likely" by "more useful"), most of the assertions will be relevant for the deducers and experimenter, too. But let's return to the world of theorists now.

More technically, induction is any type of reasoning in which a statement about reality is identified and determined to be more likely than random statements that use similar concepts - a reasoning that applies either logic or heuristic reasoning to existing facts about reality.

In this case, the probability that the newly constructed statement is correct is even harder to quantify than in the case of verification. Nevertheless, you might still imagine that there exists a form of Bayesian inference that quantifies the probability that the induced hypothesis is correct. Although the numerical value of the probability is usually ill-defined (mostly because of the completely uncertain priors), we may compare these probabilities in many cases and say e.g. that a candidate law that has been extracted from a more detailed set of observations is more likely to be true than a candidate law that is only based on a small number of observations.

The inductive reasoning that has always been necessary to make promising guesses in science (and elsewhere) has many kinds and in my definition, it includes these steps, among others:

1. Interpolation and extrapolation
2. Generalization of several cases
   
3. Fusion of a group of older laws
4. Application of a successful method to approximate laws (and the concepts they use) in order to find more accurate laws (and new concepts)
5. Search for general constraints that restrict possible laws of Nature, including general principles
6. Linearization or other simplification or parameterization of the "space of hypotheses" within the mantinels of viability found in the previous item, in order to adjust and improve the imperfect but promising theories and to simplify the navigation towards the truth
   

It may be healthy to discuss them one by one.

Interpolation and extrapolation

Many or most insights about Nature are described in terms of functions of real variables, besides other concepts. Because Nature is known to be continuous in many different contexts, we have learned that it is reasonable to assume that the relevant functions are continuous, too. At least in many cases (especially in classical physics) we have very good reasons to think so, to say the least.

This principle allows us to guess that if experiments show that "y=3.05" for "x=21.5" and "y=3.07" for "x=21.7", it is pretty likely (or reasonable to expect) that "y" will be close to "3.06" for "x=21.6". The reasoning I used here is called interpolation. In the particular example, I interpolated the two measured points by a linear function.

The exact character of the function becomes increasingly unimportant if the measured values of "x" and "y" are sufficiently dense or close to each other and sufficiently "generic" (i.e. not special). The advantage of interpolation is that we don't have to make infinitely many measurements to know (or predict) something about the value of "y" for arbitrary values of "x". Note that if you didn't allow scientists to assume some kind of continuity that allows them to interpolate, you could always argue that they have absolutely no idea what happens for "x=21.6" because they have only measured what happens at two different values of "x".

In the example of interpolation above, we have made a guess about the behavior at intermediate values of "x". However, it is often necessary to make a reasonable first guess what happens at completely different values of "x". If we already have some candidate function (polynomials, exponentials, and other functions that are "mathematically natural") that describes what happens inside an interval on the "x" axis, we may boldly try to extend this function to other values of "x", too.

This process is called extrapolation. It is clearly less reliable than interpolation but it is still better than knowing nothing. Extrapolation is often needed to have some remotely sane initial idea about an unknown situation. Once other types of induction, to be discussed later, or new pieces of evidence are taken into account, we might actually be able to see that a certain function is much more justified than we would expect at the beginning. If you don't immediately know why one particular function should be the right one outside the measured interval of "x", it doesn't mean that it is forever impossible to know (or almost know) such a reason!

Generalization of several cases

You should realize that the previous arguments and methods - interpolation and extrapolation - have to be used all the time because otherwise we couldn't learn anything from our experience. Every new situation or experiment we care about is slightly different than the previous ones. Without some assumption that relevant functions are "mathematically natural" or at least "continuous" and/or "universal", we would only "know" what happens in the exact experimental situations that have been measured.

Every new planet, space shuttle etc. would be a completely new mystery. The law of gravity could always break down. In reality, it is not the case. The assumption of continuity - or even more special conditions about the relevant functions that describe natural phenomena (including e.g. analyticity in quantum field theory) - is a hypothesis that can be tested and that has been tested.

Overwhelming evidence can be found and has been found in many cases or most cases that shows, via Bayesian inference, if you wish, that this hypothesis of continuity (or even analyticity etc. in quantum field theory) is more likely to be true (or at least more useful) than a random statement about Nature you could make. In fact, it is almost certainly true, at least with some impressive accuracy. ;-)

There exist more general types of this reasoning. I included them under the umbrella of generalization. If you have seen the sunrise 10,000 times and you even have some indirect evidence that other people have seen it millions of times and your continent has witnessed it trillions of times, it is not quite unreasonable to assume that the Sun will rise tomorrow, too.

Now, 10,000 sunrises don't "prove" anything. But they are still an argument. In some sense, it is fair to think that the 10,000 sunrises imply that the probability that the Sun won't rise tomorrow is probably smaller than 1/10,001. Tomorrow is a random day among the 10,001 days that you will have seen by tomorrow and the probability that a special property that only holds for one day - not having any sunrise - is satisfied for "tomorrow" rather than the previous 10,000 days is about 1/10,001, assuming some democracy governing the days. Moreover, even Al Gore will agree that the cataclysm won't come tomorrow but only on the day after tomorrow. ;-)

I didn't use any nuclear physics. The argument that the catastrophe that starts tomorrow is unlikely because we haven't seen it for quite some time is only based on common sense. Well, not quite. It is also based on some simple observations that you (or people) have made 10,000 times. One should realize that simple observations, when combined with some "common sense" arguments, can often lead us to more solid predictions than arguments based on very non-trivial observations combined with excessively contrived theoretical reasoning.

Now, I would like to explain the relationship between interpolations, extrapolations, and generalizations. Interpolations and extrapolations only differ by the place on the "x" axis where we extend our observations (inside or outside the interval). Generalizations are, in fact, similar. The only difference is that the generalizations we discuss in this section require a new type of "x" that is discrete.

For our example involving the sunrise, "x" is the integer that counts the days in your life. The discrete function "y" is either equal to "sunrise does occur" or "sunrise doesn't occur" on a given day. And we are simply extrapolating from the previous days - values of "x" - to the future ones. It is thus a form of extrapolation. In other cases, the discrete values of "x" are not naturally ordered along an axis. For example if we "induce" Hubble's law of expansion for various galaxies, "x" identifies the particular galaxy and there is no natural way to assign real numbers or integers to galaxies.

Consequently, we can't say whether the generalization of Hubble's law from the observed galaxies to all galaxies is an example of interpolation or extrapolation. But you can still see that this generalization is a procedure that is closely related to interpolation and/or extrapolation.

These generalizations have been, much like interpolations and extrapolations, essential to figure out something about Nature. And they are still essential. All cases in which a rule or pattern applies to all members of a set of objects or phenomena belong to this category. Once again, arguments constructed in this way are not rigorous proofs. They depend on the assumption of "universality" much like interpolations depend on "continuity".

But much like many other useful assumptions, universality seems to be (at least effectively) true while it is of course falsifiable in principle. However, an overwhelming evidence suggests that it is a good guide (in many contexts - and, by a more conceptual kind of generalization, in classes of contexts).

Fusion of a group of older laws

This new type of reasoning is somewhat different. When we have two partially successful theories that describe two subsystems - or two (groups of) aspects of a physical system - we often need to "merge" these two theories.

In this case, it is obvious that the two theories we started with are incomplete because they only apply to subsystems (or to some aspects of a physical system). We only know pieces of the puzzle. In some cases, the pieces could be viable fragments of an older theory that has been falsified as a bloc but whose portions are promising enough to be recycled. To learn something about the whole puzzle, we clearly need more than the pieces.

The first step is to realize what is the relationship between the pieces. We must try to carefully divide the subsystems or the aspects of one physical system in between the two (or more) older theories and we must make reasonable qualitative guesses what happens near the boundary between the two (or more) domains of validity: a kind of interpolation is necessary here.

Because functions in Nature are typically continuous, it is usually not possible to sharply divide the domains of validity. Every theory X tends to employ some functions that also try to tell us something about physics outside the domain of validity of X. For this simple reason, the merger of two types of theories is often highly non-trivial and the number of possibilities how two (or more) theories may be merged is often severely limited: the correct theory must "tame" both older theories and force them to peacefully respect the regions outside their domains of validity.

This compatibility constraint often forces the older theories to "unify" - i.e. to merge into a greater entity in which the original two theories can no longer be strictly divided.

There are also cases in which the merger is straightforward. Sometimes the "merger" simply means that we only add the degrees of freedom and add the Hamiltonians (or actions) of two (or more) older theories. That's a typical example of a situation in which no unification occurs (and no unification is needed).

Application of a successful method in a new context

We are getting fancier. What is the method discussed here? Well, it is a scientific reincarnation of an "analogy". How does it work when we're looking for better theories? It is often possible to compare two "qualitatively" different theories that we have considered in the past, locate the difference between them, and present one of the theories (the more complete and/or more accurate one) as the other one that has undergone a certain operation.

Once we isolate this operation ("a method to improve a theory"), we may describe it in terms of general rules that may also be applied to other theories whose "siblings" are not yet known. This method is therefore a new kind of a "merger" that was discussed in the previous section. However, in this case, we are not merging two particular "models" but rather one model with an abstract method. This abstract method can be visualized as the difference between two other theories or models.

Quantization is the most obvious example of the procedure I am talking about. It is possible to compare the quantum theory of one particle with its classical counterpart, describe this difference as a set of replacements of concepts - quantization - and use these steps to another classical physical system, such as classical electrodynamics, to construct a new theory, in this case quantum electrodynamics.

There are more trivial examples of this sort of reasoning, for example the rewriting of a theory in certain useful variables - variables of a similar kind that have been successful in other contexts (although this technical step might be more useful for deducers rather than the creative theorists; new variables usually do not mean new physics). The main point is that the physicists have to combine not only models that have already been found but they must also combine models with principles, models with methods, and so forth.

