CERN: LHC getting ready next month

During the next month, the LHC collider could be capable to collide particles. It is expected that in August, around the Strings 2008 conference at CERN, the first beams will actually be injected into the rings. They plan not to collide the protons until October.



Among those eight sectors, only one (45) was pleasantly warm one month ago when the posting was first submitted. The numbers above are no longer correct. The 45 sector cooled from 290 K to 50 K during the last month. The sector 12 went from 160 K to 5 K. The sector 34 went from 20 K to roughly 3 K.

The remaining sectors have been extremely cool - close to ready (1.9 K) - for months. Click the pictures for a story and the LHC website, respectively. Finally, I recommend a simple but cute 3D model to all users of Google Earth.



The construction is artificially elevated above the ground. The deepest and most complex building is probably the ATLAS detector near the Southern "corner" of the circle.

Oops, I almost forgot: here is the LHC model KMZ file for Google Earth. Click the link in the previous sentence, browse for Google Earth (in Program Files, Google, Google Earth, Google Earth.exe), and permanently associate the application with the KMZ files (Google Earth archives).

Deutschland über alles, except for Spain

Congratulations to rafa and all of Spain for their gold from Euro 2008! I can't write anything wise about the game so let me focus on the anthems. ;-)



The Spanish anthem, The Royal March, was adopted in 1770. The author is unknown and no lyrics is used these days. However, the video above uses lyrics from Alfonso XIII's reign (1886-1931). As most proper anthems, it is about the glory, future, and flag of their fatherland.

During Franco's years (1939-1975), a new text was chosen. It added a lot of triumph, labor, peace, and other buzzwords. In 2008, a new, fully politically correct lyrics, has been proposed. It talks about the diversity, unity, brotherhood, freedom, justice, democracy, and peace. ;-) While I find this text absurdly dovish, it was rejected because of its supposed nationalist tone. Wow.

The most popular lyrics were the unofficial ones. They explained that Franco's buttocks were white because his wife was using Ariel to wash them. If you're interested in details, other political big shots were using different chemicals to clean this part of their bodies. :-)

Now: Germany

When Germany was playing against Austria, a Swiss TV channel showed subtitles that instructed the viewers to sing Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (Germany above everything). The subtitles became a kind of worldwide scandal. One of its helpful consequences was that I learned that this were no longer the official lyrics.



The Wikipedia article about the German anthem admits that most people outside Germany, including your humble correspondent a few weeks ago, think or thought that "Deutschland über alles" continues to be the name of the anthem. Well, it turns out that it's not!

The music by Haydn will be discussed later. But the text was written in 1841 by August Heinrich Hoffmann (who used the title "von Fallersleben") and it has three stanzas. The composition with this lyrics was used as the German anthem since 1922, long before Adolf Hitler became powerful. The stanzas describe:

1. Somewhat extended geography and superiority
2. Women, wine, music, tradition, loyalty
3. Unity, justice, freedom, co-operation

Not surprisingly, the first stanza was the most popular one during the Third Reich. If you think about it, it is equally unsurprising that in 1945, when Germany lost and everyone else was upset, the first two stanzas were banned in order to punish the German pride. However, Hoffmann wrote the third stanza so perfectly innocently that it could have been used for West Germany since 1949.

At any rate, everyone remembers the "original lyrics". However, we should be a bit more careful about the adjective "original". The music has been used as the German anthem since 1922 and the lyrics is from 1841 but was there any pre-history? You bet. ;-)

Austria

The 1797 composition by Joseph Haydn has been actually used for more than 100 years as the anthem of my homeland! :-) In fact, it was the only other modern anthem of the territory where I live besides Where Is My Home?, the current Czech (and first half of the former Czechoslovak) anthem (Wikipedia). You may also watch a creative (but currently untrue and dishonest) Greenpeace's version of the Czech anthem. ;-)

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Austrian Empire was jealous about "The God Save the Queen" in the U.K. (author unknown). So Haydn stole the beginning (14 tones or so) of a Croatian song, refined the flow in the following portions of the composition, and proudly presented the song as an anthem of Francis I, the Austrian emperor: the Kaiserhymne.

This guy was known as Francis II, the German emperor, in his previous life before 1804. His German and Austrian pedigree was almost perfect except for his Spanish mother and Italian father. ;-) The two big empires he has governed earned him the reputation of the only "double kaiser" in the history. There's nothing real to be proud about here because around 1804, Napoleon humiliated the German empire - the most devastating blow came in the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz (Slavkov near Brno, Moravia, Czech lands) - and used the situation to fragment Germany into a chaotic confederation of numerous, small, and hostile kingdoms and republics.

The "core" of the empire was moved towards the East. It became Austria. In 1867, the Eastern portion of the monarchy - Hungary - was promoted and the empire was transformed into a dual state, Austria-Hungary, until it was dissolved in 1918. The first 1797 lyrics of the Austrian anthem were focusing on Francis I of Austria himself. However, newer lyrics were more flexible:



This is still by one century older than "Deutschland über alles".

Haydn's music, one based on the Croatian song, was later recycled by others, including Tchaikovsky, Rossini, and Paganini. This story is a good example how ideas and memes are often combined, recombined, modified, recycled, used, and abused. The history is sometimes complicated.

Sun, Jupiter, Saturn: spin-orbit coupling?

In this dose of skeptical peer-reviewed literature about the climate, we visit PASA, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. Ian Wilson, Brad Carter, and I.A. Waite propose a new, provoking mechanism that may influence the intensity of solar cycles:

Does a spin-orbit coupling between the Sun and the Jovian planets govern the solar cycle?

The paper costs AUD 25 = USD 24 (it used to be USD 12 a few years ago).

Commercial break: Roy Spencer gives a popular presentation of his recent journal article.

It is helpful to review some facts about the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter's mass is about 300 Earth's masses while Saturn's mass is close to 100 Earth's masses. So you would expect Saturn to play a smaller role. However, you should be a bit more careful: role for what?

If you look where the center of mass of the Solar System is, the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn are the key players. The distance "r" of the barycenter from the Sun's center is modified by a planet to be nonzero, namely

r = a / (1 + m/M)

where "a" is the Sun-planet distance, "m" is the planetary mass, and "M" is the Solar mass. You see that for small "m/M", using Taylor expansions, the deviation is proportional both to the orbital radius "a" as well as the planetary mass "m'.

Consequently, Saturn moves the barycenter by roughly 2/3 of the distance contributed by Jupiter: their effects are comparable. The barycenter is not too far - it is actually close to the Solar surface.

Now, can the relative position of the Sun's center and the barycenter of the Solar System influence things like the Sun's rotation? By the equivalence principle, the answer should be No. Physical phenomena in the free fall should be indistinguishable from phenomena outside any gravitational field.

However, it is plausible that more refined quantities such as tidal forces etc. will depend on the position of both Jupiter and Saturn (although the ratio of their contributions could be smaller than 2/3). Also, the equivalence principle can be wrong but I am not among those who are ready to believe such things just in order to support a skeptical theory. So let me continue to think about some kind of tidal forces.

Now, it takes 11.86 (normal) years for Jupiter to revolve around the Sun while Saturn's orbit takes 29.66 (normal) years. How much time does it take for the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn to be re-aligned? Well, the rate of de-aligning is 1/11.86 - 1/29.66 = 1/19.8 years so the "synodic period" of Jupiter and Saturn is around 19.8 years.

This is different from the 22.3-year flow period (in the convective zone of the Sun; responsible for normal sunspot cycles; probably an internal feature of the Sun) and from the 178.7-year repetition period for the solar orbital motion found by Jose (1965) - these periodic processes modulate the sunspot cycles and bring Maunder, Dalton, and 2020 (?) minima (see also Sunspot-climate relationships) - but the authors propose a "synodic resonance" between these three periods. 178.7 is pretty much 8 times 22.3 or 9 times 19.8 (noted already before Jose 1965). Eight and nine are not two random integers. In fact, they differ by one:

1/(1/9) - 1/(1/8) = 1,
1/19.86 - 1/22.3 = 1/178.7 (approx)

I guess this is what they build upon but I don't have the full paper. (Update: Willie Soon kindly allowed me to look at it, and yes, they write what I say.) Whether this resonance actually works beyond the numerology is an open question for me. But it's certainly not crazy that the first modulation of the Sun's internal 22-year period comes from the star's interactions with the heaviest planets. And it's not crazy to think that the solar activity does influence the climate on Earth. Even if the application to climatology is irrelevant, the result of the authors would be fascinating for astrophysics.

If you believe these hints, there are all kinds of possible results that you may derive from them. For example, you won't be too surprised that solar cycle 24 sunspots haven't occurred for more than 2 months. It is plausible that Jose underestimated the cycle a bit and it should be 180+ years. We are living 180 years after the (cool) Dalton minimum. In fact, Ian Wilson claims the following:

[Our work] supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~1-2 °C.

The paper is effectively another peer-reviewed case for global cooling.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

Climate skeptic: Don't panic

The readers of various climate realist blogs may already know this 10-minute video created by Climate-skeptic.com and posted by Coyoteblog - these two websites actually have the same person behind them unless I misunderstand something. ;-)



But I found it so insightful that you might enjoy it, too. It discusses the importance of feedbacks, why most of them are negative, and what contrived things you have to assume if you want to believe that climate sensitivity significantly exceeds 1 °C.

If you like this 10-minute demo, you are also recommended to watch a more extensive but equally excellent version of this video,

What is normal? (A critique of catastrophic man-made global warming theory, 1 hour, playlist).

In this program, there's a lot of stuff about the measurements of temperature, statistics, consistency of proxies with instrumental measurements, bias and adjustability of climate models, and consistency checks involving various methods to determine the climate sensitivity.

Ira Flatow interviews Edward Witten

Ira Flatow has interviewed Edward Witten on his Big Ideas (2003):



See also the second part of the interview.

Risks for the economy: a poll

Originally posted on June 24th.
Update, June 27th, results:



In the list above, the answers are sorted from the most successful ones (in the graph, they are ordered clockwise).

40% thought that regulation in general and/or climate alarmism in particular is the most serious risk. Together with 12% for panic and speculation, we have a majority that thinks that socially engineered, political, or psychological policies in the name of a better life of the society (or individuals) ;-) are the most serious threat.

13% thought that the oil price is the most dangerous thing. Food prices are scary for 5% and general inflation for 4% of the voters. Tension in the Middle East tops the list of 5% of the readers (eighteen percent when combined with the oil price worries). Climate change, tensions elsewhere, and housing slump have at most 2% each.

11% decided that no problems are serious enough to be worried about and 5% offered alternative top problems in the comments.

Original text:

The oil price seems to be getting out of control and a blame game has begun.

Many people, including most producers in the OPEC countries, claim that speculators and hedge funds are behind the increase and regulation of oil futures in the U.S. - and nine bills have been proposed - could slash the prices back to something like USD 65 within a month.

The U.S. housing prices dropped by a record amount - about 15% from the month 1 year earlier. In Miami and Las Vegas, the drop is around 27%. A continuation of this process or its export to other countries may bring all kinds of problems.

Israel has performed an air exercise that looked like a training to attack Iran.

John Bolton claims that Israel will attack the nuclear and other facilities after Obama is elected but before he is inaugurated, assuming that it is Obama who wins.

Food prices have risen and they may continue to do so. Other prices also seem to be rising and inflation in developed countries is returning to high levels unseen in many years.

The climate in 2008 seems roughly 0.5 °C warmer than 100 years ago. Children cannot run because of global warming. ;-) Some people think that we will be fried soon. A naive 10-year-old boy was named the best kid philosopher in the U.S. because he wrote the poem "I am Earth and I am dying, my blue ice caps are melting; will you help me?".

Other people think that the attempts to regulate carbon emissions could hurt the economy. Please, vote for the "regulation" answer even if you are worried about other kinds of regulation!

People react irrationally - i.e. the U.S. consumer confidence at the new record low could be just a sign of panic - while speculators try to benefit and expand all kinds of bubbles and bandwagons.

Which of these issues do you consider to be the most serious threat to the world economy?

Besides the poll that will expire on Friday, I am interested in your detailed opinions and predictions.

Basic concepts of physics and quantum gravity: some lore

In this text, I would like to describe how the essential concepts of theoretical physics - defined as a science linking the language of mathematics with the fundamental facts about the real world - and qualitative statements about the real world were evolving as people were finding more accurate theories matching the Universe.

The focus will be on the most recent insights in the context of quantum gravity but let us begin at the very beginning. Well, almost.

Ancient Greece: astronomy, geometry, statics

Animals and mammals have been observing the real world for tens of millions of years but their observations were lacking the kind of mathematical rigor that theoretical physicists are interested in. Monkeys have always been doing some kind of physics (involving bananas and other objects) but it was a very applied sort of physics and the accuracy wasn't great.

That's why we jump right into the epoch of ancient civilizations. They were observing the real world and besides number theory - a discipline for counting cows and assets - geometry became the oldest branch of quantitative natural science. Astronomy was one of the first applications. People learned something about the apparent trajectories of celestial bodies but they didn't understand their origin.

In the terrestrial context, geometry - today viewed as a branch of mathematics - became the oldest discipline of physics whose goal was to study the possible relationships between perfectly solid things represented as geometrical objects. The Euclidean geometry was born and people thought that it could be directly applied to the real world. In this setup, geometry was good to understand statics only.

When you were a kid, did you ever think about the real world in terms of a binary function from space to the set {0,1}?

My emphasis on statics doesn't mean that they couldn't imagine how the objects were moving. They could move them around but they didn't know almost anything about the way how objects are naturally moving in the real world and especially why they were moving in one way but not another. Time was therefore just an arbitrary external parameter. The precise dependence of things on time was unknown, much like the notion of time derivatives.

Dynamics was not understood at all and Aristotle's anti-Newtonian principle, claiming that things always stay at rest unless pushed, is a great example of the limitations of their dynamics. At any rate, the Greeks (and others) were already good in statics. They understood the real world as a collection of points and other objects in the three-dimensional Euclidean spacetime. Geometry as a branch of mathematics even became useful in their lives.

Modern science

Let's move on. Galileo Galilei became the main father of modern science as well as the father of dynamics. He was the first one who realized that the motion of objects - and other previously static quantities - could be understood in terms of functions of time, a variable measured by clocks, and it was damn important to find out what the correct mathematical functions were.

In the gravitational context, he realized that the distance increases with the second power of time. Isaac Newton has combined Galileo's preliminary insights about kinematics and dynamics with rather accurate phenomenological rules describing the trajectories of planets in the old-fashioned, purely descriptive (non-why) approach - Kepler's laws - and discovered the first quantitative dynamical laws.

Classical physics

In his picture of the world, the world was described in terms of particles that objectively had some positions and these positions - being functions of time - evolved according to some differential equations, a mathematical concept that Newton had to invent along the way.

The word "particles" is just an intuitive label meant to simplify our imagination but what matters mathematically are the positions - canonical coordinates - that evolve according to some equations. These coordinates are thought of as objectively existing numerical features of reality.

The "natural" differential equations were later derived from the Hamiltonian approach and the Lagrangian approach.

Field theory

The equations above could have been used for a large number of particles. When their number (and density) is high enough, a statistical treatment becomes appropriate and the resulting "continuum" may be described in terms of partial differential equations.

These equations were relevant for solids, liquids, and gases. While you can view them as limits of a description of a large number of atoms, it is also possible to interpret these partial differential equations as being fundamental. This approach eventually won in the context of the electromagnetic field even though the whole misguided aether movement may be viewed as an attempt to prove that only ordinary differential equations, and not the partial ones, may be fundamental in the real world.

Classical field theory continues to interpret the world as a set of "canonical coordinates" that evolve in time according to differential equations. But because the number of these "canonical coordinates" is large - they depend on additional parameters, the spatial coordinates - we need partial differential equations rather than ordinary differential equations with respect to time.

At some moment, people attempted to combine fields and particles. They imagined that the world was made out of fields and particles. These composite pictures were phenomenologically useful in many contexts but they have always had problems in the role of fundamental equations. The infinite self-energy of a classical electron was an example.

Relativity

Special relativity has preserved the basic picture based on partial (and ordinary) differential equations but it has unified space and time. The spatial and temporal derivatives in the fundamental equations have always looked similar. In relativity, they may be treated on equal footing. One is invited to think about the whole spacetime as the ultimate reality. The spacetime has some additional symmetry mixing space and time - the Lorentz symmetry. The acceptable laws of Nature as well as the vacuum - empty space - are postulated to be invariant under this new symmetry. This constraint dramatically reduces the number of acceptable theories.

When we focus on the Lorentz-invariant theories, we are already naturally residing in the class of causal or local theories where signals never propagate faster than light. The latter condition is a relativistic version of the pre-relativistic causality that allowed the future to be influenced by the past but not in the other way around.

General relativity preserves the general picture based on differential equations, too. But it allows you to reparameterize the coordinates of spacetime in an arbitrary, non-linear way. Theories are still required to be invariant under all these transformations but the vacuum is not. Non-linear transformations of the empty space correspond to a world with fictitious, inertial forces seen by accelerating observers.

Because this framework has some new degrees of freedom that are needed to remember these inertial forces - namely the metric tensor -, it turns out that the framework automatically predicts gravity, too. The gravitational field is influenced by matter via known equations, namely Einstein's equations, and it acts on matter by requiring that matter moves along geodesics. Because gravity is produced in the same way as inertial forces, the equivalence principle is automatically explained: all bodies accelerate equally in the same gravitational field.

The symmetry of special relativity has unified many concepts that were previously thought of as independent: mass and momentum became a part of the same 4-vector much like momentum and energy. The previous two unifications implied that mass and energy is really the same thing. Electricity and magnetism became two sides of the same coin, too. And I could continue.

Quantum mechanics

Although the frameworks above used diverse symmetries and various types (and numbers) of degrees of freedom as well as sets of equations they followed, the basic interpretation was always identical. These numbers are "real" and the laws evolve them deterministically.

The quantum revolution was therefore the first (and most likely also the last) true upgrade of this conceptual heart of theoretical physics.

In quantum mechanics, events cannot be predicted deterministically. Only probabilities of different outcomes may be predicted. They arise as the squared absolute values of complex amplitudes. The coordinates, velocities, and other quantities - the observables - are represented by linear operators acting on the Hilbert space of allowed states. The linearity of the Hilbert space physically means that the superposition principle holds - any superposition of allowed states is an allowed state. Evolution is expressed in terms of a unitary operator. These are the universal postulates of quantum mechanics.

But the postulates are not everything we need. Much like in classical physics, we must ask what are the degrees of freedom and what are the equations (Heisenberg equations, if I use the picture with similar equations to classical physics) that they follow. It turns out that well-behaved classical systems usually have their quantum counterparts that can be deduced by the process of "quantization". But that's just a heuristic trick. Once we talk about quantum mechanics, it is only the full quantum mechanical theory that "really" exists and the classical theory is "only" its limit that may or may not exist. In the familiar "schoolboy" examples of quantum theories, it does exist: all familiar quantum theories may be obtained from a classical theory.

Quantum mechanics may be formulated in one of several "pictures" that can be shown to be completely equivalent as far as the ultimate predictions of observable phenomena go. This type of redundancy is a commonplace feature of theories that are on the right track and that are also sufficiently well understood.

Quantum field theory

We have found a completely new "heart" of theoretical physics. Successful classical theories, such as particles with the Coulomb force, may be quantized to obtain very useful and realistic quantum equations (describing all of chemistry, among other things).

However, classical field theories may be quantized as well. It turns out that the energy spectrum becomes discrete and quantum fields may be equivalently interpreted as systems of particles. In the quantum context, the dilemma whether we should use particles or fields (or both) as fundamental objects evaporates. When you do it properly, it is really the same thing. If you start with fields, you may derive the quantization rules and you discover particles. If you start with particles and decide to define quantum rules for their wave functions that are fully compatible with relativity, you end up with quantum fields, too.

Because it remains natural to look for theories that have a Lagrangian and we still want the principles of special relativity to be obeyed, we are led to a pretty natural class of theories and the Standard Model is the most phenomenologically relevant representative of this class.