This subcategory of inductive reasoning is perhaps the most "creative" one. It is capable to qualitatively change the character of our hypotheses and concepts and to increase their complexity most dramatically. If you compare scientific hypotheses to life forms, the currently discussed "merger" of models with principles that were extracted from other contexts are analogous to the most dramatic types of mutations, mergers of two DNA molecules, a change of the number of chromosomes, etc. Even in biology, many of these "large mutations" are not quite random but they are rather carefully tailored so that the resulting new life form is bound to be more interesting and viable than a random life form of a similar complexity.

Quantization and similar procedures have counterparts in rigorous mathematics, too. In set theory, we often need to construct larger sets or classes - recall Zermelo-Frenkel's set theory - from the bottom, including the set of all subsets of another set, the set of all functions from one set to another set, and so forth.

In other words, we are talking about all the procedures that often lead to possibly relevant, highly complex mathematical structures. Just like the mammals are "qualitatively" different from bacteria and rather "large mutations" had to take place in the past, cutting-edge quantum theories of gravity (i.e. stringy vacua) are qualitatively different from the classical mechanistic theories popular in the 17th century. Something had to change many times before people became able to propose and consider theories of the modern kind and I mostly include these improvements into this group of "application of successful principles to new situations".

If thousands of philosophers were trying to find the strangest possible theory for thousands of years, they would have never invented quantum mechanics (Sidney Coleman) simply because they would only be searching in the realm of naive, insufficiently abstract, not too complex, and insufficiently crazy ideas from a common sense viewpoint (for example, among different shapes of the classical atoms by Democritus): they could have never made the right guess. Nature had to force us to make our theories more abstract, more complex, and crazier in order to match Her extraordinary charm. Analogies have been the key to increase the conceptual sophistication of our hypotheses.

Search for general principles and constraints

While the previous mental step allows us to expand the "DNA of science" and create increasingly complicated monsters (some of which are clearly necessary to describe the reality properly or almost properly), we might often end up with too large monsters that are too arbitrary - too many huge convoluted animals with too long DNA molecules, if you wish. Complex animals are fine and necessary. But we still need a counterpart of the natural selection here.

Again, it is not true that new experimental tests are always needed to "kill" some of these convoluted animals. We usually have a lot of old experimental tests and most of the completely random new "convoluted animals" are almost certainly guaranteed to fail in these old tests. That's a great method to exterminate - or severely hurt - most of these big animals.

We must create and sharpen our tools to kill them. Because it is inconvenient to carry too many tools, it is a great idea to use a finite, manageable number of these tools. And to remember which of them are sharp ones. And use these tools all the time to get rid of wrong theories very quickly even if they are complicated and if others might incorrectly think that one needs centuries to kill such dinosaurs. With sharp and efficient tools, you can kill a lot dinosaurs very quickly.

In the previous paragraph, I was really talking about various experimental or cosmological constraints on "unusual" phenomena. Complicated enough theories, much like complicated enough animals, tend to have some "weak spots" that seem "unusual" and that can simplify the life of the hunters or the killers.

For example, many theories might predict some violations of the Lorentz symmetry. It is therefore useful to understand very well how to quantify the amount of Lorentz violation predicted by a given theory (the thickness of the skin of a big animal at some vulnerable spot or spots) and how to compare it with the experimentally known constraints (the length of our knife that can be enough to kill an animal). The knife is enough whenever the skin is thin.

Experimental or cosmological constraints are able to eliminate many sufficiently randomly created theories very quickly and we don't really have to make new experiments in most cases. Quite obviously, promising theories - big animals that have a chance to survive - must have rather special properties. And it is a good idea to look within these mantinels only.

So we are expanding the landscape of the DNA codes as the animals (theories) are getting more complex but we are also making the tools to kill them sharper. While the landscape of possible DNA codes is getting larger as the theories get more complex, the relative ratio of the viable theories within this landscape is getting smaller because we are also gaining an increasing number of tools to kill.

The creation of new, complex life forms is competing with the creation of new, sophisticated killing tools and both of these processes are necessary to make progress, much like their counterparts were needed for the evolution of life to end up with relatively intelligent (and otherwise valuable) animals like us. The main difference between life and theoretical physics is that the life forms can be getting increasingly complex indefinitely; theoretical physics is arguably or hopefully converging to a very specific final theory with a particular finite amount of complexity.

I would like to emphasize that the tools used to eliminate theories don't have to be simply understandable, experimental, quantitative constraints such as the limits on CPT or Lorentz symmetry violation. They may also be very abstract and qualitative principles. While the CPT symmetry or the Lorentz symmetry are examples of such principles - that force us to look at relativistic theories - and we may view them as "experimental" constraints, they are "theoretical" constraints at the same moment.

It was reasonable for Einstein to assume that the Lorentz symmetry had to be exactly valid (at least for a sensible approximation of the complete theory, it must be the case). So he simply required theories to be relativistic. This condition rules out a larger number (a majority, in most ways to count) of big animals that you could consider otherwise.

Also, various types of "consistency rules" must obviously be counted as the tools to kill. Unitarity must be satisfied, gauge anomalies must be absent, and a nearly flat & empty space must be a solution of your theory, among other things. The "large mutations" discussed previously can lead to many mathematical structures that don't satisfy even these basic rules. It takes a second to get rid of these lethally sick candidate theories.

Linearization and parameterization of the viable theories

Finally, there is one more important method that I included in the list. Because we have an increasing number of constraints - not only direct experimental constraints but also theoretical constraints that are able to instantly eliminate seemingly viable complex theories essentially without any experiment whatsoever, we are learning about the location of the correct theory within the landscape of possible theories increasingly accurately, relatively speaking.

While scientists usually test many hypotheses at the same time and only a very few of them have any chance to succeed - that's also the source of Popper's asymmetry when he assumes that the probabilities can only go down (for most hypotheses, the wrong ones, they go down) - we simultaneously want to keep the pool manageable and only consider limited enough, finite classes of hypotheses in which the right one doesn't get completely lost - that's why you shouldn't neglect that the probabilities also can go up (there exists a correct theory, after all) and why Popper's asymmetric description is flawed.

The wiggle room - i.e. the differences between promising candidates - are getting rather small. When you try to describe a small vicinity of some place in space, things may simplify. When you know the correct theory almost accurately, assuming a certain collection of basic concepts, it is usually a good idea to parameterize the correct theory by a few (or many) parameters that should be adjusted. Once you replace the promising neighborhood of a submanifold by the tangent space, you are clearly linearizing the problem.

Once you know the fields of the Standard Model, the correct theory is described in terms of the masses and couplings from the Lagrangian. For practical purposes, you may also show that the non-renormalizable couplings are irrelevant for easily testable predictions (they are also irrelevant in the technical sense) and you end up with a few dozens of parameters that matter.

Renormalizable quantum field theories with a few fields typically have a limited number of continuous adjustable dimensionless parameters. At some moment, the only task is to determine their values more accurately if you're only interested in particle physics below 100 GeV. The qualitative part of the physics research of this issue is over. What is left is rather boring. You have to adjust the very fine details and parameters. I would hesitate whether these final steps should be considered as induction.

However, the example of biology shows that the viable life forms must often be encoded in discrete data. The human DNA has a few billion bases. But if you self-confidently decide that the humans are the only intelligent animals above some IQ level that the Earth has seen so far, typical (and even less typical) human beings may be encoded in a much smaller number of bytes describing the properties or parameters of various genes. When we are getting very close to the full understanding of reality, it is very important to know the "legitimate playground" and to describe its structure and "geometry" as clearly as possible. New emergent concepts are useful to achieve this goal ("genes" in biology or "renormalizable couplings" in quantum field theory, besides millions of other scientific concepts).

The stringy landscape is of course far from being the only example of a parameterization of viable theories by discrete parameters. Such a parameterization is omnipresent in science. Conceivable perturbative theories of particle physics may be described in terms of gauge groups, representations in which scalars and fermions transform, and the continuous renormalizable couplings and masses. The discrete part of this data plays pretty much the same role as the discrete data that determine the vacuum in string theory.

In some sense, the number of discrete options is analogous and comparable in quantum field theory and in the stringy landscape. Just like quantum field theory itself doesn't predict the number of generations, string theory as we know it today doesn't predict the preferred topology of the Calabi-Yau manifold.

However, string theory completely eliminates the adjustable continuous dimensionless parameters. The only undetermined properties are the discrete parameters which is a gigantic progress in comparison with quantum field theory that has continuous parameters. And if you count the irrelevant ones (that become important at high energies), quantum field theory has infinitely many of these adjustable continuous parameters. Still, even in string theory, one has to go through the discrete candidates and find tools how to eliminate the incorrect ones.

It might be the case that such a vacuum selection is governed (completely or partially) by some new, mathematically described laws; if it is so, one could calculate what the right choice is. We don't know what the hypothetical rule exactly is at this moment. However, it might also be that no canonical calculation of the number of families and the representation of fermions etc. exists in string theory. If it doesn't exist, it is clear that we may only determine the right solution by a careful comparison of more detailed properties of the vacua with the experience, i.e. to use the old-fashioned verification to eliminate candidates.

While this "anthropic" scenario is often presented as the ultimate catastrophe because of the perceived "lack of predictivity", it wouldn't be the first time when experimental verification is needed to eliminate wrong models that talk about physics of these experiments. ;-) Our knowledge of low-energy physics could be enough to induce and deduce all detailed physical properties of Nature at the Planck scale, 15 orders of magnitude above the accessible energy scale (which is the regime we want to understand, almost by definition), by "pure thought" but it could also be insufficient. No one knows for sure: there exists partial evidence in both ways. This question doesn't really depend on any characteristic technical features of string theory; attempts to make this general question emotional or even to link it with the fate of string theory are irrational.

Note that there is no difference between string theory and quantum field theory - understood as broader frameworks or toolkits to propose models - in this particular aspect. When people were building the Standard Model, they had to determine how many fermions they had to include and what were the representations. That picked the general form of the Lagrangian from infinitely many discrete choices of a similar kind. In the string language, one makes similar discrete arguments to eliminate most of the vacua - the discrete parameters are just reshuffled and reorganized relatively to quantum field theory.

The task in string theory is more constrained because the continuous parameters are absent but it is arguably more complicated than in quantum field theory because of another reason: there may exist many discrete vacua that have the same low-energy limit (the limit we have already observed) and new observations (combined with complicated calculations) might be needed to figure out which of them is the right one. But the number of options we must go through is whatever it is.

The number is determined by Nature and the laws of mathematics that even She must respect, not by someone's wishful thinking. It is analogous to the number of possible human DNA codes. Someone could also demand that Nature together with the biologists only allow a couple of human DNA codes because humans are so special, as argued in the Holy Scripture and elsewhere. However, the number of similar human-like DNA codes is comparable to 4^{3 billion}. You can complain about it or write dumb books for dumb readers but that's the only thing you can do against the facts of Nature. The number of discretely separated currently alive candidate theories of the Universe, those that include quantum gravity, is much smaller than 4^{3 billion}. But we also know that if our "job competition" only "cuts" the set of candidates by a few general conditions, the "short list" will still contain many more entries than billions.

Nevertheless, what matters in science is whether a theory is correct or not and we know that string theory has not yet been falsified while local quantum field theories including gravity have already been falsified as a theory of the Planck scale because it is inconsistent in that regime. Consistency is much sharper a tool that can eliminate (kill) theories than any kind of a wishful thinking about the number of options that one should have.

It is plausible that I have forgotten some important types of inductive thinking that are crucial for science. For example, I haven't discussed

1. the method to qualitatively determine whether two phenomena, objects, issues, or events are causally related or not (organizing related phenomena as "nearby objects" or "causes and effects" by looking at and evaluating correlations and the time ordering of events),
   
2. whether they have a similar origin (by searching for common patterns and transformations in between them as well as their ancestors), and
   
3. Occam's razor (that can remove apparently useless parts of overly convoluted hypotheses that have been constructed in an excessively exuberant fashion).

But at least, I think that I have written enough to prove that the people who think that the entire essence of the scientific process can be summarized into the cliché that one "makes guesses" and "eliminates the wrong ones" are ignorant about the vast majority of the qualitative structure of the intellectual skyscraper called the science.

And that's the memo.

Václav Klaus vetoes anti-discrimination act

Exactly 26 out of 27 member countries of the EU already have a bizarre legal construct called the "anti-discrimination act". There are vigorous efforts at the European level to do the same thing in the 27th country, the Czech Republic, too.

Because the bill has been "ordered" by the European bureaucrats and the country may face sanctions (let's say it: the Czechs may be discriminated against) if the anti-discrimination bill is not approved, most deputies in the Parliament actually voted to approve it. President Klaus has a different opinion and needless to say, your humble correspondent agrees with every word:

Dear Mr Chairman [Miroslav Vlček, the spokesman of the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament],

I am using my competence described in the article 50 of the Constitution of the Czech Republic and I am returning a bill stamped on April 24th, 2008, about the equal treatment and legal means to protect against discrimination and about the change of several laws (i.e. the anti-discrimination act) to the Chamber of Deputies.

You sent me the bill on May 2nd, 2008.

Justification:

I consider the bill to be a useless, counterproductive, and low-quality bill while its consequences seem to be problematic.

The bill contains nothing that would be entirely new for the Czech legal system. Most of the things included in the bill are already described in existing legal regulations (from the Czech constitution to the charter of human rights and freedoms to particular laws and special regulations). There is no need to create an "umbrella" bill for these legislative policies, a bill that would become, by its very character - much like the charter of human rights and freedoms - a superior legal construct above the other laws. If some of our laws are insufficient or inefficient in practice or if something is missing in them, the problems can be fixed by a novelization of a particular law or by the adoption of a new bill.

The ban on discrimination is included in the charter of basic rights and freedoms, more particular policies are codified in a plethora of international agreements that stand above our country's laws as well as in the ordinary laws themselves. This bill is - by its very essence - a kind of pedagogical anti-discrimination booklet, summarizing the content of other laws. Its goals are ideological, not legal. However, this is not the role that laws should play. They should define the rights and duties and not to propagate edification.

It's no secret and no justification that this bill was proposed and approved as a mandatory implementation of a directive of the European Commission. In my opinion, this fact is not fit to become an argument. The directives approved by the Council (together with the European Parliament or with the European Commission itself) are politically legal tools that express the interest to achieve certain goals of the Union in individual member states. Only their outcome is binding, the form and methods of the realization of these goals are up to the individual member states. The states are bound by the obligation to accept the regulation but they are not bound by a prescribed legal format that should achieve such a goal. It is up to them how they transform these directives into their legal systems. The format of an "umbrella" anti-discrimination law was chosen by our government, not by the European Union.

The Czech Republic is not discriminating against anyone, and it is thus unsurprising that this hypothetical discrimination is not the theme of the bill. Nevertheless, the bill gives the citizens the right to be treated equally in the relationships of the private and commercial sectors which is, by definition, impossible. In an essential way, it tries to interfere with matters that have been subjects to refinements by traditions and ethical standards for centuries. Using this legal construct, our government is trying to "codify a good behavior" and it tells us that the main driver behind our good behavior should be a bill, not the education in the family, generally accepted and unwritten formulae of behavior that are usual in our society, natural role models, traditions, etc. It is another attempt to regulate the human life by laws.

By its very philosophy, the bill denies the fact that every person is a completely unique ensemble of innate as well as learned skills, characteristics, and prerequisites. It denies that each of us can be expected to have a different level of success, a differently strong relationship to work, a different efficiency, and a different behavior. The bill is trying to remove inequality. The latter is, however, a natural phenomenon. Whenever we are deciding, we are considering our subjective preferences or our equally subjective experience. This bill wants our decision making to become objective which is nothing else than a politically correct utopia. The bill constitutes a fundamental violation of the basic right of individuals to create their own preferences and of their freedom of choice. The freedom of choice is, in fact, presented as a sort of exception by the bill. It may be expected that this bill will have a negative impact upon the legal warranties and on the interpersonal relationships in general. The bill is not only a bad one; it is dangerous as well. The idea that any bill will bring the state of equality, created on the drawing boards of social engineers, is - thankfully - a false idea.

In the context of our legal traditions, a completely new and unknown principle advocated by the bill is the presumption of guilt. The new version of §133a, paragraph 3, of the civic legal code that says: "When the accuser presents actualities in the court that could imply that the accuser was directly or indirectly discriminated ..., the defendant is obliged to prove that the principle of an equal treatment hasn't been violated" is utterly absurd. It contradicts our legal principles and traditions but also the European ones and it could lead to new wrongdoings and injustice.

Another questionable aspect of the bill is the shift of the enforcement of the law to the office of ombudsman. This institution was originally created to defend the citizen against the government organs. However, it would suddenly become able to interfere with the private and commercial relations. It would be a radical change of the competences of this institution.

The extraordinary and strange character of this bill is also reflected in the unprecedented additional disclaimer added by the Czech Senate before they approved it: "The Senate considers the anti-discrimination act to be a tool to implement demands that follow from the European law and that could lead to sanctions against the Czech Republic if they are not fulfilled. The Senate however doesn't identify with the character of the bill that artificially interferes with the natural evolution of the society, doesn't respect the cultural differences between the member countries, and puts the requirement of equality of outcomes above the principle of free choice. The Senate urges the government to disapprove attempts to impose further anti-discrimination regulations at the European level." These arguments of the Senate strengthen my conviction that I cannot sign this bill and I have to return it to the Chamber of Deputies. I believe that the Chamber of Deputies will seriously consider my arguments and that it will protect our legal system from being expanded by this fatally flawed bill.

Václav Klaus, Prague, May 16th, 2008

(Speedy rough translation: LM)

P.S. Ms Džamila Stehlíková who grew up in Kazakhstan (echoing the chairman and other officials of the Green Party) has criticized Václav Klaus because his decision threatens our place in Europe. ;-) The lower chamber will discuss and vote again. Before they sent it to Klaus, about 55% of the deputies supported the bill. They still need over 50% of the deputies to override Klaus's veto.

Maurizio Gasperini & cosmological constant

Besides Tony Zee's cute musings about the mysteries of gravity, one of the most inspiring (or at least entertaining) papers today is

Gasperini's prediction of SUSY at a TeV from his solution to the cosmological constant problem.

Sounds ambitious, doesn't it? ;-)

Recall from our discussions of the cosmological seesaw mechanism that the LHC scale, 1 TeV, is very close to the geometric average of the Planck scale and the cosmological constant scale (the fourth root of the observed vacuum energy).

A naive Planckian theory of quantum gravity would predict ρ to be of order ρ = Planckmass⁴. A naive (?) broken SUSY model at a TeV would predict ρ = 10^-60 Planckmass⁴ which is better but we really need the observed ρ = 10^-120 Planckmass⁴.

How do we fix the remaining 60 orders of magnitude?

Well, Gasperini borrows the old 1983 idea due to Rubakov and Shaposhnikov of "off-loading" of the gravitational effects of the cosmological constant into extra dimensions. Using the modern language, the idea is that the bulk is curved in the right way so that it compensates most of the vacuum energy on the brane. Yes, these guys were talking about the ADD-like braneworlds back in 1983.

The curvature scale L of the extra dimensions induced by this compensation technique for the brane-superpartner-induced TeV-scale vacuum energy must be given by Einstein's equations:

L^-2 = 8πG TeV⁴ = millielectronVolt²

This millielectronVolt bulk curvature induces SUSY breaking in the bulk and the vacuum energy of this SUSY breaking is no longer cancelled by anything. Consequently, it gives you

ρ = millielectronVolt⁴

which is the observed value of the "dark energy" density. Things work well and besides the supersymmetry at a TeV, this scenario also predicts (marginally falsified) submillimeter extra dimensions. ;-)

Gasperini formulates the presentation as a proof of an inequality. Or a proof that we will see superpartners at the LHC or earlier, if you wish. ;-) The proof assumes that the brane-bulk compensation mechanism above is correct, of course.