In these theories, one decides what the fields are and how they interact. The interpretation coincides with the basic interpretation of a quantum theory - the quantum postulates hold - but the number of degrees of freedom is large enough for us to be able to describe an arbitrary configuration of particles of different types (or the corresponding fields) and their interactions.

The number of psychologically different approaches to such theories increases. We can use not only the Schrödinger, Heisenberg, or Dirac (interaction) picture but also Feynman's path integral approach. In all cases, the ultimate goal is to calculate some probabilities of various outcomes of experiments with particles and fields and/or statistical expectation values of various operators - observables that can be measured.

If we were talking about technicalities such as gauge symmetries, the number of physically equivalent methods to treat them is large, too.

Interacting theories: features

In the text above, you were led to think of the "free fields" giving us the non-interacting particle species that are subsequently supplemented with interactions. And we usually chose the renormalizable interactions only. However, this description only reflects a particular "perturbative" method how quantum field theories may be constructed.

If the interactions are strong or if you want to be very general, you don't want to think in this way. The free particles can't be seen in general - for example quarks don't exist as actual isolated particles. Instead, you want to think about more physical - directly observable - objects that can be calculated from your theory, too.

Various scattering amplitudes and Green's functions can be analytically continued to complex values of energy and momenta. It turns out that these functions must be analytical almost everywhere and every non-analyticity has to have a physical interpretation such as a new particle (e.g. a bound state).

The collection of single poles and cuts in your scattering amplitude describes the spectrum of physical particles. Moreover, various general bounds and facts about the scattering and other amplitudes may be extracted.

It is possible to think about a quantum field theory as a theory with a list of particle species following the principles of quantum mechanics - the different entries appear as poles in scattering amplitudes - and the scattering amplitudes for all possible processes involving these particles.

The set of a priori possible theories of this kind would be huge but we usually consider theories that are close to renormalizable theories or, almost equivalently but more invariantly, theories that can be obtained as long-distance limits of field theories that are nearly scale-invariant at very short distances (or, equivalently, very high energies). This is the truly interesting class and the constraints above pretty much tell us that once we determine the spectrum of light particles in the Standard Model, there are only 30 or so parameters that influence the behavior of these particles at low energies as long as the theory is required to make sense at sufficiently (almost arbitrarily) high energies, too.

Adding general relativity: quantum gravity

In the classical sections, we noted that general relativity doesn't change anything about the interpretational "heart" of physics. It added some symmetries but you could have viewed them as coincidences. Much like we required general covariance from a classical field theory (governed by the classical determinism and other principles), we should be able to add the condition of general covariance to quantum field theory (respecting the quantum postulates) and simply obtain a theory of quantum gravity.

However, when you actually try to follow this procedure in this straightforward way, you will fail. You find out that you don't really know the spectrum of your theory and the interactions at high energies. If you assume that the theory can be constructed purely from the low-energy fields, especially the metric tensor, you will find out that the resulting construction won't be renormalizable: it won't respect the rule mentioned in the QFT context that the high-energy limit of physics should exist and the low-energy physics should be pictured as its low-energy approximation. You won't know what the exact amplitudes should be near the Planckian energies where you really care about them.

Black holes are omnipresent

So what is the spectrum of localized objects in a gravitational theory?

In classical general relativity, a sufficiently heavy collapsing object is guaranteed to end up as a black hole. This conclusion certainly follows from Einstein's equations. But even if you imagine that Einstein's equations are not exactly correct, you should realize that you don't need any extraordinary density of matter or other extreme conditions to create a black hole. A large enough volume of water is enough to end up as a black hole.

The corrections to Einstein's equations that are not experimentally excluded are insufficient to change anything about the qualitative conclusion that black holes must form. Black holes simply do exist. Less importantly, we also observe their effects in the telescopes.

In the quantum context, you find out that they are not quite black. They are emitting thermal radiation. There are many ways to think about it. For example, black hole confines light and other objects by a "classically impenetrable barrier" - a change to the geometry that would make escaping light equivalent to a forbidden "superluminal signal". But in quantum mechanics, we are familiar with quantum tunneling: objects have a nonzero probability to penetrate such barriers as long as they appear in the prohibited region only for a finite amount of time.

The black hole horizon (and the black hole interior) is no exception. There is a probability that a particle near the center of the black hole escapes from the black hole by making such a jump. The information tunnels out, too.

You may also talk about the pair-creation of virtual particles that become physical if they are created near the horizon. When you calculate all these seemingly different phenomena - tunneling, pair-production - carefully, you find out that they're completely equivalent.

Stephen Hawking has determined the temperature of the resulting blackbody radiation. It is proportional to the "gravitational acceleration" on the event horizon. From the known laws of thermodynamics - a useful additional layer of physics that we haven't discussed - you can also determine the black hole entropy which turns out to be proportional to the surface area of the event horizon in Planck units, just like Jacob Bekenstein predicted a few years earlier.

In quantum mechanics, the entropy (divided by Boltzmann's constant) must be the natural logarithm of the number of macroscopically indistinguishable microstates. You may find out all kinds of general rules. Black holes are the highest-entropy objects that you can squeeze into a given volume. And each microstate looks like an elementary particle.

Quantum gravity: particle species

In classical general relativity, the existence of black holes was inevitable. Because we didn't need any extreme densities or extreme gravitational fields (with extreme tidal forces), this conclusion (about the existence of black holes) must also follow from a correct quantum theory of gravity: the classical limit is qualitatively correct when the star collapses.

Because we have seen that every black holes must carry a certain entropy and therefore information, it must correspond to a lot of microstates. Each of them looks like a new particle species. Many of them (with the same mass, angular momentum, and charge) are almost (macroscopically) indistinguishable. But microscopically, they must still differ.

In other words, very general arguments are enough to determine the type and number of high-mass species of elementary particles in any correct theory of quantum gravity: they must look like black holes and their density per unit mass must go as the exponential of the entropy (the surface area in Planck units over four).

Because the black holes maximize the entropy among localized objects of a fixed mass, they are the "generic localized states". There are so many of them that they dominate all the scattering processes with a certain high, trans-Planckian center-of-mass energy. It was possible to deduce this principle from very general arguments about gravity, quantum mechanics, and statistical physics. This principle - that black holes always dominate physics of processes at high, trans-Planckian center-of-mass energy - was called "asymptotic darkness" by Tom Banks.

There is nothing new - there is darkness - if you go to excessively high energies. Saying that there is nothing new above the Planck scale is actually equivalent to saying that there is no geometry at distances shorter than the Planck length.

If you think about a particular classical gravitational theory - for example, general relativity coupled to the Standard Model - you (more than) qualitatively know what happens at very low, sub-Planckian (center-of-mass) energies. It is encoded in the low-energy field theory. However, it turns out that you (more than) qualitatively know what happens at extremely high, trans-Planckian (center-of-mass) energies, too: it is fully encoded in the black hole microstates and all qualitative features of black holes can be determined from the classical black hole solutions - solutions to the same low-energy equations that were relevant for the low-energy regime.

If you collide particles whose center-of-mass energy is huge and trans-Planckian, you don't need to use some superesoteric high-energy properties of your theory to predict the outcome. Instead, you may use classical general relativity and determine that there's enough mass within the Schwarzschild radius and a black hole will be formed.

It means that the low-energy, heavily sub-Planckian regime is qualitatively understood but the very high-energy, trans-Planckian regime is qualitatively understood, too. Ever more energetic (i.e. massive) black holes correspond to ever larger objects with decreasing curvature. A very small curvature is normally relevant for very low energies but in the presence of gravity, it is relevant for very high energies, too.

We see that the very low and very high energy regimes must be governed by the same theory. It is a highly non-trivial requirement that the same theory must behave well in both limits. For example, you might imagine that quantum gravity is obtained by a direct quantization of Einstein's equations - equations that are relevant for low energies.

Imagine that you have a procedure how to determine the spectrum of such a quantized theory at arbitrarily high energies. It sounds very unlikely that such a spectrum would exactly match the black hole microstates that you need to get at very high energies: high-mass states of a theory (and their density) could look like hadrons, nuclei, or atoms. The details of such spectra depend on the behavior of your theory in the strongly coupled regime. However, you know that some of the answers (e.g. the density of states, controlled by entropy) should exactly agree with black hole properties (area) that can be completely calculated from a weakly curved (i.e. low-energy) calculation in your theory. It won't agree by chance.

You need to get discrete, hadron-like microstates that will however look just like black holes when their masses vastly exceed the Planck mass. It's tough. This is another method to explain why the constraints of quantum gravity are so terribly difficult to satisfy.

Is there a solution? Of course, there is. If you count every superselection sector as a new solution, there are countably infinitely many known solutions (and up to 10^{500} of them may be quasi-realistic, although it depends on the precise degree how much quasi-realistic you expect them to be). They are called the backgrounds of string/M-theory. It is a priori conceivable that besides the "10^{500}" solutions, there could exist another consistent theory of quantum gravity that properly interpolates between the known low-energy and the known high-energy limits.

But no such theory is no known and it is likely that even if one were found, it would be natural to count it as another background of string theory even if its relationship to the remaining 10^{500} vacua were not fully understood.

After all, the term "string theory" is already used for many vacua where "strings" don't seem to be the elementary objects (such as 11-dimensional M-theory). And it would be even more likely that you would have to learn pretty much everything that string theorists have to know today in order to understand the hypothetical "new" theory of quantum gravity: most of these "stringy" tools are essential for any kind of good physics (in the quantum gravity context).

Beyond asymptotic darkness: new scales

You may have noticed that when we are discussing quantum gravity, we are mostly using the conceptual framework of quantum field theory but we are dealing with a very special and mysterious kind of quantum field theory with a very special spectrum of massive particles (and very special functions describing their density and interactions).

It follows that string theory may be understood as a gadget to produce generalized quantum field theories with the right particle spectra (and interactions) that correctly interpolate between the low-energy limit and the high-energy limit, dominated by the black holes.

But as the term "string theory" indicates, it is not about black holes only. There should also be some strings attached somewhere. ;-) However, it is important to understand that only the black holes (and gravity) are universal. Strings are new objects that appear (and are helpful) in many (but not all) corners of the configuration space (or moduli space).

In the simplest picture of "asymptotic darkness" that we started with, there is only one scale - the Planck scale - dividing two interesting regimes: low-energy physics below the Planck scale and high-energy physics above the Planck scale. There are no dimensionless parameters, certainly not small one.

This simple picture is relevant e.g. for M-theory in 11 dimensions. This theory has no dimensionless parameters either. Qualitatively speaking, it only contains massless gravitons (and their siblings from the supermultiplet) and black holes. It also predicts the existence of (heavy if large) M2-branes and M5-branes, among other things, but these objects are not point-like localized objects: instead, they are extended.

String theory always invites us to study extended relativistic objects simultaneously with the point-like ones. But if you treat string theory as a gadget to generate generalized point-like quantum field theories, you are not interested in extended objects unless they are wrapped. And if they're wrapped on homologically trivial cycles in space, in order to be fully compact, they become just very special states in families that are dominated by black hole microstates anyway.

More typical vacua of string theory do have dimensionless parameters. Whenever strings are useful and "effectively fundamental" objects in a string-theoretical spacetime, we always have a new dimensionless parameter called the "string coupling", g_s, and this number (also expressed as the exponential of dilaton, phi) is much smaller than one (the dilaton therefore goes to minus infinity) if the stringy picture is really useful.

On the other hand, whenever a background of string theory has such a parameter that can be interpreted as the dilaton, you may always find some strings and the qualitative conclusions associated with string theory (such as the Hagedorn density of states and the characteristic decrease of the amplitudes at high energies) holds. It only holds up to some higher energy scale and gradually changes to the quantum gravitational, black-hole-dominated functional energy dependence.

In more typical vacua, there are many more fundamental as well as derived energy scales associated with the radii of different hidden dimensions, tensions of various types of branes, and so forth. As string theory interpolates between the required low-energy and high-energy limits of physics, it also inserts a lot of new interesting objects and phenomena in the middle. It is difficult to find a theory that properly interpolates between the low-energy and high-energy regimes of gravity. But if you want to find such a consistent theory "constructively", the known methods to construct stringy vacua are the only methods you can use.

Even if you didn't know about the results of string theory as we understand them in 2008, you would ultimately have to look for a theory that describes gravity as well as other forces and particles. Such a theory would have to interpolate between the correct low-energy equations for gravity and other forces and the correct high-energy states in the spectrum, corresponding to the black holes. It would have to reproduce many other intermediate energy scales, too.

Qualitatively, such a theory would have to look as string theory, anyway. But at some moment, you would like to know some "quantitative" details. If you were analyzing your questions carefully, you could answer many questions unambiguously and the answers would be identical to string theory once again.

For example, you would ask whether the general covariance can be extended to a larger yet "simple" symmetry. You would re-discover supergravity. If you asked what is the maximum dimension that allows supergravity, you would end up with the number eleven. If you asked what objects exist in such an 11-dimensional theory assuming that the latter is consistent, you could derive many known things about M-theory. You would be studying the very same M-theory even if your starting point was different.

Similar comments apply to the other vacua of string theory. Anomaly cancellation, discovery of black holes and other objects, and a detailed research of their properties and excitations would allow you to reconstruct pretty much everything we know about string/M-theory. If you insisted on tools that don't assume that the theory is fundamentally a theory of strings, some questions would be hard to answer. But whenever you could answer a question, the answer would coincide with the answer extracted from string theory.

In other words, the term "string theory" sounds much more narrow-minded than the theory actually is. It would be much more accurate to call it "the only conceivable theory reconciling all known established principles of general relativity, quantum field theory, and statistical physics" or "all good physics that denies neither GR nor QFT".

The proposition that such a theory contains strings in pretty much all corners of the configuration space where dimensionless parameters much smaller than one occur doesn't have to be interpreted as a defining criterion of a "special theory" called "string theory". Instead, it is a derivable fact that follows from the very general rules, assuming that quanta, fields, and gravity exist.

The dualities: looking at lighthouses

At the beginning, I mentioned that quantum mechanics allowed us to use many equivalent pictures and quantum field theory unified the notions of particles and waves. String theory leads to a similar redundancy of equivalent descriptions: they are referred to as dualities. The internal structure of localized objects may typically be phrased in many ways. Each way involves a different geometry of compact dimensions. Nevertheless, all the pictures end up to be exactly equivalent.

These dualities are an additional indication that string theory is essential to understand the Universe. If you have a physical system that can be described using two (or more), a priori very different collections of equations, it is analogous to a lighthouse that is seen from two (or more) nearby islands i.e. from two very different directions. Such a redundancy of perspectives reinforces our certainty that the lighthouses are real and that we might actually be seeing most of them.

At any rate, it is extremely unreasonable to expect that string theory may "go away" at any moment in the future of theoretical physics because pretty much all of its qualitative features may be shown to be logically inevitable and the theories with these features seem to be extremely rare - as rare as the backgrounds of string theory.

And that's the memo.

Phytoplankton surprisingly destroys a lot of ozone

Dr Katie Read and fifteen mostly U.K. and U.S. co-authors have studied the mechanisms destroying ozone (O₃) in the lower atmosphere above the ocean:

Extensive halogen-mediated ozone destruction over the tropical Atlantic Ocean (scientific paper in Nature, abstract)

Recall that ozone in the lower atmosphere is a highly potent greenhouse gas. Despite its small amount, it is responsible for almost 2/3 of the effect we attribute to CO₂. (The absolute size of the effect remains uncertain, mostly due to unknown feedbacks, but most of these feedbacks are universal multiplicative factors for all greenhouse gases.) When you divide the "shared absorption" in between the overlapping different gases, the percentages of the total greenhouse effect are as follows (source):

• 67%+ H₂O (water)
• 15% CO₂ (carbon dioxide)
• 10% O₃ (ozone)
• 3% CH₄ (methane)
• 3% N₂O (nitrous oxide)

Water itself would be able to cause a much higher percentage of the effect than 67% but some of the spectral lines are absorbed - and attributed to - the competitors. At any rate, you see that O₃ and CH₄, when added together, are almost as important as CO₂, so we should care about them.

Is ozone good? The popular cliché is that the lower-atmosphere ozone is a health hazard while higher-atmosphere ozone is helpful to protect us against ultraviolet radiation.



There are all kinds of processes that create and destroy ozone. Dr Katie Read et al., the authors of the present peer-reviewed paper, spectroscopically observed the gases at the Cape Verde Observatory (Atlantic Ocean islands, 500 miles West from Senegal in West Africa).

See also: Other lab problems facing the mainstream theory of the ozone cycle

They found out that phytoplankton apparently creates a lot bromine monoxide and iodine monoxide. These compounds subsequently destroy a lot of ozone and lead to additional products that destroy some methane, too.

The existing conventional mainstream models of Earth's chemistry completely neglect halogens (Fl, Cl, Br, I, At). That's why they end up with a wrong figure expressing how much ozone is destroyed above the ocean - i.e. a wrong figure for the concentration of an important greenhouse gas. The authors decide that the actual amount of ozone destroyed in this way is 50% higher than the models would lead you to believe.

I want to say that the rates of the (halogen-dominated) reactions they are proposing to explain the spectroscopic observations are generally increased by man-made (or other) CO₂ production and by "global warming". Remember that e.g. coccolithophores, a brand of phytoplankton, thrive when the CO₂ levels increase. Also, higher temperatures lead (or would lead) to increased water vapor above the ocean that helps the halogen oxides to escape from the ocean. All these relationships are examples of Le Chatelier's principle i.e. Nature's natural ability to self-regulate. Negative feedbacks always win at the end.

A pseudoscientific reaction from RealClimate.ORG

RealClimate.ORG's Gavin Schmidt clearly doesn't like the fact that the findings show another mildly serious problem with the contemporary climate models. So he spreads some fog. The most breathtaking demonstration of his incompetence (or zeal) is the following quote:

... Yet this is completely misleading since neither climate sensitivity nor CO₂ driven future warming will be at all affected by any revisions in ozone chemistry - mainly for the reason that most climate models don't consider ozone chemistry at all. Precisely zero of the IPCC AR4 model simulations (discussed here for instance) used an interactive ozone module in doing the projections into the future.

Wow! He seems to be so proud that their models neglect virtually everything. So if a mechanism happens to destroy another greenhouse gas that is as important as CO₂, partially as a result of the presence of CO₂ itself, the sensitivity will not be affected "at all"! Who could have thought? Has Mr Schmidt ever heard of feedbacks? Or does he think that there is no interaction (or causal relationship) between the concentration of different chemical compounds (and between temperature, too)? Has he ever heard of the so-called chemical reactions?

What he says is so flagrant denial of basics of science that I believe that most people who have heard some science at the elementary school will know what's wrong with his opinions.

Political activists like him love to talk about positive feedbacks all the time - especially the production of water vapor indirectly caused by CO₂-induced warming - but when it comes to negative feedbacks such as the destruction of other greenhouse gases such as O₃ and CH₄, they shouldn't be looked at "at all"! Is it what you call science and how you want to obtain correct (...) answers, Mr Schmidt? I am stunned.

The climate models that try to emulate the greenhouse effect but that don't reproduce the correct chemistry are simply wrong models because the chemistry that involves the greenhouse gases on either side of the formulae is completely crucial for the greenhouse effect. Because O₃ and CH₄ are also greenhouse gases, it is damn important to know whether they exist in the atmosphere and whether they are being destroyed and whether they will be destroyed in the future (and how much). So Schmidt's statement

Precisely zero of the IPCC AR4 model simulations (discussed here for instance) used an interactive ozone module in doing the projections into the future.

implies that you should now throw precisely all IPCC AR4 models to the trash bin or, to say the same thing more moderately, to work very hard to correct the bug and to introduce the previously neglected important effect that was pointed out by Dr Katie Read et al.

Many similar problems with the models have been found in the past and many more will be found in the future. Science listens - and has to listen - to all these new insights, otherwise it would be no science and it could make no progress. Looking at new data and insights and the elimination (or adjustment) of existing theories is what scientists are really paid for.

Mr Schmidt's own attitude to the error-correcting procedures is clarified by the last sentence of his text:

But it seems that the "climate models will have to be adjusted" meme is just too good not to use - regardless of the context.