I think it is a beautiful idea. The main problem so far is that in supergravity, the assumed cancellation between the brane and the bulk doesn't seem to occur. Of course, if someone proves that it does occur under mild enough assumptions, Gasperini's paper could very well be the right solution to the cosmological constant problem, including predictions of both SUSY and extra dimensions right behind the corner. ;-)

That's what I would call life on the edge. :-)

First LASER

Aargon lite: full screen game... (click)
Nobel LASERs: full screen game... (click)

The first LASER started to operate on May 16th, 1960 at Hughes Research Laboratories. Theodore Maiman was the guy behind it. He died one year ago.

In my opinion, the most important discovery that has led to the LASERs was the 1917 paper by Einstein, "On the Quantum Theory of Radiation", that rederived Max Planck's law of black body radiation and defined the Einstein coefficients of absorption, spontaneous emission, and - yes, this is relevant here - stimulated emission.

For those who get here by clicking at the Google LASER logo: LASER stands for "Light Amplification [by] Stimulated Emission [of] Radiation" and this phrase pretty much explains how it works. In the 20th century theory of electromagnetic fields and light, called quantum field theory, it can be shown that the probability that a particle of light - a photon with a certain direction and frequency - is radiated (recall, hot object tend to shine light) is proportional to the number of photons that are already flying there (plus one).

LASER is a special gadget where atoms are "excited" and they wait to be able to throw photons (light) around. When they do so, the photons like to be flying in the same direction because the probability that they do so is higher. That's why the light from LASERs has such a sharp direction. We say that the light is "coherent".

Einstein didn't even get a Nobel prize for this amazing discovery, much like he didn't get one for relativity. Others had a somewhat easier life.



The 1964 prize was for "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle".

The 1966 prize was for "the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in atoms" (optical pumping that was also needed to build the LASERs).

The 1981 prize was "for the development of laser spectroscopy".

The 1989 prize partly appreciated "the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks".

The 1997 prize was for "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light" (LASER cooling).

One half of the 2005 prize was "for the development of LASER-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique" while the other was for a "theory of optical coherence".

Karl Popper and 21st century enemies of science

Nude Socialist has printed another venomous attack against theoretical physics that was written by an individual named Robert Matthews. He argues that science has to be "redefined" but unfortunately every single sentence written in his text is profoundly incorrect.

Astrology

At the beginning, he claims that the trouble with astrology is that it is not falsifiable. However, astrology is easily falsifiable. It has already been falsified many times. The real problem is that some people haven't yet noticed.

For example, when Antonín Baudyš, a top Czech astrologer and a former minister of defense, used celestial bodies to predict that George W. Bush would die in 2003, it was a prediction. This prediction was falsified on January 1st, 2004. Even if you decided to weaken the statements of astrology and say that it is "substantially more often right than what you would expect by chance", this statement is also falsifiable and has also been falsified, either by direct observations or by indirect arguments based on theories that are supported by other observations.

The actual problem with astrology is not that it is unfalsifiable. The problem with it is that it is wrong. Being wrong is the only problem one can find on any hypothesis that makes material but arbitrarily indirect - and arbitrarily detached from everyday experience - statements about the real world. The process of learning that a hypothesis is wrong is one of the key procedures of the scientific method. Comments that a physical statement is or isn't pleasing, politically correct, falsifiable, or whatever are not really a part of the scientific method.

Science primarily talks about hypotheses' being right or wrong. Whoever wants other adjectives to dominate in science is an enemy of science.

Physicists vs philosophers

These days, many of the "critics" with a dramatic brain limitation similar to that of Mr Matthews like to worship the name of Karl Popper. But give me a break: Karl Popper was just a philosopher. I don't think that there exists a sane physicist who thinks that the opinions of a philosopher are important for science. I have never worshipped any philosopher and the physicists whom I consider good haven't really worshipped philosophers either. The concept of a Karl Popper as a unifying figure above all of science is something beyond me. It looks as silly as an Al Gore above all of climate science. Only popperazzi (or climate whackos) see science (or climate science) in this way.

As Martin Gardner puts it, Karl Popper tried to deny the existence of induction in science. But induction is very important in science - and a combination of induction and observations has been considered the pillar of science for many centuries. Popper was also naively imagining that in science, wrong ideas are being 100% falsified all the time: when a scientist finds something new, it always completely kills an idea. That's of course silly, too.

Real science is non-binary

In science, we are collecting additional experimental and theoretical evidence that makes some hypotheses more likely and others less likely. But in reality, almost no hypothesis is really known to be 100.0000...% wrong much like no hypothesis is 100.0000...% correct.

Sometimes, the new evidence falsifies a hypothesis almost completely. Such an outcome is more likely when the hypothesis was more hopeless to start with. But it is completely silly to think that every advance in science must be of this character. More typically, new insights help to refine old hypotheses and they change the probabilities of various hypotheses only quantitatively.

And the changes can go in both directions; Popper's idea that they always go down was a sign of his irrational bias: falsification and confirmation are two sides of the same coin. The likelihood goes "mostly" down if most of your working hypotheses are wrong. For the promising ones (that are getting established right now), the likelihood obviously goes up.

And it may be very hard to falsify a very promising theory - almost by definition. A promising theory is a theory that seems consistent with all/most things we can see right now.

The idea that new evidence must always push the probability of some hypotheses all the way down to zero - and that this kind of a "miraculous" killer evidence is even needed for an idea to be considered as science - is absolutely crazy and no actual scientist could believe such a silly fairy-tale because this is simply not how science works (or how it can work). The goal of science is to distinguish the right and wrong hypotheses and the right theories are not guaranteed to be testable by devices we can imagine today, especially not by easily constructable gadgets.

Thinking otherwise would be a textbook example of a wishful thinking. It would actually be an oxymoron because the truly interesting and new science is usually located, almost by definition, on the "boundary" where things start to be hardly testable. After all, that's why we call the location "cutting edge". We often have to wait for new technological breakthroughs before the cutting-edge insights become accessible to our experience.

Should we love Karl Popper more than e.g. Rudolf Carnap or another 20th century philosopher of science because of his particular oversimplified statements? I have no idea. Both of them were just philosophers and both of them have been wrong in many cases.

Popper has promoted some extreme ways to look at science that were different from the previous ways. But the differences have nothing to do with the actual 20th century scientific results. Popper has just made his rules up. I think that Popper's rules, if used as universal rules, have been shown invalid but if you disagree, could you please tell me what I can do to falsify Popper's assertions? You should be able to tell me, right? ;-)

Even physicists are occasionally defending wrong philosophies of physics. Philosophers are much more likely to do so. And they are actually doing so.

Philosophers' work: segments

Philosophers write a lot of ill-defined nonsense and a lot of dogmas that are detached from the details of the real world and/or from the cutting-edge scientific research. About one third of their production is a completely incoherent babbling, another third is shown to be partially correct at this moment, and the remaining third is already known to be fundamentally incorrect. The middle third is paradoxically the most dangerous one because it may inhibit the progress in the future.

Some of their assertions only reflect the philosophical underpinnings of an approximate physical theory and as soon as a more complete physical theory is found, the philosophical assertion has to be abandoned which they are often unwilling to do. Unfortunately, the scientists sometimes join the Inquisition that is defending philosophical dogmas against new scientific insights.

Popper was no different. What did Mr Popper do so important that physicists should pay attention to his words?

Incidentally, no living pure philosopher is defending the principles that are actually likely to be universally valid - such as the superposition principle and other postulates of quantum mechanics. Such things are too technical for them. They always prefer some easily understandable rules inherited from our everyday experience and these rules are never universally valid.

Popper and Weinberg

Amazingly enough, Mr Matthews - after sketching his completely flawed explanation what's wrong with astrology - uses another authority, namely that of Steven Weinberg, to defend his thesis. Matthews tells us that Popper has been "lauded" as the greatest philosopher of science by the likes of Steven Weinberg.

I don't know whether Popper has been lauded by Weinberg but what I do know perfectly is that Weinberg has said many times that philosophy applied to science hurts science. The only good thing that some philosophers have done for scientists was that they have protected them against the preconceptions engineered by other philosophers. This quote can be found at the beginning of the chapter linked below.

In other words, Weinberg agrees with me that philosophical dogmas - and certainly dogmatic requirements about "falsifiability" - are not relevant for science and they have never been relevant. No redefinition of anything is necessary. Given this fact, Matthews' statement that "Weinberg considers Popper to be the most important blah blah blah" sounds misleading, if you want me to describe this vicious misinformation diplomatically.

Because all obvious statements are controversial these days due to the overabundance of aggressive simpletons, I must also offer you a proof of the previous sentence. Well, in his "Dreams on a Final Theory", Weinberg wrote an excellent chapter called

"Against Philosophy".

I invite you to click at the link - the most important external link of this article - and read the whole chapter. You may enjoy it.

Here is Martin Gardner's summary:

Although philosophy may have played a positive role in the work of Einstein, Heisenberg, and others, it has, in Weinberg's opinion, done more harm to science than good. Particularly baleful, he argues, was an early, crude version of positivism that prevented many eminent physicists from regarding unobservable entities as "real." The most flagrant example was the refusal of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, who had so strong an influence on Einstein, to admit the reality of atoms or to accept the unobservable fields of general relativity.

Read Weinberg's chapter in its entirety. It contains the word "positivism" 23 times and none of the occurences is really positive. ;-) If something is unobservable, it is true that a scientific theory is not required to talk about it. But it is certainly allowed to talk about it if the concept is useful to make it work smoothly.

Weinberg says very clearly that we shouldn't expect philosophy to be relevant for a modern scientist and, in fact, most philosophers acknowledge this fact. Weinberg also quotes Paul Feyerabend who realizes that most philosophers of science use such a narrow definition of a "scientific explanation" that science - and especially modern science - hasn't really found almost any explanations that would satisfy their criterion. ;-)

Weinberg's - and Gardner's - observation is precious. Positivism might be a nice philosophy - and it may be helpful when we're lucky and it protects us against other wrong ideas - but when the fundamentalist principles of positivism are taken literally as universal rules, they are completely incompatible with the scientific progress. And they have always been incompatible with the scientific progress.

If someone claims that all theories must lead to practically verifiable observational consequences for them to be considered science - and there are numerous individuals who have parroted the same nonsensical thesis at least 687 times - then he simply misunderstands all of physics and all of its history.

Ideas that have been outlived

Virtually every new important advance in the history of physics was connected with a concept that looked "unreal" to the people who haven't yet understood the breakthrough or that violated some of the seemingly essential principles of science of the previous era.

As Weinberg says, the mechanistic way of thinking inherited from the ancient Greece made it harder to accept the action at a distance. It has also led to an unmotivated research of the luminiferous aether and to the grave mistakes of Marxism. It has slowed down the quantum field theory synthesis of waves and particles and so on. In Weinberg's words, it is "foolhardy to assume that one knows the terms in which the final theory will be formulated."

Ernst Mach and others thought that the atoms were not science because they were too small and couldn't have been observed. Mach also believed that the vacuum couldn't carry any "invisible" fields such as the metric tensor because "invisible" fields are not scientific and thus cannot exist: this formulation by Gardner is a very good way to explain the real, deeply flawed motivation behind Mach's principle. Sorry, Mr Mach, but it is up to Nature to decide what is real and what is not. A related but equally wrong philosophical prejudice is currently being sold by various third-class scientists as relationism or background independence (a term that means something completely different in science than what it does in Lee Smolin's pseudoscience).

People couldn't have imagined that the electromagnetic fields, much like the metric tensor, can live in an empty space, without any "material" substance that carries them i.e. without the aether. If there is no "matter" (aether), how could there be any waves in space? This is how the 19th century people used to think - and of course, many people outside the actual cutting-edge research think so even today. Weinberg dedicates several pages to the confused dogmas about the "reality of space and time" and about their beginning.

Others couldn't (and still can't) accept a theory (quantum mechanics) that only predicts probabilities but not a "real" ("mechanist") description of the world, including the degrees of freedom that will "decide" where the particle is observed a moment later. But the objects of quantum mechanics are equally "real" as the old concepts, unless you are dogmatic and wrong about the meaning of the word "real".

There exist hundreds of similar examples and Weinberg explains many of them. All those critics have been wrong throughout the history and their classification of an important concept as "unreal" (or "unscientific") was just a reflection of their ignorance, dogmas, and intellectual limitations, not a valid observation about reality.

Experiments always need a theory

Weinberg also emphasizes that the attempts to only allow "pure" observations to decide about the fate of theories are naive because we always need a theory to interpret our perceptions (at least a theory that explains the relationships between our perceptions and more "external" aspects of reality). Observations can never be freed of theory - all experimental data are theory-laden, as he says - and even most historians of science seem to realize this elementary point. Many philosophers and critics of science don't.

Weinberg offers us many detailed stories about relativity and quantum physics in which physicists were afraid to speak about things that seemed "unobservable". In most cases, this fear was irrational and wrong. In some special cases, it turned out to be justified. But one can never know in advance. Quarks are mentioned as the most dramatic abandonment of the principles of positivism. They are essential to understand nuclear physics but they just can't be observed in isolation: whenever you try to isolate them, you do something completely different (produce mesons). Ernst Mach would surely hate them.

In fact, Weinberg also writes down the very same thesis I wrote many times, too: we are reformulating the physical theory in terms of concepts that are more and more fundamental and at the same time further and further from everyday experience. It seems unlikely that the positivist attitude will be of much help in the future, Weinberg says.

Of course, he was right at least for 15 more years. The only thing that these positivist philosophical dogmas have led to since the mid 1990s is the previously growing - and now already and hopefully dying - anti-scientific tumor around Peter Woit and tons of his equally idiotic peers.

Deconstructionists

The rest of the chapter in Weinberg's book focuses on philosophical relativists who try to deny the objective character of scientific insights - i.e. postmodernists of various types. Unfortunately, the list includes ex-president Václav Havel. Although Weinberg has written some nice things about Thomas Kuhn - e.g. that he didn't really agree with the concept of a non-objective science - he describes his work as a revolution that didn't happen elsewhere.

But back to Kuhn's non-objective heirs. While science as a human activity is a social phenomenon, it simply doesn't imply that the results are social constructs.

Finally, Weinberg conjectures that the postmodernists are partly motivated by a mutated positivism, partly by their desire to (erroneously) feel superior when they look at the scientists, and partly by their general hostility to the Western civilization. The latter motive is becoming irrelevant for the criticism of science because science is getting truly global which is, in Weinberg's view, a good thing.

Female and male alarmists spam Nature

I've added "male" to the title to assure you that I see all of them. ;-) But the order matters, in this case.

After some time, I looked how the contemporary alarmist peer-reviewed literature about the climate looks like and I was absolutely horrified.

The following report seems to be special among the alarmist screams because of a technicality, namely the unprecedentedly high concentration of women. Let us start in the Financial Times. Fiona Harvey gave her article a very modest title:

Proof found of man-made climate change.

Well, such a title is eye-catching, to say the least. :-) The similarity with articles about "a surfer dude who has found the theory of everything" is far too obvious. Harvey's article contains neither the title nor the names of the authors of this apparently revolutionary article. It only quotes a Gentleman called Barry Brook who predicts up to 6.75 °C of warming in the 21st century. It's a lot - roughly 10 times more than what science actually predicts - so he must be a great scientist. ;-)

So it is not straightforward to find the actual research article. Fortunately, after some time, you can find another article about the article by another girl-turned-amateur-scientist, Emma Marris:

Warming world altering thousands of natural systems

Her article is highlighted by a huge advertisement on the title page of nature.com. She "explains" the "methodology" of the "proof". They look at 829 phenomena related to ecosystems and they find that some of them have not been changing significantly since the 1970s while others exhibit a trend. Among those where a trend is observed, 90% of cases are consistent with warming. And this is supposed to be a proof of AGW.

The actual "groundbreaking" article by Cynthia Rosenzweig et al. is here:

Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change

Already in the abstract, they say that "these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone." How do they figure out that the naturally looking variations we have seen since the 1970s cannot be explained by natural variations? Well, the essence of their "reasoning" is explained in the following sentence of the abstract:

Given the conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely to be due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, ...

Wow. So The Financial Times unapologetically tell you that there is a proof of man-made global warming and if you look what the proof actually is, you see that 14 mostly female authors are excited about parroting a pre-determined sentence from a summary of the IPCC report that they were helping to write themselves, anyway.

Now, there is nothing unusual about the observations of their paper. All systems in Nature are guaranteed to be changing. Regardless of the causes, some of these changes will be significant, some of them won't be. That's exactly what they observe. Now, how many of the statistically significant changes are expected to be consistent with global warming?

It depends how you define consistency: most importantly, it depends on your standards of consistency. The fewer details a person knows, the harder it is for her to falsify a statement and the more things can look consistent with each other, especially if she is willing to help them to look so. If she knows almost nothing, like the authors of the article in Nature, then pretty much everything is consistent with everything else and with global warming in particular. Even global cooling was recently argued to be consistent with global warming. No wonder that 90% of other changes are consistent, too.

But even if you consider perfect scientists who can determine what is actually consistent with warming and what is consistent with cooling (and who don't adjust some of the arguments in order to increase their number to 90%), it is not shocking that the percentage of observed effects consistent with warming will deviate from 50%. The Earth is small enough and the mostly warming effects we have seen in the last 30 years are indeed influencing most of the surface in the same direction: 30 years is simply a long enough time for the diffusion to distribute the heat over the Earth quasi-uniformly and for the continents to be closer to being "correlated with each other" than being "independent".

Of course that when it is generally warmer on a bulk of the Earth's surface, flowers of all kinds will tend to blossom earlier (they are adapting, if you wish), heating will be turned on less frequently while the air-conditioning will be running more often. You don't need to be collecting 829 examples of effects whose parameters depend on temperature.

This trivial observation clearly doesn't imply anything whatsoever about the man-made or natural origin of the climate change. Everything can boil down to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, galactic cosmic rays variations, or any other natural phenomenon you can think of.

Equally importantly, it doesn't imply anything about climate change's being dangerous: "discernible" effects are usually much smaller than "dangerous" ones. Quite on the contrary: it shows how ecosystems (and people) naturally adapt and the changes of external parameters are not dangerous as long as the players are allowed to adapt.

I find it amazing that the modern society not only pays billions of dollars to these severely limited people in order to allow them to play the game in which they are the "scientists" but it even tries to pay attention to the results of their hysterically unscientific enterprise.

The most famous article by Cynthia Rosenzweig is her (and Parry's) 1994 article about the impact of climate change on the world food supply. Well, so far we could have only observed the impact of insane environmentalist policies on food inflation. Predominantly because of biodiesel, food prices have jumped by dozens of percent.

Overproduction of food - once viewed as a permanent economical disease of the first world - has evaporated within a few years. This is the kind of stuff that actually influences and alters the life of humans and societies and the life on Earth in general. You don't have to wait for a century to see a hypothetical effect - like in the stupid fairy-tales about the dangerous global warming. It is enough to allow the Greens to be realizing 1% of their goals for 2 years and we already begin to see some serious trouble. Try to imagine that they are allowed to do the remaining 99% of their plans for several decades.

Global changes of Nature - even if they were man-made - usually take decades to make a visible impact on the society. On the other hand, social changes and new economic policies can lead to good or devastating results much faster. We should think at least twice which of these two classes of changes we should be more careful about.