Very good. More precisely, what an astonishingly misguided person.

So Mr Schmidt finds error correction in science too good and prefers not to use it and not to correct errors in the climate models. In fact, he even prefers not to talk about adjustments at all because it could indicate that science and models are not the infallible and eternally valid verses from the Holy Scripture that he knows, believes, and uses to evangelize. Instead, they could become temporary insights that could be influenced (or even refuted!?) by every new observation or a new scientific paper - and that would be nothing short of hell! :-)

I happen to use the word "science" for this "hell".

Well, this approach of Mr Schmidt might be one of the reasons why his personal opinions about the climate and the opinions of his comrades at RealClimate.ORG are scientifically worthless piles of crap. The more science will know about Nature, the more crappy the opinions of similar zealots who are not ready to adjust their opinions will be. If you try to quantify how much this particular paper changes the numbers relevant for the climate sensitivity, it is fair to say that 5-10 papers like that are able to change the numbers by something of order 100%. In a year or two, our understanding may be very different if we're doing things right. It's therefore damn important for climate science to (critically) read and (rationally) process such papers!

People like Schmidt are neither willing nor able to correct mistakes in their models and theories. Fortunately for them and unfortunately for the society, they are being paid for something completely different - for a blind promotion of wrong theories and politically convenient conclusions that are irrationally extracted from these wrong, never-updated, obsolete theories.

See also Science Daily, Nude Socialist, and Discover Magazine.

Black hole information puzzle

After some time, motivated by a new package of misunderstanding and mystification that has spread across the blogosphere, I decided to write a text about the black hole information puzzle.

Previous articles about the same issue:

• Hawking and information loss
• Hawking and unitarity
• Black hole final state
  
• Two preprints on information loss
• Problems with black hole remnants
• Hayden+Preskill: fast information retrieval
  

What's the problem?

The black holes have been known to exist, according to general relativity, for more than 50 years, long before they were located by astronomers. Black holes seem to be able to "eat" objects and "destroy" the information in these objects. What is left is a typically spherical black object with "no hair" that doesn't seem to remember anything about the initial state.

Before 1974, you could have hoped that the information about the initial matter is preserved inside the black hole: it is inaccessible but it is there. However, in 1974, Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes evaporate. The radiation coming from the black hole is exactly thermal and doesn't seem to carry any information either - a point that will be clarified later. At the end, there is no black hole interior left and there is no room where the information could be hiding. Once the black hole evaporates completely, the information simply seems to be lost entirely.

Why is it bad?

In conventional classical physics as well as quantum physics, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the (initial) state of the system at t=t_0 and its (final) state at t=t_1.

In quantum physics, the states are vectors in a linear Hilbert space and the one-to-one correspondence, as dictated by the Schrödinger equation, also requires the probabilities of the initial state and the corresponding final state to coincide. This condition is mathematically expressed as the unitarity of the evolution operator. The evolution must be a complexified version of an orthogonal transformation - one that preserves the length of vectors.

So according to quantum mechanics and its holy principle of unitarity, the information about the initial object (star...) must be preserved somewhere after the black hole evaporates. However, that's impossible according to general relativity because no particle - and even no information - is allowed to escape from the interior of the black hole. Such escaping information would be as bad as superluminal signals that you may have discussed in the context of special relativity. We say that such an event would violate causality, the principle that an event can only be influenced by its past (and in relativity, only by events in its past light cone).



A Penrose (causal) diagram of an evaporating black hole. You can't trust the distances but you can trust the angles in the "r-t" plane: world lines of light are always 45° diagonals. Each point of the diagram is a two-sphere in spacetime. A star that is too heavy and shrinks under the appropriate Schwarzschild radius (orange curve) inevitably collapses. Unlucky observers on the yellow surface don't even notice but at some moment they cross the green diagonal horizon, a (null) hypersurface separating the interior (the purple triangle) from the (light green) exterior. The information can't get from the interior to the exterior, especially not to the "infinite future", another diagonal line, because you would need a nearly horizontal (superluminal) trajectory for that. All material world lines that ever occur inside the black hole are guaranteed to hit the wiggly singularity sometime in the future and they are destroyed by huge curvature over there. What happens near the singularity depends on details of quantum gravity but it doesn't influence the "rough" structure of the causal diagram - one that can be derived purely from (experimentally verified) low-energy Einstein's equations, assuming that they hold in all regions with an allowed exception near the singularity.

So we seem to have a direct contradiction between [QM and unitarity] and [GR and causality]. Both of these principles, unitarity and causality, cannot be exactly correct because a contradiction arises from their explosive mixture.

What does it mean to solve the problem?

A solution to the apparent paradox is to have a self-consistent theory and a self-consistent set of interpretations and partial, at least qualitative answers that

• is (approximately?) consistent with unitarity in the context of quantum mechanical systems where unitarity is known to (approximately?) hold
• is consistent with the existence of black holes and (approximately?) with other conclusions of general relativity, including causality, where these conclusions are known to hold
• tells you, at least qualitatively, how these principles start to be modified (and when) in order to get rid of the contradiction
  

I wrote these conditions explicitly to make it clear that if you say that "quantum mechanics and unitarity is always and completely wrong" or "causality is always and completely wrong", you are not proposing a solution. Instead, what you are doing is to deny the established facts in physics.

The apparent paradox only arises if we take these established principles of physics into account. If you deny these principles, it is not surprising that you can also avoid the paradox. But such a denial solves nothing for the people who are aware of the principles that have led to the paradox in the first place. ;-)

It is of course possible that some of the fundamental assumptions of current physics - maybe even the very existence of black holes - is incorrect. But if it is so, a suggestion that assumes such a radical departure from the established insights of physics must also replace all the theoretical and experimental evidence supporting general relativity by an entirely new framework. If you just close your eyes, deny some results, and say that you don't have to explain why general relativity has been so accurate in other contexts, you are not solving any puzzle. OK?

The comments above imply that a solution must inevitably modify at least one of the following assumptions:

• the evolution of quantum states is always and exactly unitary
• the interior of the black holes is always and completely causally disconnected from the exterior

Nature clearly avoids contradictions so it must sacrifice one of these principles. But which one is it? Or is it both? Moreover, to solve the problem, you must also explain why the sacrificed principle has seemed to be universally valid in the history of physics so far: you must offer a framework that not only eliminates the contradiction of the information loss but it also agrees with our knowledge about related effects.

What's the correct solution?

As most quantum mechanicians have known from the very beginning, it is the unitarity, a principle of quantum mechanics, that wins in the battle and remains universally valid.

On the other hand, causality becomes an approximate principle that is only valid in the limit of infinitely large causal diamonds. In the presence of black holes, the internal causal structure is modified by quantum phenomena and the information can "tunnel" out of the black hole.

When you summarize all these effects, the radiation emitted by black holes is analogous to the radiation emitted by stars or other "burning" objects: it looks pretty thermal but the information about the "burned" matter is stored in the radiation in principle: it is encoded in subtle correlations between the photons, their precise directions, and their frequencies.

Why is it the correct solution?

It shouldn't be so surprising that unitarity survives completely while causality doesn't. After all, the basic postulates of quantum mechanics, including unitarity, the probabilistic interpretation of the amplitudes, and the linearity of the operators representing observables, seem to be universally necessary to describe physics of any system that agrees with the basic insights of the quantum revolution.

On the other hand, geometry has been downgraded into an effective, approximate, emergent aspect of reality. The metric tensor is just one among many fields in our effective field theories including gravity. In string theory, there are, in some sense, infinitely many such fields besides the metric tensor - the whole "stringy tower". The metric tensor doesn't have to exist as a good degree of freedom at the Planck scale or in other extreme conditions. We know many other fields that are only good enough at low energies - e.g. the pion field. Also, the Einstein-Hilbert action is just an approximation that is corrected by many corrections whose qualitative character is known. That's what we qualitatively know from all the lessons of the renormalization group, effective field theories, and so on.

The light cones needed to determine causal relations between events are calculated from the metric tensor. Because the latter is an approximate concept, it is not surprising that causality is approximate, too. In the context of compact, temporary objects such as black holes, you shouldn't be shocked that the causal separation between different regions of spacetime is an approximate notion, too.

Matter and information can tunnel in between different portions of the spacetime. The retrieval of the information is just another example of quantum tunneling. The Hawking radiation itself may be viewed as an example of quantum tunneling - a process that can break the classical limitations of space e.g. penetrate the wall. Such a process may also break causality, for a limited amount of time. That's why it is really possible, in a quantum theory of gravity, to extract the information from the black hole.

Equally importantly, we have understood - pretty accurately - the character of the theories that realize this solution to the black hole information puzzle. The situation is most obvious in Matrix theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence. In these two explicit methods to define physics of string theory, we can show that the rules of general relativity including Einstein's equations and the existence of black holes are satisfied. At the same moment, we can rigorously prove that the information is preserved because these systems may be described as an old-fashioned, non-gravitational quantum system governed by a Hermitean Hamiltonian.

The huge progress in the stringy understanding of black hole dynamics is probably the main reason why we are so certain that we (=competent physicists) know the correct answer to the black hole information puzzle. The information is preserved and the causality doesn't hold exactly in compact regions of spacetime.

It is somewhat harder to create a "fully satisfactory psychological model" showing the form of the information as it leaves the black hole and "mapping the detailed degrees of freedom" to each other. However, we are not really guaranteed that such an intuitive model, with a comprehensible description "where the information goes" when it leaves the black hole, must exist. In the context of ordinary quantum tunneling, you can't really reconstruct the trajectory of the particle through the inpenetrable wall, either.

I want to say that while we know almost certainly what is the correct answer to the black hole information puzzle, our knowledge is not really a "rigorous proof". After all, we're dealing with a natural science, not with mathematics, and no fully rigorous proofs about the real world can ever exist. It means that we're not really saying that it is 100.00000000% impossible for the Universe to work according one of the contrived, unnatural, miraculous, alternative scenarios discussed below.

But if you remember Steven Weinberg's interview about religion, he said that science as pioneered by Galileo and Newton hasn't made religion impossible. Instead, it has made irreligion possible. The situation with the black hole information puzzle is analogous. The recent breakthroughs, including the detailed description of quantum gravity by Matrix theory and AdS/CFT correspondence, haven't rigorously proved that it is impossible for the real world to be losing information, employ black hole remnants, or do other bizarre things. Why? Because if any uncertainty is an issue for you, Matrix theory and the AdS/CFT (and string theory) don't have to describe the real world, not even qualitatively.

But what these breakthroughs have shown is that the Universe can work in a way that satisfies unitarity and that also satisfies the rules and conclusions of general relativity in the low-energy limit. With subtle - and normally undetectable - mechanisms such as "quantum tunneling" described above, the rules of quantum gravity seem to be perfectly consistent with everything that we know. So this picture - most accurately encoded in string theory - is a solution to the black hole information puzzle.

Once again, this doesn't really prove that there can't exist some other, totally different solutions. But it does show that these hypothetical alternative solutions would have to make a lot of progress to become real competitors whose likelihood could be compared to the likelihood of the string-theory-based answer.

Why are the wrong solutions unsatisfactory?

Guess: information is lost indeed: the evolution is non-unitary:

• Problems: no self-consistent "generalization" of quantum mechanics that would be non-unitary but that could include the well-established equations behind quantum systems is known. The postulates of quantum mechanics seem to be universally needed. Even if you only want to preserve the superposition principle but sacrifice unitarity, you are also forced to sacrifice clustering - the independence of separated regions of spacetime, a modest version of locality. Moreover, some well-known proposals to get a non-unitary picture require new boundary conditions in spacetime. These things break general covariance and consequently the energy conservation: the energy can get lost or produced at these new artificial boundaries. See e.g. Strominger 1994.

Guess: remnants: the black hole never disappears completely and the "Planckian seed" that is left carries all the information.

• Problems: this implies that infinitely many new particle species must exist. Arbitrarily high information can be squeezed into the Planckian volume - something that violates all the holographic bounds etc. Equivalently, such a new infinite number of localized species produces a lot of sick divergences in loop processes (e.g. drive the renormalized Newton's constant to zero), makes decay rates singular, and violates astrophysical bounds in the real Universe where too many unknown particles shouldn't exist. Analogous problems occur if you want to say that the whole information is emitted when the black hole is already tiny, near the end of the evaporation - because such a "new regime" of the evaporation is a version of the remnant that is physically small and carries the information. Finally, you haven't really saved unitarity because a pure state may evolve into a mixed state with the exactly thermal radiation that is a part of this answer.
  

Guess: baby universes: the information is stored in a new, disconnected region of spacetime.

• Problems: this is really a subset of the "information is indeed lost" approaches to the puzzle. If the information is preserved in a new segment of spacetime, the information carried by the two slices of the ordinary spacetime simply doesn't coincide: the information is lost according to the old rules. Talking about baby universes doesn't really help anything: in physics at least qualitatively related to the physics we know, all states can be described in terms of quasi-localized objects. Baby universes are degrees of freedom that are disconnected from any place in the usual spacetime: the physical interaction of the ordinary spacetime with these new un-localized degrees of freedom would probably violate locality and clustering. The baby universes are much like angels who can also be believed to carry the forgotten information. If we can't get the information from the angels, it is operationally lost. If we can talk to angels, it is not lost but the laws of physics become as non-local and superstitious as voodoo.
  

Guess: denial: black holes don't exist, or they don't evaporate, or the world is not quantum, etc.

• Problems: as we explained in the introduction, these approaches can't be counted as solutions to anything unless you replace the whole "killed" branch of physics by entirely new and (at least equally) convincing explanations of the phenomena that were previously explained by the branch(es) of physics that you have "killed". For example, George Chapline would have to write completely new equations instead of Einstein's equations - equations that agree with the experiments verifying GR but that don't imply the existence of black holes. Most people who propose these truly revolutionary solutions are unfamiliar with the actual established physics and they simply ignore it. That's why they don't see any puzzle to start with and that's why their comments can't be viewed as serious or valuable ideas by the physicists.

Guess: black holes have some hair, after all.

• Problems: there are no sharp problems with this assertion because this assertion is correct, with a sufficiently general definition of the "hair". The known fact that black holes carry a huge entropy really does imply that they have "hair". However, in conventional interpretations, this hair can't be encoded in the configurations of the ordinary low-energy degrees of freedom. Instead, they are encoded in the quantum numbers associated with high-energy fields: see Coleman & Preskill & Wilczek 1992. Now, Samir Mathur's fuzzballs are the closest realization of the picture where the "hair" is encoded in some rather ordinary degrees of freedom but their relevance for generic black holes in quantum gravity remains uncertain. What is certain, however, is that black holes do carry some information and that one needs a very accurate - "quantum accurate" - probes to measure these new degrees of freedom. That's why the low-energy probes and approximations of the full theory should continue to imply that black holes have no (classical) "hair". This condition is satisfied by string theory.
  

Why is the people's dissatisfaction with the correct solution irrational?

Sabine Hossenfelder wrote seven solutions and incorrectly claimed that all of them have advantages and disadvantages. From reading her general clichés, you have no method to figure out which solution(s) is (are) actually the correct one(s) and why. Her reasons to dislike the correct solution(s) are irrational, as argued below.

In fact, it is fair to say that two "proposed solutions" she listed are correct, namely that the evolution is unitary as known from the AdS/CFT correspondence; and the solution that the black holes do carry some (quantum) "hair", after all. They're both aspects of the same correct solution.

Hossenfelder claimed that every proposed solution has a "disadvantage" so she identifies a "problem" with the correct solutions, too. What's wrong with the solution that the evolution is known to be unitary from the AdS/CFT correspondence? She writes

• Problem: as long as the conjecture is unproved one could equally well consider the information loss problem, if real, as a counter-example for the validity of the conjecture. (Also, I personally would find it unsatisfactory would this only work in AdS space.)

These comments are, of course, nothing else than a sequence of logical fallacies. First of all, it is not really true, in any effective sense, that the AdS/CFT conjecture remains "unproven". I think that in 2008 after those 5,000 papers that have worked, it is downright ludicrous to doubt the AdS/CFT correspondence. Even if you considered the correspondence "unproven", it is in a much better shape than the alternative conjectures that have really been "disproven". ;-)

She proposes to assume that the information must be getting lost and this conclusion may even be used to prove that the AdS/CFT correspondence is incorrect. Well, a subtle problem with the approach is that we can see that the AdS/CFT correspondence is valid and every existing argument that the AdS/CFT is invalid or incomplete has a known flaw. On the other hand, every "proof" that the information is lost is known to have a loophole. That's a damn asymmetric situation.

The very existence of the AdS/CFT dual theories is a proof that any "universal" proof that the information must be lost in quantum gravity is incorrect - simply because it is enough to have one counterexample and we have it. ;-) So what she's doing is just complaining that 2+2=4 shouldn't be correct because if she could prove that 1+1=3, it would also mean that 2+2=5. Indeed, one could probably construct such implications but the problem is that the main assumption, namely 1+1=3 (or information loss), cannot be established at a remotely comparable confidence level as the AdS/CFT correspondence. Not only it cannot be established: Hossenfelder's verbal exercise hasn't produced a glimpse of evidence, not even circumstantial or speculative evidence. You shouldn't blame a correct answer for merely being incompatible with the alternative, incorrect answers: that's what correct answers usually "do". ;-)

As far as her personal objection goes, it is ludicrous, too. While the AdS/CFT proof directly applies to anti de Sitter black holes only, the general conclusion that the information is preserved is surely much more general. For example, flat space may be obtained as a limit of a weakly curved AdS space. Moreover, black holes in certain flat spaces can be described in equally unitary Matrix theory, too.

In de Sitter space, the conservation of information is more subtle because even empty de Sitter space seems to have an "unpredictable" thermal radiation coming from the cosmic horizon. There is no "asymptotic region" of a de Sitter space and the information debates become more subtle. But they don't become more subtle because of black holes in the interior of the de Sitter space.

Black holes are localized objects and the behavior of these systems is surely universal: the local processes in string theory exhibit some properties that don't depend on remote regions - string theory is known to satisfy clustering, at least in some mild forms.

The only way how the asymptotic conditions of spacetime influence the conservation of energy is that

• for some of these asymptotic conditions, a new description of the physical system (AdS/CFT or Matrix theory) is known
  
• the information can only be accurately measured if you have a large enough (or infinite) space where the properties of the Hawking particles may be measured. That's difficult in compact spaces or de Sitter space. But this difficulty is unrelated to the original justification of the black hole paradox.

What's important is that the AdS/CFT correspondence and Matrix theory provide us with a counterexample that shows that every "proof" that every quantum theory of gravity must have the "information loss paradox" is inevitably a wrong proof. If you look carefully at those "proofs", string theory always finds a loophole. Sometimes, it may be subtle to decide what the loophole is because the "proofs" often use concepts that can't be located in the string-theoretical description of reality. But even with this localization problem, we know that the "proofs" either use concepts that they're not allowed to use, or these "proofs" are wrong.

The AdS/CFT correspondence and Matrix theory are exactly unitary theories consistent with general relativity, the existence of black holes, and their evaporation in the low-energy limit and any proof that such a combination can't exist is wrong. Irreligion has become possible. Religion hasn't quite been proved impossible but it is no longer needed for the most rationally acceptable solution.

If you accept that the AdS black holes preserve the information but you claim that others don't, it's like accepting that Neil Armstrong used a spacecraft to get to the Moon but others will still have to walk. Jesus Christ: if we have already overcome the technical problems and created a spacecraft, why wouldn't we assume that other astronauts can use it, too? Again, I can't rigorously prove that you can't walk to the Moon, using this method. But I can see that the walking becomes a very contrived assumption once I know a gadget - the spacecraft - that can help you (and anyone) to get there.

Event horizons vs singularity: what defines a black hole

But later in her text, Sabine Hossenfelder exhibits her complete incompetence much more explicitly than by hiding the correct answers in the melting pot of five other answers that are known to be extremely unlikely. She also offers her own "idea" that is downright ludicrous. She claims that the essence of the paradox - and the key part of black holes in general - is not in the event horizon but in the singularity.

That's a misunderstanding shared by some undergraduate students who are just beginning to study physics of general relativity and who don't really understand the concepts well. It's analogous to young students of medicine who can't yet recognize stomachs from hearts. In reality, it is not the singularity but the event horizon that defines a black hole and it is the event horizon, not the singularity, that is relevant for the black hole information puzzle.

This statement, completely mysterious to Ms Hossenfelder, is completely elementary. Even the first sentence that defines a black hole at Wikipedia mentions the event horizon as a defining feature of black holes. The light cannot escape from the hole which is why it is (approximately) black. And it cannot escape because of the event horizon, not because of the singularity.

Why is the event horizon, and not the singularity, the crucial place that was responsible for the paradox? Simply because the general relativistic argument relevant for the paradox said that the information cannot escape from the black hole - that's how we know that it is lost. The region that separates the interior and the exterior is the event horizon. Its existence, combined with causality, makes it impossible for the information to get away.

When we talk about the possible information loss, we are comparing two slices through the whole spacetime: one slice occurs before the black hole is formed and another one occurs after the black hole evaporates. None of these slices contains any singularity which is why the singularity cannot be directly relevant for the paradox.

Complicated high-energy processes can take place and do take place near the singularity and the singularity is, most likely, not exactly "singular" when full physics of quantum gravity is taken into account. But that doesn't help us to solve the paradox. The information may be getting lost at the singularity, from the viewpoint of an observer who fell into the black hole and who is going to be destroyed, too.

But this unlucky observer is not the guy who defines the information loss paradox. It is not shocking that a person who is destroyed in a catastrophic gravitational field won't be able to reconstruct the information - because this guy has no optimistic future: in fact, he has no future at all. The information loss paradox arises when the past and future slices of the observer at infinity - outside the black hole - are compared with each other. Whether some unlucky observer inside the black hole thinks that the information was destroyed exactly when he died has no direct relevance for the question whether - and how - the information is lost from the asymptotic observer's viewpoint. The region around the singularity is localized and whatever happens there - and whichever "regularization" of the singularity the full theory chooses - has no impact on the conclusion that the information can't get away.

Summary

The black hole information puzzle is a textbook example of a theorist's puzzle par excellence. It is almost guaranteed that the exact information needed to reconstruct the initial state from the final state of the radiation will never be observed. So far, we haven't even observed the radiation itself. So this discussion has always been theoretical in character and it will probably remain forever theoretical.

But that doesn't mean that correct answers to such questions can't be found. Quite on the contrary, the black hole information puzzle is an example of a question where the correct answer is already known - the information is preserved and the causality is broken by tiny "tunneling" effects that make it possible for the information to escape.

While we know the correct answer, it is often difficult to pinpoint the exact problem of the previous ideas that have led to wrong answers. Why? Because these wrong answers usually assume the existence of degrees of freedom, terms in the action, and other objects that haven't been confirmed in the full theory of quantum gravity as we know it today - a description of a theory that is really equivalent to the phrase "string theory". In other words, these wrong solutions have made all kinds of assumptions that turned out to be incorrect.

In the case of fully defined superselections sectors of string theory - such as the models described by the AdS/CFT correspondence or Matrix theory - we know the states and the in-principle equations that transform the initial state to a final state. In many cases, it is difficult to "localize" the information contained in these states at particular points of space.

But that's just another, related lesson we have learned: although it can be shown that the low-energy approximation of string theory is local, the character of locality becomes subtle in extreme conditions, even in the presence of black holes. We can't really say "where the black hole hair is located" but we're not guaranteed that a good answer to this question exists in the first place. String theory implies the existence of many degrees of freedom but their precise association with a point in space is only guaranteed to exist if we avoid extreme deformations of space such as those that exist in the presence black holes. With black holes, degrees of freedom might be disconnected from particular points in space and if you (artificially) associate them with points in space, the resulting dynamics will be acausal and non-local.

Known and unknown things in physics

I am convinced that all competent quantum gravity physicists agree that the information is preserved in flat space or AdS space even though they may have a feeling that "we are still missing a part of the complete picture". Although you can formulate some arguments in favor of this proposition that don't depend on string theory, it is clear that string theory is by far the most important toolkit that makes us know that the information is preserved. It's also the main reason why Stephen Hawking has joined us to say that the information is preserved, after all.

One more thing to say: this story is a nice example of the huge explanatory power of string theory. While we may be uncertain which vacuum is the correct one - e.g. how many throats our Calabi-Yau space has if we live in one - there are many qualitative conclusions that string theory allows to make unequivocally. The conclusions about the preserved information are an example. They hold in all the 10^{500} vacua that are discussed under the trademark of the "landscape". These conclusions, and many others, are completely universal.

Black holes play a very special role in quantum gravity because they're the only "fundamental" localizable objects that are heavier than the fundamental scale. While the existence of strings and branes depends on the position in the landscape (or configuration space) and they are only useful concepts if some dimensionless moduli are much smaller than one, black holes are universal: they're also the only universal objects that are e.g. produced in all trans-Planckian collisions.

You may see that the people who don't like to study physics of quantum gravity carefully enough get completely lost even in very qualitative questions about physics. You ask them whether the information is lost and they return you 7 possible answers with 1 superficial paragraph per explanation why they dislike it. The explanations under the correct answers are manifestly wrong and many other explanations are confusing. You can simply see that the "quantum gravity theorists" outside the (broader) string theory have no idea what they're talking about.

In real science, it is crucial that one tries to divide the questions into the answered and unanswered ones as sharply and as rationally as possible. If someone can't answer any questions - e.g. not even the qualitative ones related to the information loss puzzle - her or his approach to physics has clearly made no progress. One can't ever be 100% certain but if you have no questions where your certainty clearly exceeds 90% or at least 50%, you have simply chosen a bad approach. You may have asked too ambitious questions and with no quasi-reliable answers, you have nothing to safely build upon.

The people in this bad situation often realize that they have found nothing and compensate this non-existing knowledge by "certainty" about all kinds of other, usually more detailed questions. Unfortunately, this "certainty" is based on pure guesswork and lacks any kind of rational justification. In most cases, the guesses are wrong. That's what guesses usually "do".

The actual cutting-edge status of physics is that many qualitative questions such as the question "is the information preserved?" have been answered while many detailed questions such as "how many throats our compact manifold has?" are uncertain. It is extremely counterproductive to force scientists to feel ashamed that there exist any open questions - such as the vacuum selection issues - because uncertainty and confusion is an inherent part of the scientific process that no scientist should ever be ashamed of. And it is equally counterproductive to force scientists to pretend the uncertainty about questions where they feel certain - such as the qualitative answers to the information loss puzzle.

Scientists should not only "try to know" but they should also "try to know what they know" and "try to know what they don't". It's bad to scream that known things should become unknown and everyone should try to build "diversity" about them, and it's equally bad to scream that unknown things shouldn't exist because a scientist who doesn't know something (or everything) is "not even wrong".

Various people who criticize theoretical physics are making these two complementary mistakes all the time which is too bad.

And that's the memo.

A fun historical paper: Stephen Hawking, Nature 248 (1974), Black hole explosions?

MSSM in string theory: review

Hans Peter Nilles et al. review known stringy backgrounds that reproduce the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, including the following constraints:

1. Exact MSSM spectrum below the unification scale
2. R-parity
3. Hierarchical Yukawa couplings with nonzero mixings
4. Solution to the mu problem
5. See-saw suppressed neutrino masses

It's amazing but even with these huge constraints, people have found diverse models that satisfy them.

The authors review these models. Because string theory offers us a very different toolkit and a very different kind of freedom in model building than field theory, I think it is a highly nontrivial observation that string theory is able to naturally reproduce all these desirable phenomenological features.

The folks who don't think that it is likely that string theory is the right description of fundamental physics are just being utterly unreasonable, if I have to use an extremely diplomatic description.

Female brain: hundreds of genetic differences

Björn Reinius and six co-authors (Sweden) have studied sexual differences in gene expression in the brains of humans, macaques, and marmosets. Marmosets (the right picture) were chosen because males and females look almost the same, unlike the other two species.

They focused on the occipital cortex (or visual cortex in the occipital lobe, if you wish), a graphics card inserted into the rearmost region of the brain. They found that the degree of brain differences is nearly proportional to the amount of general morphological differences: there are dozens of differences in gene expression in the marmosets but hundreds of differences in humans and macaques.

An evolutionarily conserved sexual signature in the primate brain (full scientific paper)

Generally, it was shown that the sexual signature is conserved during the evolution - so these differences between the sexes are at least tens of millions of years old, as you could have heard from your humble correspondent for years.

Another result that is well-known from non-genetics research has been confirmed, too. Specific aspects of female brains are more heavily evolutionarily constrained than the specific male features as well as the sexually neutral properties of the brain.

I guess that there could be a very general explanation of this fact (XX is inherited from the general "melting pot" while the way to inherit XY may depend on the context, and similar comments could apply even if the sexually specific gene is carried by non-sexual chromosomes). However, the authors use their different-variance observation to predict that the brain could have been important in the evolution of sex in primates.

Do these differences show up in the functioning of the brains?

This question is usually answered in the last sentence of the text. However, your choice of the source may matter. ;-) The last sentence of the abstract of the actual paper in PLoS genetics says the obvious thing:

Genes within sexual expression profiles may underlie important functional differences between the sexes, with possible importance during primate evolution.

They also argue that such insights could be helpful to treat sexually specific psychiatric diseases.

On the other hand, the last paragraph in popular presentations of the paper, e.g. in ScienceDaily, says the following:

Lead author Björn Reinius notes that the study does not determine whether these differences in gene expression are in any way functionally significant. Such questions remain to be answered by future studies.

Can you spot the difference? I find it disgraceful for the journalists-activists-liars to flagrantly deform the results of scientific research and to contaminate it by their own ideology. They should be ashamed and people on the street should be spitting on these journalists.

Björn Reinius is no idiot so he, of course, knows that a very large portion of differences in gene expression is guaranteed to be functionally significant. If it were not the case, the brain would be the first living object that is invariant under changes of the gene expression. So what remains for the future research is not to find out "whether" they are significant but "how" they are significant.

ScienceDaily has misinterpreted the very essence of the paper and why it's important and new. There are dozens of papers that show huge anatomical differences between male and female brains. But the goal of Reinius et al. was nothing else than to study the functional differences. And gene expression is the first example of functional issues.

Also, they decided that if the differences are functionally important, they should be evolutionarily conserved. Much like in the case of the very existence of gene expression dimorphism, they have also confirmed the other prediction in their published paper, not in a future paper: they are evolutionarily conserved. Could the journalists kindly notice what the paper is actually about?

Hat tip: Tom Weidig

YouTube & Internet Explorer: this video is no longer available

When you use Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or earlier to watch YouTube videos, it often happens that you are told:

This video is no longer available

even though you know that the video works with Firefox, Opera, or other browsers.

In that case, it is a proxy issue. You are trying to download the video with a proxy that is incompatible with YouTube. A very typical example is Google Web Accelerator, a program that should speed up the internet traffic by using a Google proxy. If you use it, the fix is simple: right-click the accelerator icon in the tray and stop the accelerator.

If you still haven't fixed it,

1. try to download hotspot shield that gives you a new proxy IP address to download from the U.S. YouTube (most complicated)
   
2. or try to change/increase the quality by attaching a "fmt" parameter to the URL, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQyMnoYqguo&fmt=6 - here, the numbers 6,18,16 at the end can give you nontrivial results. A new server may be chosen.
3. choose your own proxy. In Menu / Tools / Internet options / Connections / LAN settings, check the "use proxy" switch and enter 213.42.1.19 as "proxy" and 8080 as "port". Answer the dialog boxes and try to view the videos.

Roger Penrose: Before the Big Bang

Professor Sir Roger Penrose (Oxford) will give the second memorial (string theorist) Andrew Chamblin lecture in Cambridge on Friday (June 27th, 2008, 15:00):

Deep questions of cosmology: did something happen before the Big Bang?

I suppose it will be similar to a lecture at George Mason University a year ago:

Before the Big Bang (playlist, 9 times 10 minutes)

If I manage to listen to it, I will write some comments here.

Good bye, Bill Gates

Since July 1st, 2008, Bill Gates will no longer be the chairman of Microsoft. He will dedicate his energy, name, and time to charity. Well, there are many other people who could do such things but Gates is surely a free man!

Steve Ballmer who has been Microsoft's CEO since 2000 and who will become the most powerful man of the company recently visited Czechia and charmed most of the public and the media as if he were a movie star. What a huge difference between Ballmer and the average (boring and silent) Czech managers. But let's return to Gates.

I consider Bill Gates to be the most well-deserved multi-billionaire in the world. Steve Jobs is also great and probably more charismatic and more likable than Gates but Bill Gates is a more authentic geek.

There are all kinds of geeks but many of them are geeks partially because they like their image of a geek: they want to be a part of a community. Many of them adopt the anti-corporate ideology in order to join. Bill Gates doesn't need anything like that. He was born as a geek.

I still think that it is immensely cool that such a geek has become an extremely skillful businessman and one of the richest people in the world.

The crucial role of Microsoft's product in the present world has always looked unquestionable to me. But what has really cemented my respect for Bill Gates a decade ago was when I learned who had created the BASIC programming language on the following system - Commodore 64 - that many of us have played with for years:



Click, type your favorite short BASIC program and run it. Yes, your program on the most popular home computer of the mid 1980s is actually interpreted by a code in your ROM that was written by Bill Gates. He gave away the rights to the Commodore BASIC OS because he thought it was useless. His later business decisions were usually more sensible. ;-)

The wide spectrum of products starting from the Commodore 64 interpreter/OS to MS-DOS and Windows and to the numerous recent Microsoft products and visions simply shows that Gates' creativity is no illusion and his success is no coincidence.

Other multi-billionaires have either inherited a lot of money or they have followed a relatively straightforward set of algorithms to multiply their assets or they have been lucky but Bill Gates is different. His are well-deserved billions.

And that's the memo.

James Hansen: 20 years later

Off-topic: Sorry for the weekend silence. We went canoeing the "Berounka river" between Pilsen and Prague (see a camping map) from "Dolanský most" (Dolany Bridge) near "Chrást u Plzně" (124.6 km) to "Zvíkovec nad jezem" (81.8 km) with the Sat-Sun night at "Kobylka" (103.5 km). The total was 42.8 km of a beautiful landscape.

Commercial: Vote in our poll on the most serious threat for the global economy

Exactly twenty years ago, on June 23rd, 1988, James Hansen gave one of the most notorious speeches that have led to the current irrational and pseudoscientific global warming hysteria.

Today, 20 years later when it is already clear that his predictions have been bunk since the very beginning, James Hansen wants trials against oil firm chiefs who help to allow the people to understand that the predictions have been incorrect.

See The Guardian, a left-wing British outlet
Search for "crime" in the 2008 Hansen's testimony and/or listen to Diane Rehm's somewhat senile interview with Hansen: "crimes against humanity" are discussed since 46:00

How does Hansen justify his plans?

"When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organizations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

Well, I doubt that outside North Korea, it is illegal to be an oil firm boss and to spread information about the climate. However, I think it is fraud and should be punished as such to fool millions of people in the rich world and extract tens of billions of dollars for low-quality pseudoscientific research and hundreds of billions of dollars for carbon indulgences, a frantically expanding gray sector of the economy.

James Hansen should be given a legal supervision that would prevent him from doing the things he's doing. I realize that this opinion may sound comparably exaggerated to Hansen's own words but when you start to see fringe pseudoscientists who not only want to use their subjective, sensationalist, and mad visions and personal interests to unseat all inconvenient CEOs and Congressmen - another explicitly formulated desire of Mr Hansen - but you also see that they seem to have a clique of misinformed or equally evil collaborators who have been partially successful, I am telling you: This is a damn serious situation that should be solved unless you want to repeat some truly black pages from the history.



Andrew Revkin interviewed James Hansen a few days ago. It's impressive how superficially sane the insane person is able to sound. ;-)

Temperatures: comparisons

On June 23rd, 1988, the temperature in D.C. was 98 degrees when James Hansen was giving his

infamous testimony in the U.S. Congress (full text).

He was clearly selling a stock that was already overpriced in 1988. Today, the temperature in D.C. is predicted to be 85 degrees, 13 degrees below the figure 20 years ago. The temperature in D.C. shouldn't go above 92 degrees this week.

The global temperature has dropped, too. Because June 2008 is not yet over, let's talk about May. The middle troposphere, where the greenhouse warming should be most obvious, had the following temperature anomalies: in May 1988, it was +0.08 °C while in May 2008, it was -0.29 °C i.e. 0.37 °C cooler than 20 years ago. Qualitatively similar conclusions may be obtained from other teams besides UAH, too.

In the past two decades, a significantly linear (or even worrisome) global warming trend hasn't materialized but the expansion of the global warming hysteria has exceeded all sensible expectations. Nature hasn't worked well for an average physicist called James Hansen but he has begun to realize that the current political atmosphere is much more friendly to his fringe theories than the actual terrestrial atmosphere. Why? There's simply a lot of dopes and self-serving pseudointellectuals and quasi-preachers in the media, in the Academia, and in politics, too.

Because Nature isn't willing or capable to confirm Hansen's far-reaching speculations about a dangerous global warming, Hansen hopes that the judges will be more "bullish" with respect to his stock and they will help him to exponentially escalate the harassment of everyone who dares to say - or think - that James Hansen as a scientist and his kind of science has been a failure driven by sensationalism and political goals rather than a careful, objective, or sophisticated evaluation of the cold hard (and usually boring) data and the patterns they exhibit.

If you open the full text of Hansen's 1988 testimony, the last page includes a graph that indicates that the warming between 1988 and 2008 should be around 1 °C (scenarios A,B). In reality, it was close to zero. If you think that this is not an example of a completely falsified prediction, I would like to know how a falsification of a hypothesis that is a priori worth talking about could look like.

In certain qualitative discussions, one can simply see the quality of predictions. Open this image of

James Hansen's predictions superimposed on UAH data

Would you say that the prediction back in 1988 was approximately correct or useful? Yes, Hansen is completely off the chart. I had to add a strip to the top of the original UAH chart. ;-) I don't think it's really essential to know whether his prediction overshot the warming trend by 350%, 850%, or whether he got the sign wrong. What matters is that his science has clearly been completely incompatible with reality.

Still, many people including politicians listen to this kibitzer. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world. [Feynman 1974]

There are many things that haven't changed in the last 20 years and many things that have changed. The temperature hasn't really changed. But Hansen's 2008 testimony is slightly different than the 1988 testimony. The 1988 testimony contained at least some (low-quality) science and (wrong) graphs. The 2008 testimony doesn't: it is entirely dedicated to the hysteria, the prosecution of heretics, and to the methods to reverse of the industrial revolution.

James Hansen has become a more effective speaker than before but he has become a worse scientist than ever.

Dubai: living in a turbine

Text comments here...

Dynamic architecture looks rather spectacular but I would not be certain that people will love to live there (or work there or vomit or whatever they will be doing there most of the time).

Hat tip: Alexander Ač

Czechia and Treaty of Lisbon

Sorry for the moderation here - two+ days of canoeing. Enjoy the weekend and see you!

The United Kingdom decided to continue in the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon. In fact, their Parliament has already ratified it and the U.K. became the 19th country that has done so. However, Gordon Brown has put the ratification on hold despite the vote because of a new legal hurdle - an active lawsuit that it was illegal not to have a referendum on the issue.

The British Parliamentary approach doesn't seem particularly sensible given the fact that 27 countries need to agree with the treaty and Ireland has already rejected it. But it seems that some people want the referendum to be understood as a kind of optical illusion or a quantum fluctuation ;-) that can and should be ignored.

Incidentally, the Treaty of Lisbon is a 487-page update of previous rather convoluted texts (see 287-page diff). It also contains a verse that the EU must fight against climate change - a very similar comment to the propositions about the "leading role of the communist party and the ideology of Marxism and Leninism" in our previous communist constitutions. I am afraid that even if this verse were the only bug of the proposed treaty, and it is very far from being the only one, it would already be too much of a problem.