What is really endangered: climate or freedom? What do you think? And what is worse for humans: 0.006 °C (or even the "catastrophic" IPCC's figure of 0.03 °C) of predicted average man-made warming per year or a 10% jump of food prices per year? How many people have actually thought about these questions in quantitative rather than binary, dogmatic terms?

It is an interesting exercise to go through all the authors because many of them are rather typical authors of the IPCC reports. For example, the third author of the "proof" is Marta Vicarelli, a contributing author of the IPCC report. This is the kind of people who are often being presented as leading scientists. When you actually look who she is, you learn that she is not even a PhD - she is just a PhD candidate who doesn't have a single citation - and the only thing she can apparently do is to co-write similarly irrational alarmist rants about risks.

Many of these women and men are affiliated with NASA. Even if their work were science and not just the junk science we can read, we should ask: what the hell does their activity have to do with space research?

This is what political correctness is doing all the time. I find it outrageous that similar garbage is being printed in journals that used to be prestigious and that average or downright stupid women and men who can't reach the ankles of people whom I consider scientists of global importance are being presented by dishonest journalists-activists as the world's leading scientists. This proliferation of idiots and parasites in the name of political correctness is just disgraceful. And it is very dangerous, too.

And that's the memo.

String or frayed braid?

A strategy to order a beer when it's hard

A string walks into the Black Hole Bistro at the Perimeter Institute with a few friends and orders a beer. The bartender says, "I'm sorry, but we don't serve strings here."

The string walks away a little upset and sits down with his friends. A few minutes later he goes back to the bar and orders a beer. The bartender, looking a little exasperated, says, "I'm sorry, we don't serve strings here."

So the string goes back to his table. Then he gets an idea. He ties himself in a loop (!) and messes up the top of his hair. Then he walks back up to the bar and orders a beer.

The bartender squints at him and says, "Hey, aren't you a string?"

And the string says, "Nope, I'm a frayed braid."

Hat tip: Maya's Mom

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope

I think that Microsoft has just surpassed Google in one discipline. WorldWide Telescope is better than Google Sky. The latter is included in Google Earth.

WWT website (nice presentation!)
Download & install (direct link; don't be afraid to install DirectX 9, it won't destroy DirectX 10 on Vista)
My screenshot (there are better things to see)
A tour; how kids react

It works much like Google Earth/Sky but has many more textures in it and you can see many images that NASA folks are seeing via Chandra, Hubble, and other gadgets.

Get ready for all constellations, planets, moons, galaxies from Hubble, black holes, nebulae: everything you ever liked to see in the Cosmos. Guided tours are included. Thousands of pictures on their right locations.

The sky is not the only place where you can look at. In the lower left corner, there is "look at" and you may choose Sky, Earth, Panorama, or Planets. The Earth is a rough version of Google Earth - with a lower resolution but much better 3D realism. The Panorama shows rotatable pictures of Mars from the rovers' viewpoint while the Planets visualize many planets and moons, including the fractal planet Mandelbrot. ;-)



Another fun from Microsoft research: colorful barcodes. A new kind of filesystem has been designed for them. ;-) Click to learn more.

Finally, I guess that many people find most CAPTCHA (screwed letters and digits that you have to copy to prove that you are not a robot) too annoying and difficult - while they could be easy for computers. Assira is an alternative.


Believe me, I could make it work so that it tells you "you're human" when you succeed :-) but let's not waste too much time here.

John McCain's climate plan

I would like to know what you think about John McCain's climate plan:

Google News

He says that he was converted to the global warming religion when "he saw climate change in Alaska through his own eyes." Well, I agree with him that we should stop quabbling about this issue so let me say that if I were asked to judge a senior person who says something like that on his merits, I would say that he is probably a senile nutcase.

Roy Spencer's answer: McCain's assault on reason

He also wants to do all kinds of things from regulating the global temperature to reducing carbon emissions by 60% by "marked-based" regulation mechanisms that have been proven dysfunctional.



At least he is not supporting King Ethanol. The picture above is a rape seed crop field (for Czechs: "řepka olejka") that have covered about 10% of the Czech agricultural land. The yellow color is beautiful but the proportional jump of food prices is less beautiful. ;-) And it is just a "demo" without an actual climate impact that shows where the economy is going to go if we really begin to realize some of the insane plans to regulate carbon.

Climate change is not the only politically correct "hooray action", as we describe it in Czech, where John McCain has uncritically joined the far left groups. Most importantly, he is very close to them emotionally. While I could respect him for all kinds of other things, it is pretty clear that if I were a U.S. citizen, I couldn't vote for him and I would choose Hillary as a lesser evil (or maybe even as a good candidate?). She respects the principles and the people who are actually driving this modern world and yes, she is also the most manly candidate among the three.

Unfortunately, the voters won't be given this option in November.

Bosons are from Europe, fermions are from America

Jester from CERN who is a boson himself (well, at least one half of the time) helped to discover

Pauli's other principle.

Bosons, including photons, gluons, W and Z bosons, were experimentally discovered in Europe while fermions, including the muon, the quarks in general, charm quark, tau, bottom, top, and tau neutrino, were experimentally discovered in America.

I've made the lists more complete than Jester.



A map: Sorry if you think that anyons and especially Boltzmannions don't exist: continents' potentials are influenced by the laws of Nature.

One can easily see that the SSC would have discovered gauginos (gluinos, neutralinos, or charginos), gravitinos, or higgsinos (and maybe even some preons?) while the LHC will obviously discover the Higgs and maybe also the squarks, sleptons, Z' gauge bosons, axions, gravitons, and/or KK gravitons. Mini black holes should be discovered in Greenland because they are bosons and fermions 50% of the time, respectively.

Unless, of course, the law breaks down and there will be a new exception following the example of J.J. Thompson who discovered a rather important fermion, namely the electron, in Cambridge, U.K., much like James Chadwick who discovered the neutron also in the U.K. and Ernest Rutherford who discovered the nucleus in the U.K. and coined the concept of a proton. ;-) But maybe the early British physicists should be counted as Americans.

I wonder why the physicists-seers - Alejandro Rivero, Lee Smolin, Sundance Bilson-Thompson, and others who have studied "physical" patterns very similar to this one throughout their lives - have never discovered Pauli's other principle. ;-)

Bonus: Garrett Lisi in Prague

Garrett Lisi organized a conference in Prague. Instead of talks, they went surfing. You might think that it is difficult to find the waves on Vltava in the middle of Prague but everything can be solved:

Gore - Pelosi - Gingrich illegal commercial

Nancy Pelosi faces elections in June. Any coordinated expenditure (click this link, it contains the whole NY Sun story!) such as this commercial is legally understood as donation. Companies' (such as the Alliance for Climate Protection's) donations to candidates that exceed USD 2,300 are prohibited by the federal election law.

The last thing you have to check is whether the appropriate fraction of USD 300,000,000 is more than USD 2,300. ;-) I would guess it is.

The comments by Gore's people that they deserve an exception because it is a "non-partisan" issue are extremely bizarre. First of all, there is no loophole in the law for "non-partisan" promotion of the candidates. Second of all, this is in no way a non-partisan issue - it is a radical environmentalist issue promoted by Pelosi and a Republican egomaniacal blowhard sellout.

Boris Tadić's party wins Serbian elections

I didn't even expect it but Boris Tadić's pro-European Democratic Party won the Serbian elections. That's very good.



The results above are preliminary but it is unlikely that SRS, the Radical (Nationalist) Party, can eliminate the 10% gap. Moreover, LDP, the party of the "Serbian Obama" Jovanovič and the only bloc that accepts the Kosovo independence, has a big chance to make it into the Parliament.



This Gentleman was probably voting for DS, too. ;-)

Koštunica's DSS is around 12% right now. It is likely that Tadić's DS will be able to make a "small" coalition either with DSS or with the post-Miloševič SPS, the Socialists (if you also include 4 Hungarian minority deputies) - and no one else. DS and LDP is probably not enough. I don't think that the victory of the SRS would be a tragedy but in my opinion, the Serbian voters have nevertheless shown their maturity and the ability to think rationally in somewhat difficult times.

I am also impressed that the result of SPS is worse than the typical results of the Czech communists and I would definitely support their membership in the EU.

In the 250-strong Parliament, the expected composition will be:

• 103 - DS (Tadić)
• 76 - SRS (Nationalists)
• 30 - DSS (Koštunica)
• 21 - SPS (Socialists)
• 13 - LDP (Pro-Kosovo)
• 7 - Ethnic groups

DS+LDP+Ethnic groups is 3 votes short of a majority.

Richard Feynman: 90th birthday

... but let us begin with Dynkin, A.E. Becquerel, and Schwarzschild ...

Today, Eugene Dynkin celebrates his 84th birthday. Congratulations!

Dynkin lived in Leningrad until 1935 when the family was forwarded to Kazakhstan because his father was politically undesirable - a hypothesis that he confirmed by his support of Galanskov and Ginzburg in 1967. However, he didn't have to serve in the war and, thankfully, could do some maths.

In his previous life, he studied Lie groups and all of us know the Dynkin diagrams, beautiful gadgets that classify Lie algebras and all mathematical systems with the same spirit. If you forgot what they are, look here:



In the last 50 years, he studied statistics - since the late 1970s when he emigrated to the U.S., at Cornell University. For example, Dynkin's formula calculates the expected time when the Brownian motion leaves a ball.

Dynkin's system is a collection of subsets closed under complementation and under countable disjoint unions and it is important for uniqueness theorems in measure theory.

Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel died on May 11th, 1891. This French physicist studied solar spectrum, magnetism, electricity, and optics. He was the son of Antoine César Becquerel and the father of the radioactive Henri Becquerel.

In 1867-68, he wrote "Light, its causes and effects" (in French). And he also accumulated a lot of evidence supporting Faraday's law of electrolysis.

Karl Schwarzschild died on May 11th, 1916 (another anniversary) because of pemphigus, an ugly skin disease that he caught on the Russian front where he calculated the trajectories for German bullets.