Such serious, politically extreme comments that make it into constitutions, the most important laws of countries, are always a problem. The constitutional communist priority was one of the main legal reasons why democracy couldn't be restored in Czechoslovakia for 41 years and the alarmist comment about the climate could make it impossible for climate realism to thrive in the EU for additional 41 years .

Ireland: the new politically incorrect nation

Others have suggested that Ireland may be forced to leave the EU because of the referendum. From a legal viewpoint, that's an amusing attitude. Ireland is one of the most pro-European members of the union and the result of their referendum - the only referendum that took place about this question - only reflects the opinion of a large percentage of the EU nations and their citizens, as opposed to the politicians who receive funds from the EU. It has nothing to do with the Irish nation per se. The only special feature of Ireland was that their laws required a referendum.

The majority of the Irish voters only decided to respect the legal status quo in the EU. It is thus very strange if some other people who want to replace the current rules by some currently illegal mutations claim that Ireland, one of the few countries that obey the EU rules, should be "fired". ;-)

The Irish "No" is no crisis: it is an answer to one question that was asked, a democratic routine. As Petr Mach of CEP correctly says, the true crisis would be if Europe couldn't live with results of democratic referenda and needed the Parliaments to bully "inconvenient nations" such as Ireland.

By the way, the Irish "No" has been "blamed" upon the British commissioner for trade by Nicolas Sarkozy (because the Englishman dares to dislike subsidies!). Peter Mendelson is also responsible for starving children across the world! ;-)

Enlargement vs Treaty of Lisbon

There are other bizarre opinions that various European politically confused big shots as well as charlatans promote all over the place. For example, one half of the EU politicians, unfortunately including Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, seem to think that without the Treaty of Lisbon, the EU cannot accept new members.

I don't exactly know what is the rational justification of their strange opinion. But I know how to falsify it: for example, among the 27 members, 12 states of the EU (44.44%) were recently accepted under the same Treaty of Nice that is going to continue after the death of the Treaty of Lisbon. So if you think it is impossible to enlarge the EU under the existing system, I am afraid that you have already been proven wrong.

By the way, the Treaty of Nice has explicitly thought about the possible future number of members exceeding 27. The only "qualitative" difference is that not every country will have an EU commissioner at every moment. Well, I don't think that our (one) commissioner is too relevant, anyway, so it wouldn't hurt that much. Moreover, the Lisbon Treaty clearly has to "solve" this problem in some way, too: it wants the commission to drop directly from 27 to 18 ministers. Is one of the treaties superior? Why?

Unless the "No Lisbon, no enlargement" cliché is meant is an irrational method to blackmail others, a method to use Croatian and other ambitions to join the EU as hostages. In that case, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel themselves would be the obstacles to enlargement: the current system and the Irish voters are not the obstacles. Well, I definitely want brotherly countries like Croatia to join but if it meant that the current members would have to uncritically accept all kinds of new and problematic rules, then I would agree that "No Lisbon, even if it means no enlargement". Sorry, friends in Croatia: the membership is not such a big deal! ;-)

Czechia and the treaty

Much like in Ireland, the question of usefulness of the Treaty of Lisbon is a controversial question in Czechia, too. In fact, Czechia is viewed as a more serious threat because it is only the voters who disagree with the treaty in Ireland and voters are irrelevant and can be pissed upon. In Czechia, however, the voters have made it into the Parliament and the government, too. :-)

The Czech senate ordered the Czech Constitutional Court to see whether the treaty is compatible with the Czech constitution. The verdict is expected in September or October but the court couldn't have begun yet because the treaty actually doesn't seem to exist on paper!

More precisely, there exists no official Czech translation of the treaty. You shouldn't blame the EU because it is indeed nontrivial to translate (or read) such a 500-page dinosaur. There exist two unofficial, samizdat translations of the treaty but according to the rules of the court, they are unacceptable as documents to be used in the court proceedings. The EU hasn't offered us its official translation and it doesn't want to be responsible for the unofficial ones.

When these amusing hurdles are overcome, I guess (but I am not quite sure) that the court must conclude that the treaty is incompatible with the Czech constitution. In fact, I think that it is obviously incompatible and it is incompatible in many other countries, too. But in other countries such as Ireland, they have actually worked on this question. So the Treaty of Lisbon included an amendment of the Irish constitution - and this amendment was a part of the question in their referendum.

As far as I understand, no champion of the Treaty of Lisbon in the Czech Republic has even come to the idea that it was necessary to design the appropriate amendments of the Czech constitution. And of course, the opponents of the treaty are unlikely to do this job even if they know that it is probably necessary. ;-) Prime minister Topolánek "wouldn't bet CZK 100 or USD 6.50" that the treaty would be approved in the Czech parliament today.

A few hours later, Topolánek changed his mind and said that he could bet CZK 100 on "Yes" because he could afford to lose such a small amount of money. ;-)

Czechia as a hurdle

Today, the EU decided to continue with the ratification process but because the union was able to notice that the Czech Republic doesn't agree with this attitude (the prime minister says that a pressure on the remaining countries would be both inappropriate and counterproductive while the president is of course strictly against the treaty), my country was officially listed as an exception where the ratification process is allowed to be suspended while others continue to be excited with this magnificent project. ;-)

Many of the headlines and comments about this event are rather amusing:

• Czechs resist Lisbon pressure
• EU leaders take note of Czech difficulty in ratifying Lisbon Treaty
• Czechs used to bucking the system
  

The first headline talks about some pressure. I guess that the Czech politicians in 1415, 1621, 1938, 1948, and 1968 were used to somewhat stronger pressure (from Roman Catholic Church, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Daladier, Stalin, Brezhnev, and their collaborators, including defenestrations, executions, and threats of extermination of the Czech nation) than the current Lisbon pressure on Topolánek, Schwarzenberg, et al. - by several orders of magnitude. :-)

But for the journalistic sissies, it is already a "pressure" to be hinted that your attitude is not the most politically correct attitude in Europe!

The second and third headline - and many others - clearly adopt the "journalistically neutral" attitude that it is a great thing to ratify the treaty and everything that makes is harder is a "difficulty". Well, I don't think that the arguments (and thinking) about the treaty would be viewed as "difficulties" in the Czech Republic. It is more likely that the treaty itself is a difficulty. Painfully enough, the Chinese media seem to use more balanced headlines: EU postpones decision on Lisbon Treaty, accommodates Czech concerns.

There are many other biased headlines of this type, e.g. Czechs cast shadow... Well, I think that our guys finally shed some light at the summit! ;-)

Concerning the third headline (BBC), Czechs are not really used to "bucking the system". Czechs have been pretty much the most loyal, peaceful, pragmatic, and problem-free nation (among the non-ruling nations) in the Austrian empire, the Third Reich, as well as the Soviet bloc. Even Švejk was a "good soldier". What do you think that the adjective means?

Many Czechs have often had reservations about the system - and we were making peaceful jokes to lighten up our lives - but there were good reasons for that. We haven't controlled either of the empires above. I don't think we have a tradition of "resisting authority". What we have is a tradition of pragmatic (and sometimes cowardly) choices when it is necessary to "resist authority".

Moreover, I don't think that the people who support the Treaty of Lisbon are any more "authority" than our politicians. Look at the picture of the French and Czech prime ministers to realize that in some sense, there are friendly relationships between two equally large peers, especially Topolánek. ;-)

Some of the European politicians literally behave as small kids who are being stolen a favorite toy.

For example, Belgian secretary of state, Olivier Chastel, said that the Czechs were "not willing to listen to reason". Well, I was not told about the exact reasoning of this Gentleman but given his position, his comment is funny, anyway. I am inclined to believe that from his point of view of a Belgian official, it is reasonable for Brussels to control the lives of all Europeans. But I am less certain that everyone else, including people outside Belgium, must find it equally reasonable. ;-)

Well, if you formulate it in this way, some of them may be even unwilling to listen to this new kind of reason. :-)

Automatic politically correct synergy

Much like many other laws and regulations, this treaty is a good example of a politically correct "hooray action" that everyone - or every good human in the world - is automatically expected to approve. Do they (those excessively abundant, homogenized Eurofanatic politicians) really expect that everyone is going to be happy with such an incomprehensible, 500-page treaty that no one can fully grasp and that effectively allows Brussels to control many kinds of aspects of our lives without good feedback mechanisms?

And if they really do, why?

If they don't believe it and if they only want to neglect what people actually think and how the treaty will influence the lives of those who are not paid, directly or indirectly, as officials from the EU budget, then it is a scary testimony about the corrupt, parasitic, and non-democratic nature of the present union.

If they do actually believe it, then their belief is a reflection of a breathtaking naivite that should be too much even for the chairman of a class at an elementary school.

Whenever there is a question whether nations or territories should be more unified or less unified, i.e. whether the governments should be more centralized or less centralized, it is always guaranteed that there will exist dramatically different opinions about such a question. The most obvious reason is that some people will gain and others will lose by such a newly proposed arrangement.

Nevertheless, certain people seem to think that the opinions of the mankind should be unified. Amazingly enough, their expectations may go in both ways, depending on the context.

So in the context of the European Union, everyone is expected to support an ever tighter unification and an ever more powerful government in Brussels. That's what they would call "unity" or "love" or "peace". In the context of Serbia, Israel, Russia, and other countries, everyone is expected to support the creation of a maximum number of new states that will disintegrate the previous local power as much as possible. In this case, the desirable process is called "freedom" or "independence" or "right to self-determination" and no one cares that it is the opposite of "unity", "love", and "peace".

They always like to use positive, black-and-white words for their favorite approaches and they always fail to see that it is possible to see things differently.

Is it really so difficult to see that there exist people who have good reasons to dislike the idea of a central, supernational European government? And is it so difficult to understand that there exist people who are legitimately upset about the continuing fragmentation of countries such as Israel, Serbia, or Russia?

And once you understand that people have diverse opinions and diverse interests, is it so difficult to honestly behave in such a way that you reveal that you realize that people have different opinions and different interests? Or do you think that politicians - and not only politicians - have to be so flagrantly dishonest all the time?

Should politicians play this disgraceful would-be moral game of "expecting something" that makes it virtually impossible for cowards (i.e. most people) to say and think something else? Fortunately, not everyone is a coward.

It would also be great if some of those politicians began to realize that blackmailing simply can't work in this context. Rational people, politicians, and nations are comparing the proposed treaties with their opinions and their interests. And if the treaties don't seem good enough for some parties, they will simply not be accepted.

If someone wants to blackmail Ireland or Czechia by pointing out that they might be "fired" from the EU, well, it is tough but it is his decision. However, such a secession is no taboo so the blackmailing won't be terribly efficient.

There exist advantages as well as disadvantages of our membership - or the membership of other countries. The disintegration of Czechoslovakia was much more important a change for the nations than someone's membership in the EU but it was not such a big deal, either. Such changes are only a problem if someone wants to fight with weapons. In other cases, an agreement is always found and the world may continue.

When the situation evolves in a certain direction, it is completely plausible that the disadvantages start to dominate and the "graceful exit" from the EU will become a realistic and acceptable option. The European Union can survive without Czechia and vice versa. The only problem for the EU is that it will have a hole at the very center of Europe - a non-simply connected manifold. But that's not such a big deal. ;-)

On the other hand, advantages may count, too. It is conceivable that many people in Czechia would appreciate if the EU capital were moved from the anachronical place encoding the cold war, the Brussels, into a more natural center, Prague or Pilsen. ;-) And if the Prague Castle were also declared to be the home of the EU president, as in a personal union, all the problems could suddenly go away. :-)



Some European nations live happily outside the EU but it is not the only alternative option. After all, it could be fun to establish new, Confederate States of Europe with Ireland, Czechia, and others.

There would be a lot of beer for everyone in the CSE. ;-) In the consumption of beer per capita, Czechia is the world's #1 superpower, with 157 liters a year. The #2 is Ireland, with 131 liters a year. Germany, Australia, Austria, the U.K., and Slovenia follow. I am not sure whether Australia will join the CSE soon.

Ireland may also join the U.S. Boston rather than Berlin... :-)

Craigslist scammers

I was trying to sell a heavy object X through prague.craigslist.com (plus other advert servers) and a particular person was interested in it. Surprisingly, he seemed to be American. ;-)

After a day of waiting for more photographs, he told me that he loved X and he would send me a cheque for 2P where P is the price I demanded. I would send P back to him via Western Union and as soon as he would receive it, someone would pick X in Pilsen.

He didn't seem to care about any details concerning the amount of money (and fees) he would have to pay or any geographic or logistical details and didn't sound particularly charming or intelligent through the cell phone (the number can't be determined).

If you have similar attractive offers, I recommend you to read the craigslist fraud warning and politely reject those offers! ;-)

The cheque would be fake and, which is what I didn't quite realize for a while, its falsity would be only discovered many weeks after I (or you) would pay P back to him.

See also:

How they stole USD 2,800
How they didn't steal my identity

AP and Tom Chałko: global warming and earthquakes

The Associated Press decided to promote an übercrackpot called Tom Chałko (Australia) and his new, groundbreaking two-page paper.

Update: CBSnews have removed the article. Moreover, CBSnews insist that the story came from the AP while the AP denies it. See a backup from Yahoo. The MarketWire story seems to be alive at dozens of places, e.g. at MSNBC.



Video 1: More clips from 10.5 apocalypse here...

Global warming is apparently causing earthquakes and their energy has increased by 400 percent in two decades, as the Gentleman learned, among many other revolutionary findings.

The rest can be seen in 10.5 Apocalypse (see an excerpt above) that is just being aired on Czech TV NOVA (the 2nd part is aired tonight) which is why I posted it here. ;-) Global warming is speeding up continental drift 1 trillion times, America will be divided into two pieces by a new ocean next week. Add earthquakes, floods, evaporating lakes, gigantic tsunami, breaking dams and collapsing founding fathers, holes in the continent, erupting volcanoes, and so on. :-)

I love these movies but the existence - and, in fact, huge number - of the people who are completely unable to distinguish fiction from reality drives me up the wall.

How difficult would it be for the AP journalists to open scholar.google.com, enter Chałko's name, and see that his most famous paper is "No second chance? Can Earth explode as a result of global warming" (2001) with 4 citations, 3 of which are self-citations and the fourth citation is a book about the importance of the reality of UFO where Chałko's paper was reprinted?

The picture on the left shows the master himself in his own famous elegant T-shirt.

The paper I mentioned is about the same topic, namely that global warming overheats the planet's interior. ;-) How difficult is it to multiply the surface of Earth, 510e12 m2, by Hansen's conjectured imbalance 0.8 W/m2 to obtain 4e12 W? And how difficult is to divide this number by the heat capacity of Earth that is close to 4e27 J/K to obtain 1e-15 K/s (or 3e-8 K per year) warming rate? And to see that it is zero for all conceivably practical purposes?

Is it really necessary to use the term "scientist" for entertaining, likable, but complete lunatics who study human auras and their self-healing ability to restore the perfect health (except for the brain) and the unlimited potential of your mind, cure all the diseases (buy the book on the left side), give your life a purpose, and who are windsurfing addicts (haven't we seen this somewhere already)? ;-)

I guess that the "journalists" at the Associated Press will have something to explain. Or maybe not. They may already be reading their auras in order to be bioresonant. And they are reading The Freedom of Choice for the 10th time because the book gets better every time you read it. This Chałko stuff may be the new AP scientific standard. See also Climate Audit.

By the way, the earthquake energy hasn't increased, of course. Read the FAQ by USGS who are responsible for seismology. The total energy is dominated by earthquakes at 7.0 or higher and they haven't increased - they have actually decreased a bit in recent years. However, many small earthquakes went undetected in the past.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

Blaise Pascal: 385th birthday

Blaise Pascal was born on June 19th, 1623, to a father who was an aristocratic judge with interest in science and maths and a mother who died when Blaise was 3 years old.

Pascal has made his most famous breakthroughs in the physics of fluids, construction of calculators, religious philosophy and theology, and modern economics and social science. Not a bad record for a guy who was ill throughout his life and who died before he was 40. (His stomach and even brain was damaged, probably due to some combination or variation of stomach cancer, tuberculosis, and brain lesion.)

Childhood

The child prodigy was educated by his father. When Blaise was 11, he wrote a treatise on the sounds of vibrating bodies. He shouldn't have done that because his father was so afraid that Blaise would become a string theorist and his study of Latin and Greek would be compromised that he forbade Blaise to pursue maths until his 15th birthday. ;-)

However, when Blaise wrote his own proof that the sum of angles in a triangle equals 180° a year later, the ban was lifted. Blaise the kid could suddenly study Euclid and even participate at gatherings of thinkers such as Roberval, Desargues, Mydorge, Gassendi, and Descartes in a monastic cell.

Desargues worked on conic sections and Pascal was thrilled. Decartes didn't want to believe that some of the "conic" findings were due to Pascal Jr and not Pascal Sr. ;-) When Blaise was 15, his father's assets dropped from 66,000 to 7,000 livres. Moreover, the father had to leave Paris for political reasons. His three children were left with Madame Sainctot, an attractive and achieved prostitute.

The calculators



The father was eventually pardoned and began to calculate taxes owed and paid again.

Blaise, now 18+ years old, was so compassionate that he invented the Pascaline or Pascal's calculator to simplify his dad's life. The gadget that could add and subtract was a breakthrough, at least from our present viewpoint, but it wasn't a commercial success. One of the reasons was that it wasn't easy to produce it. About 50 prototypes have been made within a decade or so but only 15 or so were sold. Compare e.g. with Playstation 3 that has sold 13 million devices.

But because of the pioneering role that the Pascaline has played, it is natural that an important programming language was named after Pascal.

Mathematics

Pascal's triangle, a convenient method to write down the binomial coefficients, was written down in 1653, when Blaise was 30. Well, this particular achievement doesn't seem too revolutionary for a 30-year-old genius to me.

One year later, Pascal began to study game theory and probability theory carefully. He introduced expected values and other notions and his and Fermat's work on probabilities surprisingly inspired Leibniz when he was formulating (his version of) the infinitesimal calculus.

In philosophy of mathematics, Pascal dreamed about the new truths being derived purely from the truths that have already been established. He realized that such a utopia is not really possible and decided that the deduction building on an axiomatic system, using the modern terminology, is the best possible scheme you can get.

Moreover, the ultimate axioms cannot be proved rationally and a reference to intuition (and even God) will therefore be forever essential. He presented the axioms of geometry to be an example of the optimal framework balancing the axioms with deduction. Pascal also emphasized that only definitions that are written down by a writer to simplify his life - and that don't depend on external understanding by everyone - are meaningful in science.

Religion

Pascal always suffered from a nervous ailment. But a paralytic attack in 1647 disabled him so that he couldn't move without crutches. He needed to heat up his legs all the time. His sister Jacqueline helped to cure him physically but the nervous problems remained. Add hypochondria, his father's broken hip in 1646, and a lot of other problems to get the gloomy picture.

The whole family were close to Jansenism, a branch of the church that emphasized the original sin, divine grace, and destiny. After the father died in 1651, the relationships between Jacqueline and Blaise turned worse, then better, but Blaise was not a full-fledged believer at that time.

However, in 1654, months after he studied game theory and probability, Pascal had a religious experience that largely made him give up mathematics. What happened on November 23rd, 1654?

He probably participated in a traffic accident involving horses. Although he escaped without any consequences for his health, the sensitive thinker fainted away and became unconscious for a while. Fifteen days later, he apparently received a call from God. Pascal wrote: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded with "I will not forget thy word. Amen" from Psalm 119:16.

The document with these "insights" is known as the Memorial. Pascal was careful to have it in his clothes all the time. In 1656, he began to write religious texts. For example, in The Provincial Letters, he attacked casuistry, the popular Catholic relativistic moral teaching that things are ethical or unethical depending on their context (case). The morally relativist king ordered the book to be burned and shredded in 1660.

Pascal's text was not just a principled yet controversial treatise about ethics. It was also a fun reading. It influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, too.

The religious experiences didn't end in 1654. In 1657, Pascal's 10-year-old hopelessly ill niece was miraculously cured after some believers kissed a crown that has tortured Christ. The scientific consensus of that era, including the Catholic Paris and the Pope, have confirmed that it was an actual miracle from the same universality class as those described in the Bible. ;-)

With a lot of new religious energy, Pascal himself began to write The Pensées, a book defending Christianity that he never completed. His aim was to deduce so powerful contradictions and terrible conclusions out of stoicism and skepticism that the non-believers would be driven up the wall and accept Jesus Christ. ;-)

Pascal's wager

For example, Pascal's Wager is the suggestion that it is better to bet that God exists, even if He doesn't, because you may gain (almost) everything but you will lose (almost) nothing. At any rate, the expectation value (based on God's uncertain existence) of the profit is higher if you believe in God because you gain infinity if you believe in Him and He exists.

Pascal's argument was recently revived (or stolen?) by some mad global warming alarmists at YouTube (the devil version) who (ludicrously) claim that you lose infinity if there exists AGW and you bet It doesn't exist. ;-) Good enough a performance to attract 4+ million stupid viewers and to promote the silly "precautionary principle". The average rating of the videos is 4.5 stars, raising concerns about a possible genetic collapse of the mankind.

From the naive YouTube alarmist, whose name happens to be Greg Craven and who is a high school teacher if you care, Pascal's Wager was further re-stolen by Ross Garnaut, the left-wing Australian government's climate guru. :-)

The error in the argument is, of course, that it inconsistently combines a significant probability of climate change problems - that only applies to "realistic climate change" - with huge damages caused by climate change - that only occur with "unrealistic climate change" whose probability is very low. When the columns are defined properly, either the "costs of climate change" are "almost infinite" but the probability is close enough to zero to win and make the expected damages very low, or the probability of "climate change problems" is reasonably high but then the corresponding costs are low enough for the climate realists' recommendations to be more beneficial in average.

The Australian endorsement happened yesterday. As you can see, Pascal's ideas are hot every day even 385 years after his birth. If climate science keeps on evolving in the current direction, Pascal's post-1654 (religious) ideas will become more important for the discipline than the pre-1654 (hydrostatical) ideas discussed below. ;-)

Pascal has always been an ascetic, convinced that it was natural and necessary for man to suffer.

Hydrostatics

The SI unit of pressure is also named after Pascal. Why? Let us return before the conversion, to his previous, scientific incarnation.

Around 1646, Pascal already knew everything about Torricelli's experiments. Take a tube filled with mercury and turn it upside down in a bowl. At some height, you see the vacuum. Most scientists thought it wasn't vacuum. Why? Simply because the vacuum was impossible! It was impossible because of some idiotic dogmas by Aristotle.

Because light can apparently penetrate (move) through the vacuum and any motion must be caused by something, as Aristotle declared, there can't be vacuum in the vacuum region above the mercury! ;-) This sloppy thinking reminds me of some recent musings about "relationism" and "background independence".

While I admire the ancient Greek and Roman science and societies, I am always amazed how horrible impact on scientific reasoning Aristotle's legacy has had. Five hundred years ago, the Catholic Church has done a lot of things against science but some of the really bad "weapons" were bought from Aristotle.

Aristotle's teaching is the greatest example of dogmatic natural philosophy. One writes seemingly "natural" theses, for example "every motion must be caused by something", and derives all kinds of conclusions - such as the non-existence of the vacuum - without ever asking whether the assumptions and the implications are valid and what they exactly mean and what they don't. There is never an attempt to remove the vagueness and to critically test an idea.

Pascal was more sane. He realized that conjectures in science can be easily falsified: one wrong prediction is enough. He wrote: "In order to show that a hypothesis is evident, it does not suffice that all the phenomena follow from it; instead, if it leads to something contrary to a single one of the phenomena, that suffices to establish its falsity."

At any rate, Pascal didn't buy this "vacuum doesn't exist" stuff, driving people like Descartes up the wall. He not only explained why there was vacuum above the mercury but he told us much more about the workings of fluids. He discovered Pascal's law - namely that fluids propagate the pressure into all directions. The pressure is thus a scalar. Moreover, he knew that the pressure [difference] is equal to "[delta] h rho g". The pressure is proportional to the height - which is exactly what allows you to use the tubes with mercury as barometers.

Some of the experiments proving Pascal's statements were carried out in 1646 and 1647 by himself and in 1648 by his friends. He reproduced many of them. The picture on the left side shows Pascal's barometer in 1646 located in Rouen, France.

Summary

Blaise Pascal was an extraordinary 17th century thinker whose life shows a lot of the darkness of the Middle Ages and his personal difficulties but whose discoveries helped to pave the way for hydrodynamics, modern computers, modern economics, modern social science, and modern philosophy of science. He didn't build the Eiffel Tower but did a lot of other things. ;-)

Aage Niels Bohr

Aage Niels Bohr was born on June 19th, 1922. This son of Niels Bohr was good enough a nuclear physicist to receive a Nobel prize, too. The 1975 physics prize was shared by Bohr's son and Motl's son, as well as Leo James Rainwater. OK, I admit that Motl's son should be spelled [Ben] Mottelson... ;-)

Tegmark: The world is made of mathematics

Related older articles:

Physics and mathematics: boundaries and interactions
Platonic world of mathematical ideas
Max Tegmark: The mathematical universe

An article in Discover Magazine sparked some new blogospherical discussions about the mathematical "body" of the Universe.

The article explains that Max Tegmark lives a double life - in one incarnation, he is the ultra-mainstream cosmologist that many of us know from his talks, in the other one, he is a mysterious philosopher. It is the other face that we look at.

Tegmark says that there is only mathematics and nothing else exists. The world is made out of maths. Is it true? Well, it is a philosophical question that can't really be "settled". I am used to say that the real world is isomorphic to a subset of mathematics. But is it the same thing?

In fact, I am only using the word "isomorphic" not to irritate too many people but in my real opinion, the "isomorphism" may be treated as "equality" from all physical points of view. It has the same properties and it is thus the same thing. The whole reality "is" the information and all relationships between pieces of reality "are" mathematical laws.

I don't think that you gain anything by assuming that the reality is "something else" than the appropriate mathematics. But I am sure that you lose a lot if you deny that the reality is the same thing as mathematics and should be studied mathematically.

I find Max Tegmark's propositions somewhat vague but at the philosophical level, he is not claiming anything else than the elementary philosophy that most theoretical physicists, with Einstein as a key example, have believed for quite some time. The real world is a mathematical structure. A subtle "additional" task for the scientists is to find out what subdiscipline of mathematics is most appropriate to match the Universe and what are the actual answers to more detailed physical questions. ;-)

Of course, I am only joking when I say that these detailed questions are a "subtle" addition. They're the bulk of the scientists' work and Max Tegmark's philosophy doesn't seem to offer them anything useful to advance.

While Tegmark's comments are vague but they have a sensible core, the comments by many Tegmark's critics are downright incoherent or wrong. For example, Sabine Hossenfelder says that "just because we (i.e. human beings) don't know anything except maths without 'human baggage' it doesn't follow from this it is the only thing there can be."

OK, I have no idea how to interpret Sabine's comment so that it makes sense. Besides mathematics, humans know a lot of things with 'human baggage'. It is one of the main points of Tegmark that the reality "is not" this human baggage. The reality is a pure structure from which the 'human baggage' has been removed. Such a "purified" structure is mathematics, almost by definition. Tegmark surely doesn't claim that we know everything about mathematics - or that we have always known everything about mathematics. Quite on the contrary, he says that the true aspects of reality "live" somewhere in the Platonic world of mathematical ideas and wait to be found.

Principle of finite imagination

Sabine calls the principle behind her reasoning "the principle of finite imagination". The brain is finite and it is therefore able to understand "finite complexity" structures only. Some of the structures relevant for the real world can be too tough for the human brains.

Is it true? Well, it might be. If you sometimes read the loads of dopes on her or Peter Woit's blogs whose thinking collapses once they collide with a rather simple mathematical notion or with a number comparable to 10^{500} - error, beep! - you can see very easily that many (and probably most) human brains are painfully finite. But the limited realm of ideas that are accessible to average and lazy brains is surely not what Tegmark or your humble correspondent mean by the world of mathematics.

We clearly mean the idealized realm whose beauty and wisdom is only available to those who are both talented and patient enough to walk through these abstract valleys and to understand them.

Are (some of) the human brains able to understand all the necessary mathematics in principle? We don't know for sure. But it is exactly one of Tegmark's conjectures that we can. By "mathematics", he doesn't mean "anything impersonal". He means a collection of structures whose properties and relationships can be described by a finite amount of "scholarship". Such structures are therefore accessible to a sufficiently talented and hard-working human.

Moreover, Sabine seems to be making a childish, "materialist" mistake when she equates the number of the neurons with the number of elements of a mathematical structure that can be grasped by the brain. However, people have pretty much understood the monster group whose order is close to the number of electrons in Jupiter [thanks, Mitchell]. They can study the landscape of stringy vacua or the landscape of DNA molecules, too. Mathematics is able to self-organize itself in such a way that large structures can be studied at a small piece of paper (or brain), after all.

I am convinced that circumstantial evidence - and the history of science and mathematics so far - indicate that the world is "finite enough" to be accessible by talented and hard-working brains. Most mysteries that looked inaccessible in the past are suddenly understood and quantified. This is no proof that we can extrapolate this success but it is certainly a strong indication that we should try and we should believe in our success.

I can't tell you about the timescale when new things should be discovered - only crackpots are ready to promise you timelines of future revolutions in science and to criticize the real world if it disagrees with their timelines. ;-) However, I can assure you that if we give up, the progress will slow down or come to a halt.

Academic system

The alternative physicists on the blogosphere write that Tegmark's comments are untrue; but everyone should be allowed to study whatever he wants; in particular, Tegmark should be allowed to study "the mathematical Universe" all the time.

My answers to all three questions are completely opposite.

The essence of Tegmark's framework is true because his comments are just an idiosyncratic edition of some basic philosophical assumptions of theoretical physics. People can study whatever they want but the researchers can (or should) only be paid by the society if their production has a certain value because of the "principle of finite money for scholarship".

While Tegmark's philosophical musings are essentially correct, they are not valuable or new enough to deserve a separate support. So I think that it is very correct that Tegmark is paid for his careful analyses of the WMAP data and similar stuff and not for his mostly vacuous philosophical musings about the mathematical universe. In non-scientific disciplines, there can be different criteria besides the "validity" and "potency" of scientific results but every discipline must have some criteria and no field of human activity can fund "any" people who are working on "anything they want". Only hardcore communist utopians think otherwise.

Sabine's opinions represent a large portion of what I hate about the pompous fools and self-centered pseudointellectuals. She doesn't care a single bit whether Tegmark's - or her - ideas are valid, interesting, useful, or anything like that. What she cares about is her status as a "thinker" and she wants to create a similar "clique" of people who call themselves "thinkers" - for the taxpayers' money. She is rating other people's work in science not according to the content of the work but according to their readiness to form the "clique" with her.

I am sorry but the elimination of wrong (and worthless) ideas is the #1 principle of all of science. So if you are proposing to hire people regardless of the value of their work, and it seems that it is exactly what these people are doing all the time, then you are definitely not building a scientific community. You are building a pompous quasi-religious community of arrogant and stupid crackpots of the Lee Smolin type whose babbling is incoherent and who don't understand basics of "their field" but who like to dress up as intellectuals and to emit populist clichés that sound good to the complete ignorants among the laymen.

This should stop as soon as possible because it is getting out of control. The Academia is already overflooded by incoherent pseudointellectuals and pompous fools who only like to paint themselves as fantastic guys despite their breathtaking ignorance and inconsistency and who are building on the support of the most ignorant and stupid people in the world rather than the most well-informed ones. Sometimes they are doing so not only to feed themselves but even to actively undermine the work of their much better peers. This is definitely not a path to progress.

So I think that it's fine if Tegmark's musings are reserved for no-longer-scientific magazines such as the Discover Magazine and if hard science is both required and expected in the professional spheres.

More precisely, it would be great if we could return to this old regime.

And that's the memo.

Leonard Susskind: 60+ hours of lectures

If you have 60+ hours for some fun, here are several courses by Lenny Susskind, one of the most achieved and most original physicists of the our era. Stanford University has posted them to YouTube:

Classical mechanics (playlist)
Special relativity (playlist)
Quantum mechanics (playlist)
Quantum entanglements I (playlist)
Quantum entanglements III (playlist)

Some of his approaches are unusual and entertaining but you are still invited to trust a vast majority of the things he is saying! ;-) The first lecture of "Quantum Mechanics" seems inaccessible and there are probably other bugs, too. But there is still a chance that you will find something interesting.

Gore's personal electricity consumption up 10%

Al Gore's oversized house was consuming 20 times more electricity than the average American household.



So the "messiah" added solar panels, installed a geothermal system, replaced existing light bulbs with more efficient models, and overhauled the home’s windows and ductwork.

At the end of 2007, Gore claimed that the electricity consumption was reduced by 10%. But what is the actual result?

Tennessee Center for Policy Research (click and read)

The actual outcome is that his electricity consumption increased by 10%. Since the renovations in Summer 2007, Gore's empire devours 17,768 kWh a month in average, much more than 100 times the consumption of your humble correspondent's home.

This story is an example how hypocrites have always worked. The most successful ones may earn USD 100,000,000 by downright fraud and lies. They pay USD 16,533 for renovations whose only goal is to fool everyone.

The resulting change of the electricity consumption is positive but millions of people are so stupid that they award prizes to the moral junk of Gore's type instead of putting these megafraudsters into the prison.

Leonard Susskind: The black hole war

My battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics

What happens when something is sucked into a black hole? Does it disappear? Three decades ago, a young physicist named Stephen Hawking claimed it did - and in doing so put at risk everything we know about physics and the fundamental laws of the universe. Most scientists didn't recognize the import of Hawking's claims, but Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft realized the threat, and responded with a counterattack that changed the course of physics.

THE BLACK HOLE WAR is the thrilling story of their united effort to reconcile Hawking's revolutionary theories of black holes with their own sense of reality - effort that would eventually result in Hawking admitting he was wrong, paying up, and Susskind and 't Hooft realizing that our world is a hologram projected from the outer boundaries of space. A brilliant book about modern physics, quantum mechanics, the fate of stars and the deep mysteries of black holes, Leonard Susskind's account of the Black Hole War is mind-bending and exhilarating reading.

Technical bonus: Download Firefox 3 final

Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex

MRI scans of 25+20+25+20 = 90 people have supported a proposition that many people have "known" for quite some time: homosexual men's brains are structured like the (straight) female ones and lesbians' brains are structured like the (straight) male ones.

ABC, BBC, Reuters, Sci. American, 100+ others

Homosexuality is therefore determined before the birth. It is the first time when MRI scans were used to look at this question.

The researchers from the Karolinska Institute, Sweden - where the medicine Nobel prizes are decided every year - have shown that the straight male and lesbian brains are larger and left-right asymmetric. The straight female and gay male brains are smaller and symmetric.



The amygdala seems to be the region of the brain - responsible for emotional reactions (both CPU and RAM) - that shows the identity most efficiently. It is enough to look whether the nerve connections are mostly in the left half or the right half: you find out that the straight men and lesbians have connections mostly on the right side of the amygdala and vice versa.

WIRED: 10 green heresies

Wired News has encouraged the readers to rethink what it means to be "green" i.e. to save energy (and fossil fuels) and to be friendly to the environment.

Their list of their 10+1 "green heresies" contains the following entries:

1. It is greener to live in the cities
2. Air-conditioning is greener than heating
3. Conventional agriculture beats organics
4. Forests may cause warming
5. China is the solution
6. Genetic engineering may be great
7. Carbon trading is a failure
8. Nuclear power beats all other sources
9. Used cars beat hybrids
10. Climate change is inevitable
11. CO2 is not everything (bonus)

The authors are trying to use their brains a little bit but they are still typical environmentalist activists who have clearly been brainwashed by all the popular nonsense about the "bad" CO2 emissions that can quantify the "sin" and similar stuff.

In order to make you sure that they're greens, let me quote the first sentence of the 11th entry as an example:

No one with any scientific sense now disagrees about the severity of the climate crisis.

The only severe thing about this statement is that it severely contrasts with reality. In reality, every person with elementary scientific education knows that the notion of "climate crisis" is pure bunk promoted by undereducated and overzealous pundits in the media that contradicts pretty much everything we know about the climate system and about the society.

Nevertheless, the green writers at Wired News are still way too insufficiently green for the Gentlemen at RealClimate.ORG. In fact, the latter environmentalist radicals were so irritated that they attacked Wired News in a text with a friendly name,

Wired Magazine’s Incoherent Truths.

A/C

The first proposition that Ray Pierrehumbert hated is that air-conditioning is better than heating, as far as the energy consumption goes. Matt Power writes some bizarre things about the power needed for cooling and I would bet that Pierrehumbert understands the physics of power and physics of heat in air-conditioners more than Power does. ;-)

But when it comes to their main conclusions, the situation changes dramatically. Power writes that the heating in a typical Northeast house creates 13,000 pounds of CO2 a year while the air-conditioning in a typical Phoenix dwelling produces 900 pounds. It is very bizarre to measure energy consumption in pounds of CO2 but let's use Power's fashionable units, anyway.

This overall comparison of the two typical houses is what matters at the level of the society. Air-conditioning in the U.S. households consumes less energy mainly because the average annual temperature outside the average house (15 °C? Or 10 °C in Czechia?) is well below the most comfortable temperature for humans (23 °C?).

Whether our technologies make it cheaper to heat up or cool down a liter of water by 1 °C is an interesting technological question but the key figures that are relevant for policymaking include a lot of other multiplicative factors that Pierrehumbert is completely unable (or unwilling) to see.

Because the air-conditioners consume much less energy than the heating systems in the U.S., by more than one order of magnitude, it is very clear that the energy that you would save on heating by a hypothetical "global warming" will clearly exceed the additional energy that your air-conditioners will have to consume.

The overall energy needed for heating and air-conditioning would obviously decrease if the outside temperature would increase - i.e. if it would approach the comfortable temperature for humans. This is a purely academic question because the amount of predicted warming, about 0.006 °C a year, changes the ratios of heating vs air-conditioning consumption 100 times less than other random factors, including the newest design of the devices or the evolution of the "hot" housing markets.

But academically speaking, the statement is true. Warming would reduce the overall energy spent for heating and cooling.

The same comment applies to people who freeze to death and to the victims of heat waves. Because many more people "freeze" than "melt" ;-), it is clear that a hypothetical warming would subtract the "freezing" people, add the "melting" people, and reduce the overall number of victims of inconvenient temperatures because the "subtraction" would numerically exceed the "addition".

Whether the existing air-conditioners are somewhat less efficient than the commercially sold heating systems is irrelevant. The latter is a physics question or an engineering question but it can have no direct implications for policymaking because the key question for policymakers is not about the 10%-like differences in the efficiency but about the overall energy that you have to spend for one purpose or another.

Treat forests like crops

Trees absorb carbon dioxide. Young trees do so more efficiently than old trees. Matt Power and Ray Pierrehumbert agree about this point but Pierrehumbert is still very angry. Why is it so? Well, I guess that it is because the first two words of Power's article are "Ronald Reagan's". ;-)

Fine, that's the actual reason. But how does Pierrehumbert explain that he is upset? He says, correctly, that the CO2 balance depends on the fate of the wood. Indeed, it does. If the wood is stored in the form of lasting products such as furniture and houses, the carbon atoms will disappear from the atmosphere for a longer time than if you transform the wood into something that decomposes (or burns) very quickly.

But once again, this question - which methods to use wood remove more carbon from the atmosphere - is a completely different question from the question whether forests treated as old monuments or forests treated as crops are more efficient absorbers of CO2. And the answer, correctly reproduced by Power, is that the trees-crops absorb more carbon.

Now, I don't think that the absorption of carbon is a "good thing" in any inherent sense and I would never cut a tree because of a similar "justification". But I can still think about these issues and Pierrehumbert cannot see the forest for the trees, literally speaking. If you treated trees like crops, a significant fraction of the wood would obviously end up as a long-lasting product. Power is right and Pierrehumbert is wrong to criticize Power. The fraction is pretty much well-known but if we really began to think that it is good to absorb carbon, our lifestyle could start to encourage particular ways to use wood.