However, the German Jewish physicist had to be born before that. It was on October 9th, 1873. When he was 16, he published a paper on celestial mechanics. He was interested in optics and described a power law for the optical density of photographic materials, involving the Schwarzschild exponent. He also cared about the quantum theory, instrumental astronomy, stellar structure and statistics, Halley's comet, and spectroscopy.

Schwarzschild's most important contribution to science is undoubtedly his solution of general relativity. Although Einstein used to verbally emphasize that general relativity allows us to use any system of coordinates, he talked the talk but didn't walk the walk. Einstein would always use quasi-Cartesian coordinates. Consequently, he could only solve the equations approximately.

Schwarzschild boldly used the polar coordinates and solved the rotationally symmetric problem exactly. Einstein presented the solution to the Academy. Whether or not the horizon and the singularity beneath it could have any physical substance was a controversial question for more than 20 years (Einstein himself thought that it was not physical), until Oppenheimer unambiguously claimed that the horizon has to be real because nothing could possibly stop the collapse of a heavy enough star.

Schwarzschild died a few months after he found the solution, on May 11th.



The most famous physicist who has an anniversary today is Richard Feynman who was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, NYC, exactly 90 years ago: on May 11th, 1918.

Richard Feynman was a late talker. He began to speak when he was 3. His Jewish father, Melville - who was selling uniforms - taught Richard to think critically and to question authorities. Richard may have inherited the sense of humor from his mother, Lucille.

As a kid, he was fixing the radios. By 15, he mastered differential and integral calculus. At the high school, he invented a good fun to Taylor-expand functions of operators. At the end of the high school, he won a math contest (by a huge margin). He applied to Columbia University. But as you know, Columbia University - although it has some good people - is full of far-left hacks, aggressive cranks, and political zealots. It was no different in the late 1930s and Feynman was rejected because of their Jewish quota.

Happily, he went to MIT, a school he loved, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1939. He became a Putnam Fellow and went to Princeton University where he worked with his advisor, John Wheeler. They played with the attempts to regulate the electron's self-energy. These games have eventually led to the correct causal structure of the Feynman propagator. Feynman's first seminar was in front of monster minds - Einstein, Pauli, von Neumann. His PhD thesis showed why the action was relevant to quantum mechanics - a bunch of ideas that have led to the path integrals and Feynman diagrams.

I believe that Feynman's activities, achievements, opinions, and stories are too well-known so I won't write about his active role in the Manhattan project, his love who had tuberculosis, picking locks, friendly prostitutes, drums and samba, famous lectures on physics, pioneering dreams about quantum computers, work on superfluid liquid helium, anger about pompous fools, collaboration (model of weak interactions) and rivalry with Gell-Mann, his concept of partons, his discovery of the Faddeev-Popov ghosts, Feynman's derivation of Feynman rules for general relativity, his investigation of the Challenger tragedy, "too old" Feynman's comments about string theory, or his own fight against cancer, besides thousands of topics I forgot.

Instead, I will recommend you additional links besides those found in this paragraph:

• Modern PC police goes after Feynman's name
• A celebration of Richard Feynman
• Feynman inventing Hawking radiation
• Feynman's calculation of space shuttle failure probability
  
• Pleasure of finding things out (a great 50-minute interview)
• 100+ blog articles with the word Feynman
  
• Richard Feynman: the best mind since Einstein (a playlist)
• Surely You're Joking (a full book stolen by Russian pirates)
• Joan Feynman (sister) & Alexander Ruzmaikin: the Sun affects the climate via the stratosphere's North Annular Mode (27 cits)

Young and Fresnel: two interference anniversaries

Thomas Young was a British polymath who died on May 10th, 1829. He achieved a lot in the research of energy, solid mechanics, light, vision, physiology, medicine, music, and Egyptology.

He was born on June 13th, 1773 to a Quaker family. The children were like dimensions of the superstring and he was the eldest of these ten kids. ;-) When he was fourteen, he knew Greek and Latin and understood some French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Amharic. I don't even know that four of these languages existed.

He studied medicine, obtained a physics PhD, and inherited the estate of his grand-uncle that earned him financial independence. To protect his reputation as a physician, he published articles about medicine anonymously. Because of his medical practice, he also resigned as a professor of natural sciences (1801-1803) at the Royal Institution.

He has worked on many practical things including the dangers of gas infrastructure in London and life insurance. John Herschel, Albert Einstein, Lord Rayleigh, and Philip Anderson considered or consider themselves admirers of Young.

In 1807, he described elasticity of materials by Young's modulus, the characteristic ratio of stress (pressure) of a material and the associated strain (relative change of the length). That was quite important for engineering. In an equation independently derived by Laplace, Young understood capillary phenomena via the principle of surface tension which also allowed him to write down the Young-Dupré equation for the contact angle of droplets (without the Dupré thermodynamic dependence). Young was the first scientist who used the term "energy" in the modern sense.

Thomas Young has also revolutionized our understanding of vision. He figured out that there had to be three kinds of nerve fibers - red, green, violet (...) - on the retina for us to see colors. Experimental tests of this Young-Helmholtz theory occurred more than 50 years later. He also understood that eyes look at different distances by changing the shape of the lens. In 1801, he was the first man to describe astigmatism.

As a physician, he designed phenomenological rules for a child's drug dosage based on its age.

As far as languages go, he proposed a universal phonetic alphabet (with 16 pure vowels (!), among other symbols). As a linguist, he compared the grammar and vocabulary of 400 languages. In 1813, he revived the term Indo-European languages first coined by van Boxhom in 1647.

Young was the first one who tried to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. But he and his collaborators were naively imaginining that the texts were both phonetic and literal. Champollion didn't want to share the credit when he cracked the code. However, Young constructed a method to tune musical instruments, Young temperament.

His contributions to the wave theory of light will be discussed at the bottom.

Augustin-Jean Fresnel was born 220 years ago, on May 10th, 1788, to the family of an architect. Unlike many other famous physicists, he was no child prodigy.

When he was around 8 years old, he finally learned how to read. He studied at various schools and served as an engineer.

The year 1814 was rather important. First of all, he supported the Bourbons which became a reason why Napoleon's people fired him later. More importantly, he began to write important papers about light.

A paper on the aberration of light (a correction to the apparent position of objects due to the finite speed of light) was rejected. A later memoir about diffraction (bending of waves around obstacles, leading to complex interference patterns) written in 1818 was more successful and earned him a prize in Paris. He was elected to various academies in Paris and London.

As a manager of lighthouses, he constructed Fresnel lens that replaced mirrors. He never became famous but in 1824, he wrote the following to Young:

In myself, that sensibility, or that vanity, which people call love of glory had been blunted. All the compliments that I have received from Arago, Laplace, and Biot never gave me so much pleasure as the discovery of a theoretic truth, or the confirmation of a calculation by experiment.

Young and Fresnel: research of wave theory of light

Because the research of wave theory of light by these two guys is interlinked, let me discuss it simultaneously. The most important achievement was arguably Thomas Young's double-slit experiment with light but I can't write much about it because people are not even quite sure whether he actually did it back in 1801. ;-)

Today, we know that light is a transverse wave. As recently as 1817, people thought that light was a longitudinal wave, much like sound. Thomas Young didn't quite revolutionize this particular situation but he helped to slowly improve it, anyway. He said that light had a small transverse component besides the dominant longitudinal component. :-) Finally, Fresnel managed to eliminate the ludicrous longitudinal component completely in 1821 because he realized - purely theoretically - that it was essential to explain polarization of light.

Fresnel was able to improve the geometry of some previous experiments (by F.M. Grimaldi) to reduce diffraction and pick the pure interference only.

Many insights in wave optics are named after Fresnel, including:

• F. equations (waves boundary conditions on the boundary between different refractive indices)
• F. diffraction (quite difficult integrals, including the F. integral)
• F. lantern (based on F. lens, used in theaters)
• F. rhomb (a prism to create polarized light)
• F. zone (elliptic shapes to restore the intensity reduced by diffraction, using reflection)
• F. zone plate (concentric circles replacing lens; they can focus by the power of wave mechanics)
• F. number (dimensionless F = SizeOfAperture squared over (Wavelength times Distance); for F greater than one, we need F. diffraction instead of Fraunhofer diffraction)
  
• F. drag (a wrong theory to explain why the speed of light in Arago's experiment was constant, despite the aether)

The Fizeau experiment in the 1850s verified Fresnel's predictions for speed ratios of light in moving water. Michelson and Morley (and Zeeman) liked to replicate it, too.

The Huygens principle - the concentric round waves around each point that was hit interfere with all others - is often referred to as the Huygens-Fresnel principle.

Ross McKitrick: The Devil is in the Generalities

Prof Ross McKitrick has an excellent article in Ontario's "Academic Matters" magazine. It is called

The Devil is in the Generalities

He encourages the public to stop using the word "environment" which is all-encompassing or, in other words, most sentences involving this word are vacuous truisms.

We should talk about more concrete things that can be operationally defined or even quantified. Statements about such things can be confirmed or ruled out.

Even the word "air quality" is too general and he discusses remarkable details about the diverse types of air pollution. Many of the environmental issues have improved dramatically but the vagueness and superficiality of the term "environment" is one of the main drivers behind people's flawed impression that we are facing an "environmental crisis".

CNN: Nima Arkani-Hamed predicts extra dimensions

CNN has a fun story, Colliding with Nature's best-kept secrets, about the LHC and about Nima who predicts extra dimensions to be seen at the LHC. The article has just become the most popular article at the CNN website. (It's also the most e-mailed one.) The Reference Frame wishes Nima, Savas, and Gia a lot of good luck. :-)



Nima starts to talk about the LHC collider and fundamental physics in 2010 at 4:45. The video is from the lecture at the Perimeter Institute, Canada, in 2007.