Power is fundamentally right and Pierrehumbert's amusing comments about rot in his old Victorian house only subtract a few percent (per century) from Power's powerful observation. ;-) If your goal were to remove carbon from the atmosphere, you should grow plants that absorb as much CO2 as possible (e.g. young trees) and use them for as long-lasting applications as possible.

SUV vs used cars

OK, I didn't want to discuss this topic because when the oil price is close to USD 140 per barrel, it simply looks crazy to assume that a normal person wouldn't pay any attention to the fuel economy of his car. The actual money that you pay for gasoline is much higher than any conceivable damage that the resulting CO2 emissions could indirectly create through "global warming".

The people who don't have to save fuel and who want to read additional comments about the CO2 emissions of their cars are the very rich people who typically have many cars - and some of them have private jets, too. These people are buying Priuses or Prii ;-) in order to mask their trips by big cars and perhaps by their private jets (and many other regular commercial flights) and to feel good about their life. It is very clear that the more Prii these people have, the more they can morally "afford" to waste energy in other contexts. Consequently, Prii are bad.

So I would certainly leave the fuel economy to the invisible hand of the free markets because this hand is pretty powerful when the gasoline is at USD 4.00 a gallon. Please, only look how much you actually pay for energy, do not look at any other "environmental" numbers, and kindly inform those who look at them that they are morons. Incidentally, if you are afraid that the price will keep on climbing, you may pre-pay gasoline for the present prices from GasBankUSA.

Those chemicals that are used in batteries and other places when fancy cars are produced are almost certainly much more serious environmental issues than anything related to carbon dioxide.

But Matt Power's main argument is the following: while you consume energy if you drive a car, it takes a lot of energy to produce one, too. That's why the used cars may be more energy-efficient than the new cars, including fuel-efficient new cars.

Pierrehumbert doesn't like the argument. Why? Well, hybrids are obviously one of the sacred symbols of his movement and he doesn't like heretics who say anything bad about them. That's the true reason but Pierrehumbert can't reveal it openly. So how does he justify that he dislikes Power's valid argument about the energy cost of car production?

Well, Pierrehumbert is making almost the very same mistake as he did in the case of the old Victorian house. Recall that Pierrehumbert focused on rot in his house and on the decomposing napkins but he was unable to see that the rest of the wood in his house has survived for more than a century.

In this case, Pierrehumbert says that it doesn't help when you buy a used car because the previous owner has to buy a new car himself.

Pierrehumbert's reasoning is clearly falacious because the previous owner is deciding between used cars and Prii, too. If most of the people decide (or are encouraged) to use older cars rather than new cars, it is very clear that the average age of the car on the road will increase and the production of new cars - and the associated consumption of energy - will decrease.

If the previous owner decided to sell his used car and buy a new car - e.g. a new Prius - he was clearly acting against the recommendation by Matt Power. But Power's recommendation was addressed to all drivers, not just some of them, and those drivers who follow it are clearly helping to reduce the production of new cars and the associated waste of energy because they are increasing the "hotness" of the used cars.

Again, I certainly don't think that it is a sacred goal to reduce the production of new cars. 20% of the Czech economy is car production - we are the world's #1 country in car production per capita because we have just surpassed Slovakia that is now #2. ;-) But if I am asked to assume that it is a bad thing to consume energy, the energy consumed during car production is bad, too. And Power is right. It must be taken into account and in many cases, it will dominate the overall numbers.

Pierrehumbert as a symbol of the green inability to think

As Noam Chomsky wrote in 1957, colorless green ideas sleep furiously. He thought that the sentence didn't make sense but in 2008, it makes a lot of sense. The generic environmentalists are unable to think. Pierrehumbert is a great example of an intellectually deficient individual who have flooded the media, universities, political parties, and even some corporations. Let me mention two fallacies that are being repeated by these green brains all the time:

1. The tendency to see a minor, irrelevant, small effect but not the major effects, the "bulk"
2. The assumption of non-existing correlations that are used to subtract "inconvenient terms" and suppress "inconvenient correlations"
   

These entries may sound too abstract. So let me explain what I mean.

Externalities vs internalities

The first fallacy is often discussed under the name of "externalities". Externalities are consequences of an economic transaction for a third party. Environmentalists like to assume two wrong things about the externalities, namely that

1. they are very important
2. they are mostly negative

In reality, externalities are - almost by definition - less important than "internalities" even though the latter term is unfortunately not being used at all. If you buy a chocolate, the supermarket gets the money and you receive the chocolate. A child may also see a cute picture on the chocolate in your cart. That's an externality. But such effects influencing third parties are, almost by definition, less relevant than the "bulk" of the transaction itself.

Far-left people who love to speculate about communist myths such as the "inherent imperfections of the markets" and similar nonsense often like to see the irrelevant, small, additional effects but not the actual transaction. It is OK if these people are given a few bucks to play with (because we can afford to throw them out of the window) - another example of externalities - but it is usually a catastrophe if these people are allowed to influence (or control) whole companies or societies because they really have no idea about the "bulk" of all the relevant problems. They don't know the actual reasons and drivers of the human behavior. They don't know why things actually work.

Pierrehumbert has shown us this fallacy at least twice. In his discussion about the forests, he mentioned rot in his Victorian house, pretending that he had proven that all wood decomposes rapidly. However, he has forgotten the wood that has actually survived from the Victorian era. This quantity is both a majority of the wood used for houses as well as the critical quantity in the whole debate about old and new forests. Pierrehumbert is unable (or unwilling?) to see it.

Inventing non-existing correlations and cancellations

In the case of the used cars, he has made a related mistake. He didn't like Power's desacration of a religious symbol, the Prius. So he effectively said that if you buy a used car rather than a new Prius, it won't make a difference because the previous owner of the used car buys a new car, anyway. So his action will compensate yours.

The fallacy of this reasoning may also be described as the invention of correlations that do not exist in reality. In effect, Pierrehumbert assumes that if you decide that used cars are better than new cars, you will create another person who will decide that new cars are better than used cars.

This is clearly incorrect. The priorities of the other owners are clearly uncorrelated to your personal decisions. Power correctly assumes that there exists a quantity that measures how much people prefer the new cars over used cars or the other way around.

If people prefer new cars, a higher number of new cars is produced, no one wants certain used cars, and they are scrapped earlier. If people would begin to prefer the used cars, the average age of the car on the road will increase. The production of new cars would drop, together with the energy costs of this production.

If you are an average person who buys an average used car, the number of used cars on the road increases by the number N that is smaller than one - because the previous owner is likely to buy a new car - but that is smaller than zero, anyway - because this car could otherwise be scrapped (and the previous owner can buy another used car). Pierrehumbert showed an argument that N was smaller than one but he pretended that the argument meant that N was zero. That's wrong. N is somewhere between 0 and 1 but for most qualitative purposes, it is pretty much the same thing as we assume that it is 1, not 0. Power is qualitatively right, Pierrehumbert is qualitatively wrong.

Summary

The whole environmentalist ideology may be viewed as constant repetition of these two fallacies and several others. The greens identify some aspects of reality that are "holy" or, on the contrary, "evil", in the newest edition of their quasi-religion. And then they look for some links between these religious symbols on one side and "good" or "bad" things as understood by the sane people on the other side, in order to spread their quasi-religion.

It is always possible to find an effect (or a hypothetical effect) that links the "irrationally good" things with the "rationally good" things - or the "irrationally bad" things with the "rationally bad" things. Such an effect helps to propagate the quasi-religious symbols and it is routinely blown out of proportion (the greenhouse effect is the most popular example as of 2008).

However, there are also many other effects - including effects that correlate "irrationally good" things with "rationally bad" things and vice versa - that are inconvenient for the greens. So they use all kinds of logical fallacies, propaganda, and intimidation to hide all these inconvenient links. For example, the Sun and the turbulence of the oceans surely cannot influence the climate, can it? The wooden Victorian houses no longer contain any carbon and every used car on the road has a "twin" that is a new car. ;-)

The detailed character of the green holy symbols and the preferred effects that are used as weapons to impose the quasi-religion on the rest of the society is changing with time. But the inherent irrational and unscientific nature of the green ideology is a constant of motion.

And that's the memo.

Predictions vs understanding

In this essay, I would like to discuss some differences between "predictions" and "understanding" as two slightly distinct outcomes of theoretical research.

Some people like to think that "predictions" are the only purpose of scientific theories. Such a belief largely contradicts the main motivation behind theorists' work. Theorists don't want to ask the question "what will happen" all the time. They like to ask the question "why", too.



The question "why" is actually very important. Even if our predictions of particular phenomena don't change at all, it is still possible that our theoretical framework evolves. And it may sometimes evolve dramatically. The explanations get unified and unnecessary excess baggage is jetisoned, as Murray Gell-Mann says in the commercial for a famous ex-company above. ;-)

Such improvements of the "why" questions often help us to answer the "how" and "what will happen" questions more accurately later. Theorists often ask themselves:

Do things make sense?

Even if they have some formulae that satisfactorily predict the empirically observed numbers, these formulae may make a lot of sense or much less sense. Our explanations may look natural or they may look contrived. If an explanation looks contrived, it doesn't mean that a theory and its predictions are wrong.

But it doesn't mean that theorists will ignore the contrived features of their theory, either.

When an explanation looks contrived, a theorist is not fully satisfied even if the predictions seem to be accurate. The status of such an explanation is somewhere in between an acceptable theory and an unacceptable theory. Such a fuzzy status of an explanation may be transformed into a well-defined problem if an actual sharp contradiction is found. But a semi-satisfactory theory may also become fully satisfactory if all the reasons why the theory look contrived are proven to be artifacts of our wrong assumptions and misleading intuition.

Black box answering all questions

In order to understand the difference between our capability to predict and our ability to understand, consider the following situation. You are given a black box - or a computer program, for that matter. You enter the information about the particles you want to scatter and the black box spits out (the statistical distributions of) the quantities measured by the detectors.

And the black box will always be right. Using the box, you may predict the results of all scattering experiments.

In this situation, should you be satisfied with our explanation of particle scattering? I think that the answer is obviously No. The black box may know the answers but "we" don't know it. We can't identify ourselves with the black box because we don't know how the black box works. With the black box, we may predict results of experiments.

But the mystery really hasn't disappeared at all. In fact, it is plausible that the method how the black box answers the questions is simply that the black box contains a particle collider inside and it performs all the experiments. If it is so, the predictions of the black box are not real predictions of experiments: they are the experiments themselves.

But even if we admit that the black box works differently, the mysterious question "why do the particles do what they are observed to do?" is replaced by the equally mysterious question "why does the black box say what it does?". We haven't made much progress in our understanding of particle scattering unless we know something about the internal workings of the black box.

Can we trust computers?

In reality, we are frequently using gadgets that are somewhat similar to the black box above. We use computers to do complicated calculations for us. For example, lattice QCD people use supercomputers to calculate the properties of hadron. If their calculations match the experimental data, should we be satisfied?

This question is more subtle and there is a reason to be satisfied. Why? Simply because we know how the lattice QCD programs work, at least roughly. We know the QCD Lagrangian and the computational procedures that the programs employ.

On the other hand, we may still feel that if a computer does a very complicated sequence of calculations in order to produce a qualitative answer, we still don't understand why the answer is what it is. We may often look for an easier explanation that can be formulated without the brute force of the computers.

It is important to realize that we are never guaranteed that such a better explanation exists. If a correct formula that appears in our explanation or the qualitative patterns of an explanation look truly regular, accurate, or if they seem to agree with some simple mathematical functions, it is sensible to expect that a better explanation than a huge sequence of numerical calculations should exist. While it is reasonable to expect it, it may still happen that subsequent research proves that such a "simpler" explanation cannot exist.

How much unified our theories have to be?

We normally want our explanations to be as universal as possible. In other words, we want our descriptions of different pieces of reality to be as unified as possible. If the correct predictions of a class of phenomena may be extracted from a compact formula or a concise set of rules, we always tend to think that the explanation is better than a very contrived explanation that predicts the phenomena with a similar accuracy.

Everyone knows why Newton's theory is a better explanation of the motion of planets than epicycles with properly engineered 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order corrections. The simplicity of Newton's laws is not just a matter of aesthetics: the simplicity also encodes their universality. When you use them properly, they predict not only the motion of planets but also the motion of apples and moons, among other things.

We are looking for compact, unified descriptions of reality because these descriptions are more likely to be correct even if they predict equally accurate results as some contrived, fragmented explanations with many undetermined parameters or many independent assumptions. Why? Simply because the actual reason why the contrived explanations work could be that they have been "adjusted" to agree with reality. Contrived explanations are elements of large classes of families of explanations and the probability that at least one element agrees with reality "by chance" (even though it is fundamentally incorrect) increases with the size of the family.

When compact explanations, simple formulae, and theories based on a small number of assumptions and parameters agree with observations, we have a good reason to think that the agreement is not just a coincidence.

These comments are usually understood well in the context of the climate science. If a climate model - and the process to compare it with the measurements - depends on many choices, parameters, conventions, and methods, the agreement is less spectacular and less surprising. You may always think that the choices, parameters, conventions, and methods have been deliberately chosen to improve the agreement but the agreement may be a matter of "coincidence".

If the agreement is less accurate and describes less detailed features of the data, it tells us less about the validity of the theory, too.

However, the question of "adjusted theories" is almost completely misunderstood by the public in the context of theories of fundamental physics. If a theory has a landscape of solutions - e.g. the landscape of string theory - it certainly doesn't mean that everything goes. The number 10^{500} of the elements of the landscape may look large to the laymen but it is an extremely tiny number of possible theories that should agree with all observations ever made.

If you imagine that the mankind has only performed 1,000,000 a priori "independent" experiments (and it is surely an underestimate!) and there were roughly 10 possible outcomes of each experiment (another underestimate), the number of possible outcomes of the set of experiments is 10^{1,000,000}. The probability that you will correctly describe all of them with one element of a 10^{500}-strong landscape "by chance" is completely negligible, especially if the 10^{500} elements of the landscape share virtually all "qualitative" features.

Again, your explanation would be much more convincing once you knew how to pick the right element from the landscape. But a scientist can't build on wishful thinking. Nature has the universal right to say No. The number of solutions that are acceptable at the present level of our knowledge simply is 10^{500} or higher. And we must be comparing the explanations we have.

String theory and effective quantum field theory are the two frameworks that agree with all particle physics experiments that have been made so far. While string theory only has a "finite" or at most "countable" number of possibilities, there is a "continuously infinite" number of quantum field theories because their coupling constants and other parameters must be understood as paramaterizations of "different theories".

When you do the calculation properly, string theory is far more predictive and constrained than quantum field theory, even with the 10^{500} elements. This is a conclusion that most laymen are completely incapable to do because they are simply overwhelmed by numbers of order 10^{500} and they can't distinguish them from infinity. But in certain contexts (for example if you want to answer all questions about Nature), these are damn tiny numbers.

Note that the entropy of the Universe exceeds 10^{100}, a googol, which means that the minimum dimension of the Hilbert space needed to describe the whole Universe is 10^{10^{100}}, a googolplex. This is way too higher than 10^{500}. And the number of possible configurations of experimental results in all experiments, if you count all microscopic parts of the experiments as separate entities, is closer to the googolplex, too. It is extremely unlikely (the probability is close to the inverse googolplex) that the results will agree with an element of the landscape whose size, 10^{500}, is closer to a modest googol rather than to a googolplex.

Moreover, even if you disagreed that string theory is much more constraining than effective quantum field theories and you would think that they have an equal number of possibilities, you should note that this is a "tie" between the two frameworks in this particular discipline. With such a "tie", you have no rational reason to think that effective quantum field theory is a superior framework just because it is older than string theory. With your assumption, they are "equally predictive" and you should give them equal chances.

Moreover, we can easily see that effective field theory becomes completely unpredictive in the context of Planckian physics and quantum gravity while string theory becomes extremely well-defined and predictive in that regime. That's of course the main reason why string theory is superior as a description of the physical reality. But as I have emphasized above, even if the "predictive power" were your main criterion, string theory would be at the top. In the extremely traditionalist approach, it would be there together with effective quantum field theory.

Finally, I want to mention that we have talked about 1,000,000 of "a priori independent" experiments. Needless to say, all these experiments are not "a posteriori independent". All known experiments are manifestations of the same Standard Model or the same general realtivity, after all. But the fact that the experiments have become "dependent" or related is nothing else than the existence of a theory - or a unifying theory - itself. The less independent various phenomena in Nature look, i.e. the more interlinked (and unified) they are, the more we have understood about their origin.

Can theories always be visualized?

Let me close this topic and mention another feature that people like to expect from attractive theories. They can "imagine" or even "draw" what they mean. The internal mechanisms can be "visualized" and "seen". If it is possible to imagine - or to create a visually impressive TV program about - a theory, the theory feels "superior".

In my opinion, this sentiment is a sentiment of the laypersons. In reality, there is no reason for a theory to be ready for an easy visualization. An impressive visualization may help a theory to be accepted by the people but the existence of such a visualization doesn't imply that the theory is more correct or more fundamental. Many correct theories that describe the reality at the fundamental level are notoriously hard to imagine or visualize simply because our cognitive abilities - and the movie industry - have been trained to imagine and visualize very different types of phenomena from those that are essential at the fundamental level.

So I think that the expectation that all things can be "seen" is unjustified. But even if you believed that the expectation is sensible, you should never treat it as a dogma. When you refine your ideas, the conjecture that a process can be visualized in a certain way is just another conjecture about the Universe. And conjectures in science can be incorrect. And they can often be proven incorrect.

The hidden variables in quantum mechanics are one of the best examples. A classical picture of the internal structure of quantum mechanical objects has been a dream of many people. The fathers of quantum mechanics realized that there was no reason why such a mechanistic description should exist. And in fact, after a few decades, we became able to prove that such a classical description is impossible as long as you accept that the Universe respects causality and locality at least at some basic level.

It has been proven that a particular project (of hidden variables) to rewrite the laws of physics in a "visualized" fashion has been doomed from the start. It doesn't matter that the project looked attractive to you. Nature always has the right to veto your theoretical projects. ;-)

Should we be satisfied with our understanding?

This brings me to another, related question: should we ever become satisfied with our present description of reality? Imagine that the description works but it looks a bit contrived and the reasons behind its detailed properties don't seem to be manifest.

Again, I would like to emphasize that the answer to this question can't be universal. If a feature looks contrived, it may be a sign of an inconsistency or incompleteness of your present theory. But such an awkward feeling may also be your personal psychological problem caused by your incorrect assumptions. When scientists study their theories and their relations to the relevant phenomena and other phenomena more carefully, they may usually decide which answer is correct.

In some cases, the contrived theories are shown to be incomplete and a new description that is more universal or that makes more sense is found later. In other cases, the feelings of "dissatisfaction" are proven to be misguided psychological feelings based on certain assumptions and these assumptions may be shown to be incorrect. Both possibilities are conceivable and a rational person can never be certain about the answer from the very beginning - only a dogmatic person can.

Can everything be predicted?

A similar question is whether we should expect that our theories will answer all "why" questions or whether some of their counterintuitive features will remain confusing or unexplained forever. Once again, we can't ever be completely sure.

A priori, we want to explain as much as possible. We want to ask new "why" questions whenever we can. On the other hand, there may also exist - and there often do exist - real limitations caused by the laws of physics. These limitations may imply that a better explanation can't exist. They may imply that all of our ideas how a "better" or "more fundamental" explanation should look like may be proven to be incorrect. Whether or not they look a priori intriguing is secondary.

None of these questions has a universal answer and we must always be ready to invent rational arguments and listen to rational arguments of others because in some cases, it is very important and fruitful to search for better explanations while in other cases, it can be shown to be a misguided philosophical exercise driven by irrational assumptions about the reality.

Are "useful" predictions necessary?

Finally, let me emphasize a point that has been written many times on this blog. A real theorist is not driven by practical applications of his work. He is driven by his desire to understand how the real world works. He wants to know about every awkward aspect of our newest theories and he wants to know which of them can be improved by finding a new theory - or by interpreting it in a new way - and which of them can't.