It's just so hot. Volcanic. (Ahead of the green puppy and everyone else.) Porn star. A manchild with sh*teating grin. :-)

The picture used by CNN (currently on the main page of cnn.com), the best picture of Nima in the world, was taken by your humble correspondent, of course. :-) The label "Courtesy Nima" is somewhat bizarre.

But other things besides photographs have their history, too. For example, the extra dimensions were introduced to physics by Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein.

The existence of extra dimensions in string theory was first calculated by Claude Lovelace who became the first man to know that D=26 is the critical dimension of the old, bosonic string theory.

Kaluza and Klein are dead and Lovelace is very old. I am afraid that Randall and Sundrum could be more sad that the CNN story forgot about them. ;-)

More seriously, despite the apparent superficiality, I am very happy that a serious big shot physicist (with more than 15k citations) is presented in the media at least once.

Search for Arkani-Hamed or Nima on this blog...

PI goes ekpyrotic

The Perimeter Institute informed us that the new director would be

"an internationally respected scientist of the highest order."

So I thought it would be someone like Gerard 't Hooft who is just visiting the institute and who naturally unifies the interests in serious physics as well as alternative theories about the information and the quantum.

And because of the description above, I would have frankly made a bet that it couldn't be e.g. Neil Turok.

I was wrong. Quite obviously, different people have different ideas what it means to be an internationally respected scientist of the highest order.



Three papers by Neil Turok are famous and all of them are about the cyclic Universe which is a physically unmotivated, inexpensive fantasy. Unfortunately, Neil Turok is a good example of a scholar who is helping the journalists to promote Hollywood physics and various bizarre yet popular myths, for example

☞ general statements that the expanding Universe is in trouble
☞ the Big Bang is problematic just because it is the Big Bang (a weird Turok vs Guth audio)
☞ something must be wrong with the cosmic inflation because Alan Guth thinks that Neil Turok is like a monkey

Mark Trodden agrees that the uncritical way how the journalists have often presented Turok's problematic theories is a case of bad journalism. See also Sean Carroll's criticism of cyclic and similar ideas.

Neil Turok recently invited Stephen Hawking to South Africa in order to find an African Einstein. Good luck with your search. At any rate, this is sadly the kind of stuff that determines the outsiders' opinions about the physicists.

Add some of the weirdest attempts to define the anthropic measures to understand why your humble correspondent will only join the congratulations as a matter of formality. Congratulations. At least, I am happy and grateful that Prof Turok has done some work on cosmic strings.

Nevertheless, the Hollywoodization of physics continues. As soon as the remaining heretics will be removed, the PI's cutting-edge picture of the Universe will be based on ekpyrotic loop quantum cosmology with a variable speed of light and 30+ octopi swimming in the spin foam. ;-)

Google Translate in 24 languages

Google Translate

has been upgraded and, among other things, it includes 24 languages. In the HTML template of this blog, I replaced the Italian flag by the Czech flag. It was a difficult decision but at the end, it turned out that Czechia seems to be more civilized than Italy by about 70% - as measured by the number of visitors to the Reference Frame.



I am impressed by the quality of the translation. It is the best automatic translation engine from English to Czech that I have seen so far. "Reference frame" should really be translated as "vztažná soustava", not "referenční rám", but the latter is OK as a literal, word-by-word translation. You may try the remaining languages here:


Google also offers you various toolbars for automatic translations of the pages you visit, a translated search focusing on pages in one language that are translated into another, a dictionary, and an engine that immediately translates the words under your mouse pointer; the latter only deals with English and 7 major languages.

Automatic detection is now among the input languages.

Dark Blue World

I just saw the Dark Blue World (2001), the most expensive Czech movie ever shot (EUR 8 million), for the first time. It is a powerful story.

Recall that over 2,400 Czechoslovak pilots have served in the Royal Air Force.

The movie starts in 1939 when Czechoslovakia has to surrender to the Third Reich. Many pilots have moved to England. A rather frustrating story about their friendship and love during those hard times is mixed with scenes from 1950 when the pilots-survivors were already arrested by the communist regime because they were too infected by the freedom and democracy.

In some sense, it was the least lucky group of heroes ever. They did the best thing they could, they have helped to win the war, and still, they were punished by everyone, including their girlfriends and their homeland. Sad and touching.

More YouTube videos.

Broken window fallacy & global warming

James Pethohoukis (U.S. News) talks about the positive impact that the global warming regulations are supposed to have upon the economy, according to Obama and Clinton.



William Pizer, an IPCC economist, is quoted as being skeptical about the benefits of these "green-collar jobs" and similar inventions. In fact, the statements that the carbon regulation would be good for the economy is a modern example of the

broken window fallacy.

In a 1850 essay by Bastiat, a small boy breaks a window. They sympathize with the good shopkeeper until they realize that the event will create work for the glazier who will also have to buy shoes from the cobbler and bread from the baker. Everyone should therefore be happy. Right? ;-)

Not really. Such a calculation only includes the positive impact of the broken window and completely neglects the negative impact. More precisely, all these happy things will be paid from the shopkeeper's wallet. He will lose. He won't be able to buy new shoes or an extra bread for himself. So the cobbler and baker will have roughly the same profit but the shopkeeper will lose the price of one window which is approximately equal to the net loss induced by the bad behavior of the little boy.

The case of the green industry is analogous. Of course that there will be new, narrow segments of the industry that will benefit. But because people will be forced to buy these green products, they won't be allowed to buy old-fashioned, alternative, cheaper products. As a result, the green businesses will make as much profit as their predecessors did but their customers will be able to afford less. Similar kinds of regulation simply cannot be good for the overall economy, for the whole society.

Commercial break: A peer-reviewed study in Geophysical Research Letters (Monaghan et al., funded by NSF and DoE) shows how much the lack of an Antarctic warming disagrees with the climate models. The trends differ by a factor of 2.5 - 5. Yahoo News, ScienceDaily.

Can wars be useful? Well, I think that it depends whom you count to the "overall economy". I guess that if you don't count the nations that will actually be damaged by the weapons, there can exist a net profit for the nation that produces the arms. For example, Adolf Hitler was able to end the crisis in Germany of the 1930s. When you count everyone, then, of course, people generally lose assets in wars, don't they?

But is the profit from arms races for the national economy substantial enough that it would justify an "artificial" production of weapons, in order to support the economy? I think that the answer is obviously No. From the economic viewpoint, you can arrange a similar system with an analogous impact on the economy. But instead of the weapons, the government can produce something more useful - for example, new DVD players, bridges, or subway stations. Or whatever. In such a case, it is probably possible to prove that the benefit will be higher than in the case of the "artificial" arms races.

And even if the government produces useful things, such a policy is probably only useful during crises when the unemployment is high. Otherwise it is nothing else than a transfer of a part of the economy under the government's wings which is generally a bad thing.



Global warming is affecting bird migration patterns. By Jim Peden

The people who say that some of these green policies would be good for the overall economy are usually close to the "special corner" of the society that benefits, unlike the rest. For example, I didn't tell you that the little bastard from the parable was glazier's son. In a similar way, Barack Obama is probably damn close to bastards such as Al Gore who are ready to tell you that we will benefit. Well, they will benefit and others will lose (more than how much they will benefit). When you think about these matters, it is important not to confuse the bastards with yourself or with the whole society.

And that's the memo.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

Fun with John Moffat

Jester from CERN and Jacques Distler are making fun of an old Gentleman who used to paint landscapes.

However, he couldn't earn money so he sent mail messages to Einstein, presenting himself as a disciple. Finally, John Moffat ended up as a researcher at the Perimeter Institute. ;-)

He has co-invented many things such as the Variable Speed of Light and similar nonsense. He has also copied Einstein's silly papers about non-symmetric metric tensors, presenting them as his own. (It is a silly idea because the metric tensor is a kind of potential and its antisymmetric part is something like the stringy B-field, not the electromagnetic field strength.)

In this particular story, we talk about his

recent paper (and even more recent talk)

about the electroweak symmetry breaking without a Higgs boson. He replaces the Higgs by a loop-induced non-locality or something like that.

Superficially, the paper must look completely OK to anyone who is not an expert in particle physics. It has the right fonts, equations, Feynman diagrams, and some references in it. ;-) However, the devil is in the details - more precisely the aspects that laymen would consider to be details but physicists know that they are essential. The mechanism behind the basic statement is virtually unexplained but a lot of time is spent with trivial points. Various numbers are written down with an amazing, clearly unrealistic accuracy.

And the most absurd points of the paper are presented as a virtue. If you know something about particle physics, you probably also know that the Higgs boson must exist for the WW scatering to be unitary. So what does Moffat do about these arguments?

Well, he says that his (longitudinal) WW scattering amplitude vanishes above 1 TeV! Yes, he says it vanishes. It's supposed to be a conclusion of a paper that computes some Feynman diagrams. Needless to say, no calculation based on Feynman diagrams can give you a function that is nonzero at some energies and strictly zero at higher energies. Jacques Distler explains that such a function would also be non-analytic which would make the whole theory non-local. It violates various bounds that follow from causality, too.

Equally importantly, once again, such a result simply cannot follow from the Feynman diagrams he drew because they always lead to locally holomorphic functions of the momenta and energies. You don't need to read the paper in detail to know that it is wrong.

Do you think he says that the vanishing is a stupidity, an absurdity, or at least a very awkward feature of his theory? Not at all. On page 1, he calls it "an experimental signature". That is the right term that can sell a complete stupidity. On page 10, he dedicates several sentences to statements how "clearly detectable" his signature will be at the LHC. ;-)

Whenever your goal is to defend the Flat Earth theory, talk about the majestic waterfalls at the end of the world and the gigantic turtle beneath them. They're so spectacular and so testable! The Flat Earth theory is so much more falsifiable and thus (!!) scientific than the Round Earth theory that doesn't predict any spectacular turtles! :-)

If you need to sell a manifestly wrong idea, call it "an experimental signature". It surely makes a difference, doesn't it? It is so impressive and testable and falsifiable! :-) However, you should be warned that this marke