How to play golf

Video 1: "On that evening, my father was strangely anxious." This video shouldn't be watched by readers below 18 years of age.

We just spent an afternoon in Prague by learning to play golf. There are so many types of clubs and it is so difficult to hit the ball, especially for your humble correspondent. ;-) Moreover, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle guarantees that the higher momentum the club has, the less accurately it strikes the ball. I won't bother you with details but one minor pedagogical point is perhaps worth mentioning.

As we learned, among dozens of other things, the right way to wave the club is described in 30 Cases of Major Zeman (1975), a very popular crime serial and one of the most expensive movie projects ever shot in the communist Czechoslovakia. (You may also check up the excellent movie theme song by Zdeněk Liška.)

This particular part (called "Water Well" (1978), one of the 30 parts of the soap opera) describes a very old mad father who decides to exterminate his family, cut all the trees in their garden, and burn his house. The events took place in 1969, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia. The son eventually survives and tells us about the scary story.

Needless to say, in a communist propaganda movie, a person who is as sick as the very old man had to be a bankrupt reactionary ex-capitalist who didn't like the fraternal help from our socialist brothers in August 1968. Major Zeman himself, the guy who investigates similar crimes, is an extremely positive hero of the movie, namely an agent of the Czechoslovak counterpart of KGB. ;-)

However, this part of the soap opera also showed that the post-1968 neo-stalinism, much like stalinism itself, has made the life of many families unlivable so I don't know whether the soap opera has made a good case for socialism. After the Velvet Revolution, the question whether this propagandistic but popular (and maybe even professional and artistically rich) soap opera should be aired again divided the Czech society.

In the horror video above, the method useful for playing golf begins at 1:11. ;-) The club moves as a pendulum and you should rely on the natural acceleration of the club rather than the strength of your muscles.

The Visitors

If you happen to be interested in additional soap operas from the communist Czechoslovakia, check e.g. The Visitors (1983); a video.

The CML/CBM computer (not to be confused with the Commodore Business Machines; the acronym stands for "The Central Brain of Mankind" - a typically socialist vision about the future internet's hierarchy haha) chooses 4 experts to travel from the year 2484, when a global catastrophe is imminent, back to the year 1984, when Adam Bernau, a 21st century genius, celebrates his 11th birthday and when a notebook with his secret formulae to transfer the continents is burned, together with their family's home.

The "Expedition Adam 84" uses a time machine and is supposed to save the notebook before it is burned - and to use the know-how and save the Earth in 2484 once they return to the future - but because of some glitches, they have to spend several weeks in 1984. Yes, the actress who is Adam Bernau's mother is Václav Havel's wife. All the music in this soap opera was composed by Karel Svoboda who shot himself in 2007.

Ireland rejects Treaty of Lisbon: 53.4% "No"

The Treaty of Lisbon is a document that has replaced the failed European Constitution. It avoids some of the common European symbols and similar superficial details but the essence is unchanged. It is designed as a step to change the European Union into one country, one nation.

Is it good, is it bad?



The treaty is extremely problematic from a constitutional legal viewpoint. In many countries, including Czechia, the Constitutional Court decides whether the treaty is compatible with the national constitutions. This particular question is no detail because an unconstitutional conglomerate of contradictory laws could bring havoc to the national legal systems.

And it is not quite trivial to simply allow supernational laws to operate on your territory because there exist all kinds of other reasons why this shouldn't occur. Also, even if you were a eurofanatic, you can't just replace the national laws by the EU laws because the latter don't exist in many contexts and even if they did exist, the societies would not be ready for them.

One of the main problems is that the treaty seems to put itself above the national constitutions. Many constitutionals, including the Czech one, make such events illegal. International treaties stand above individual national bills but the national constitution is still above all of them. The Treaty of Lisbon seems to be a supernational document.



Václav Klaus is recovering from his hip surgery. He was given an organ designed for young athletes which is appropriate, as his tennis partners could testify. ;-) The surgery went well but for a week, he didn't feel as well as expected.

See Václav Klaus' official comments about these very subtle constitutional questions (automatic translation to English).

Five key questions:

1. Will Czechia remain an independent country that is able to fulfil its international treaties?
2. Is the treaty's direct relevance of the EU bills compatible with article 10 of the Czech constitution?
3. Is the European charter of rights an international treaty, and if it is, it is compatible with the Czech charter of rights and other parts of the constitutional system?
4. Will the EU remain an international organization that is allowed to acquire competencies according to the article 10 of the Czech constitution?
5. If the Lisbon treaty updates the treaty about our membership in the EU, shouldn't we also update the question in the accession referendum and repeat it?
   

Irish referendum

For the Treaty of Lisbon to be activated, it must be approved by every single member nation among the 27 member countries. This "Yes^{27}" outcome is self-confidently expected by the officials in Brussels to materialize before the end of 2008.

Now, whether such a treaty is a good or bad thing is a very controversial question, so it not too exaggerated to say that the probability that each country says "Yes" is not excessively larger than 2^{-27} which is about 10^{-8}. Indeed, Ireland, the only country that holds a referendum, has rejected the treaty yesterday (53.4% "No" vs 46.6% "Yes").



It is mostly the labor unions and similar institutions who protest against it: "No" dominated among poor people because the treaty is being associated with the "evil capitalists". A typical far-left "No" poster is above. It is not clear whether "poor" is quite the right word because Ireland's GDP per capita (PPP) exceeds that of the U.S. Anyway, these are clearly not the institutions I would normally support even though I tend to agree with their binary answer - another example of the huge anisotropy of the European politics. In Ireland, the treaty is an invention of the evil capitalists while in Czechia, it is mostly an invention of the social engineers. We are right, of course! ;-)

The Irish "social" logic is also paradoxical because the Irish prosperity is, to a large extent, due to rather consistent capitalist policies imported from the EU. ;-) But yes, they don't need any help anymore. Finally, there are also reasons to reject the treaty that I share with the typical "No" voters in Ireland, including a lack of democracy and the expected increase of taxes, and some of the No campaign commercials were very funny.

On Friday 13th, the champions of a unified European nation have a good reason to be superstitious. ;-)

Plan B

Nevertheless, the EU is said to have no Plan B.

It sounds so unbelievable that I actually don't believe it. ;-) This proclamation is just a method to scare potential "No" voters. At any rate, there are more responsible, more realistic, and less arrogant politicians in Europe, too. As BBC tells us, Prague has a Plan B. More precisely, it is Plan C because we are already in the middle of Plan B for the European Constitution. Czechia will take over the EU presidency in H1 of 2009 - when the Lisbon treaty was supposed to begin - and the politicians debate the "No" outcome as carefully (and sometimes passionately) as they debate the "Yes" outcome - something that you would expect in democracy, anyway.

And be sure that the Plan C may be something else than the same EU constitution under yet another name. ;-)

A possible strategy of the eurofederalists may involve attempts to create a "hard core" of the EU that gets unified faster than others. But I am not quite sure where such eurofederalists come from and what countries they want to incorporate. If the new tighter union doesn't include France, the Netherlands, Ireland (3 no referenda), and probably Britain, I am not sure whether they should use the adjective "European".

If e.g. Merkel and Berlusconi manage to approve a closer union, why don't they call it The Axis instead of the EU? ;-)

Nathan Berkovits: constructing a proof of the AdS/CFT correspondence

N=4 SYM Feynman diagrams are spin networks!

Previous article about the topic: Berkovits, Vafa: proving AdS/CFT

Nathan Berkovits wrote what I consider the most interesting paper (PDF) on hep-th today. It is nothing else than a perturbative proof of the AdS/CFT correspondence for the N=4 gauge theory and the AdS5 x S5 background of type IIB string theory.

Nathan Berkovits doesn't refer to Penrose's work but I think he should because Nathan's new paper is the most meaningful application of the concept of spin networks in physics.

Some history

Recall that Roger Penrose invented the spin networks in 1964 although it only got published in 1971. You have links that carry SU(2) spin "j" and that can be joined by vertices respecting the SU(2) symmetry, with the 3j-symbols entering as coefficients.

This is a somewhat cultural issue: particle physicists would refer to Ken Wilson all the time while general relativists would always talk about Roger Penrose. But it is true that Penrose invented spin networks years before Ken Wilson proposed Wilson lines (or loops) as a tool to study lattice QCD - that he also invented - in 1974.

Using the language of Wilson lines, the spin network construction can be applied to any gauge field. Quantum gravity in 4 dimensions was believed not to have such a gauge field but some people liked Penrose's idea so much that they invented a gauge field. They encoded the vielbein in a gauge field and claimed that spin networks are relevant for quantum gravity.

It can be instantly seen that this idea is just a sleight-of-hand. Four-dimensional or higher-dimensional pure gravity simply has no bulk gauge field and any introduction of such a gauge field is artificial and cannot tell us anything correct about the dynamics. Spin networks in spacetime have clearly nothing to do with gravity even though some people fail to see this fact even after 25 years.

What is a spin network

The language of Wilson loops makes this story very transparent. A spin network is a collection of open Wilson lines connected by vertices in a gauge-invariant fashion. Recall that a Wilson line is a path-ordered exponential of the integral of a gauge field. If you integrate over a close contour, you obtain a gauge invariant operator.

You may also integrate the gauge field over an open contour with two end points. In that case, you obtain an object that transforms as a representation of the gauge group at the beginning point and as its dual representation (for example, anti-fundamental representation if the first representation was fundamental) with respect to the group at the end point.

The gauge field can be re-expressed with respect to any representation you want. You may attach the representation as a label to the open contour. For example, you may add a value of "j" to the link. In this fashion, you can create a lot of open links that transform as various representations under the gauge group at various points.



If the endpoints of the open Wilson lines coincide, you have a chance to contract them - and multiply by the appropriate Clebsch-Gordan coefficients - to obtain a singlet under the gauge group. Such a singlet - a functional of the gauge field - is a gauge-invariant operator. In loop quantum gravity, this function of the gauge field at t=0 has also been interpreted as a wave functional corresponding to a spin network "state" in the Hilbert space but it is not too important because it didn't work.

What spin network is used by Berkovits

Nathan doesn't consider a gauge field in spacetime but a gauge field on the worldsheet because the resulting spin network is supposed to become a Feynman diagram - a network of lines embedded in the worldsheet. Also, he doesn't want to use SU(2). Instead, he needs the full supergroup relevant for the most popular case of holography, namely PSU(2,2|4). Note that the supergroup also includes fermionic directions.

The worldsheet action of the topological model is simply

S = Tr ∫ d²z [r² (g^-1∂g - A) (g^-1∂*g - A*) + F²/e²]

Here, the asterisk should be a bar, a complex conjugation on the worldsheet. Both the scalars "g" and the gauge field "A" live in the supergroup indicated. That's a rather unusual and simple way to define dynamics of the N=4 gauge theory, isn't it?

Naively, you may use the gauge symmetry to set "g=1". However, the action above has two parameters. The gauge coupling "e" should be taken to infinity at the end of calculations (the infrared limit). And the parameter "r", the radius of the anti de Sitter space, behaves as a mass term for "A". If the dimensionless radius "r" is small, new things (and holes of radius "1/(r.e)") can occur. It is impossible to set "g=1" in special regions.

The Clebsch-Gordan coefficients of the supergroup are used as the coefficients of the cubic couplings governing the Feynman vertices of the N=4 gauge theory. The quartic vertex is more subtle and requires one to understand colliding pairs of cubic vertices properly.

Work to be done

It is not so far clear how the integrals over the off-shell momenta arise from the sums over singleton indices - I suppose that the representation theory of the supergroup should actually have a "momentum-like" continuous label for the irreps so they're not really singletons - but anyway, when the things are done properly, the sum over all spin networks should be equal to the calculation of gauge-invariant correlators in the worldvolume of the gauge theory (or scattering amplitudes in the AdS space).

But the whole framework sounds very intriguing, especially because it is almost identical to the strategy that I have wanted to realize for many years. A guess of mine that I still don't see in Nathan's strategy is the idea that the [thickened] location of the Wilson lines corresponds to loci on the worldsheet where you [almost] touch the boundary of the AdS space (at infinity). I am still convinced it is the case.

But I would like to say that this reappearance of the spin network is a nice new example of Joe Polchinski's dictum (page 21/33 here) that all good ideas are parts of string theory. You might like the idea of a spin network and be irritated that it hasn't appeared anywhere in string theory. When you choose the right group and the dimensionality of the worldvolume that is reproduced by the network - which must clearly be 2, not 4, in this case - you obtain a pretty new description of well-known theories that moreover explicitly proves Maldacena's correspondence.

Membrane minirevolution

Sergio Ceccotti and Ashoke Sen wrote a paper about the Bagger-Lambert-Gustavsson theory, arguing that you get the right positively-definite moduli space on the Coulomb branch. Yesterday, there was a paper that indicated that the BLG Lagrangian could be just an unusual way to rewrite the super Yang-Mills theory and there is no new physics in it: the equivalence could be perfect which would be bad news.

But they also indicated that the conformal point of the M2-brane theory could be captured in a Princeton preprint from the day before yesterday. ;-) One more interesting fact: The 2006 paper by Bagger and Lambert, dedicated to the memory of Andrew Chamblin, has surpassed the point of 50 citations. Congratulations.

Feynman and Fermi: radio play

I recommend you a neat radio play about the Manhattan project:

Atomic bombers (real audio, 2 hours)
LATW plays at KPCC (website)

Real Player is required. Download it from realplayer.com and you will also be able to record the program. That may be helpful because the files will disappear from the website in about a week (or 3 months?).

Also starring: Bethe, Oppenheimer, Compton, and others.

I could probably say that the actor is not Richard Feynman but it is a cute cartoon, anyway. His "okay" sounds authentic and the facts are also fine as all readers of Feynman's books can tell.

At the beginning, the right solution is the solution that is more "conservative" - these were good times! - they just don't know which one is conservative. Czechoslovakia plays quite a role in the argument.

The Einstein accent is pretty cool, too. But you should listen...

Thanks to: Senderista

Why can't they see themselves in the mirror?

Note that different people have different research approaches. The two old ladies check that none of them can see herself and the problem is solved! ;-)

The other older lady makes an experiment with motion and rigorously determines that she is ... well ... unsichtbar. :-)

GLAST blasts off

One second ago, GLAST, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, was successfully launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (Google News).

It should look at the Universe in the gamma-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The gadget should be able to do various things, for example to observe gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, and the annihilation of the particles of dark matter (such as supersymmetry's neutralinos?) if this process is possible.

Among the less important applications, the telescope is able to falsify all Lee Smolin's theories of quantum gravity and to prove that Lee Smolin, who predicts that special relativity is a failure, has never been a serious worker in the field.

BP: peak oil reached

The Guardian informs us that according to an annual review published by BP today, the world oil output fell from 2006 to 2007.



Figure 1: an oil barrel. You often hear about it but did you know how it looks like? ;-) It still costs less than USD 1 per liter which is like the cheapest beer brands.

The daily oil production fell by 0.13 million barrels (0.15 percent) to 81.53 million barrels per day. The proven oil reserves stayed essentially flat at 1.24 trillion barrels which is 41.7 years of current production. Using the current prices around USD 140 per barrel, the value of proven oil reserves is about USD 170 trillion i.e. the global GDP for roughly 3-4 years.

Now, the "peak oil" theory claims that a catastrophe occurs when the maximum rate of petroleum production is reached. Well, chances are that we are already there. Or maybe not. ;-) The first problem we obviously encounter is how to determine whether we are there or not. Why?

• The oil production is not the idealized curve that smoothly increases and then smoothly decreases. Much like other functions in the financial markets, it is a complicated function with many wiggles. I didn't tell you but the oil output dropped in 2002, too.
  
• The oil production is not determined by natural factors only. It is determined by the price and even more importantly, it is affected by decisions of the oil-producing countries and capitalists.
  
• For example, the oil production in 2007 dropped largely because of the OPEC's decision to shrink their output (they produce about 40% of the output). It is unreasonable to expect that the same decision will be made every single year after 2007.
  
• Even if you were pretty certain that the output is going to decrease, you can't be certain that it is a great investment to buy crude oil because the current price may already be another example of a bubble.
  

And I would like to emphasize one more point:

• The oil production in barrels has decreased but the oil production in US dollars has increased dramatically. ;-) For certain purposes, the latter is a more important quantity. It is the production and consumption in dollars that shows whether the actual importance of oil has peaked: it hasn't. ;-)
  

Now, in the simple theory, the oil price is going to rise (approximately) exponentially. Is it true? We don't know. Even if it is going to rise exponentially, it is not such an unusual development. Prices of many other things increase exponentially. For products that we consume, this exponential increase is called inflation. All these functions are "polluted" by a lot of mostly unpredictable "noise".

Speculation is risky

What matters is the rate of the increase. In the past decade, the oil prices grew 1.25 times a year (in average), i.e. by 25%, ending up 1 order of magnitude above a minimum reached 9 years ago or so. The rate accelerated in the last year. But are you sure that the price would continue to increase by 25% or 40% a year? I am not sure even though it is conceivable, to say the least.

Oil price forecasts

Oil price could reach USD 250 soon - the Gazprom chief says that it will while the BP boss says that it won't - but it could also drop to USD 50 either before that or soon afterwards. Commerzbank predicts a peak of the oil price at USD 150-170. You never know and if you do know and if you earn a lot of money by your speculations, you're just a damn lucky bastard (even if you may bribe others to say that you are more than lucky)! :-)

42 years of oil reserves: a subtle statement

The number "42 years" sounds very finite - and environmentalists should be happy that we will only be "ruining the Earth" for 42 more years (the temperature in the last 42 years grew roughly by 0.2 °C) but we should realize that the figure is the ultimate minimum.

Cutely enough, the people who claim that oil consumption is lethal - because of global warming - are usually the same people who are warning us that the remaining oil reserves are small. These two "warnings" directly contradict each other. But people like Alexander Ač don't care about logical contradictions - what they care about are their goals.

In fact, the proven reserves are about 42 years every year. It seems almost certain that the total oil reserves are more than twice as large, Richard Pike calculates by properly weighting the conjectured oil reserves by the probability that they exist. On top of that, new huge oil reserves are found approximately twice a decade and old oil fields are continuously upgraded.

New discoveries

For example, last month, Iraq claimed to be the world's #1 oil superpower with as much 350 billion barrels. A few days earlier, the communist bastards in Venezuela added 30 billion "proven" oil barrels, reaching 130 billion proven oil barrels in the country. The latter increase itself - 30 billion barrels - corresponds to 1 year of global oil production/consumption!

Furthermore, a completely new 12 billion-barrel Kazakh field was found in 2000 and a 5-8 billion-barrel field in Tupi, Brazil was found half a year ago. These events increase the perceived oil reserves by 1% or 0.5%, respectively. A week ago, the North Sea reserves jumped from 30 billion to 37 billion barrels. On the same day, it was announced that Croatia's oil reserves probably match those of Kuwait (!!!) although they are harder to access. Two days later, the reserves in Bualuang, Thailand were upgraded from 7 billion to 11 billion barrels. Not a bad week.

And be sure that they're not the only discoveries of the kind. Similar events are likely to keep the official figure of "42 years" constant (or increasing) for quite some time. In fact, it is more reasonable to interpret the figure "42 years" as the "psychological" time scale that the oil producers want to think about in their strategic reviews rather than a "physical" constant of Nature.

Sometimes, the official figures may also decrease but such a decrease occurs substantially less often than an increase.

The events in the previous paragraphs should convince you that it is preposterous to interpret the estimates of oil reserves as an exact science. This statement doesn't mean that the correct number "doesn't objectively exist". But there don't exist methods to find out the exact value and the qualitative answer "we probably have one century or several centuries of oil left" is as good for practical purposes as the results of more "rigorous" procedures.

King coal and his kin

Moreover, all the numbers above are about "oil oil" only. There are other carbon-based resources. As the oil price increases, coal is going to return to many places of our life. With its 4.5 percent growth of consumption in 2007, coal was the fastest growing "fuel" for the fourth consecutive year. The coal-to-oil price ratio dropped by a lot, despite Peter Shor's theory that these ratios are constant and it is only the value of money that fluctuates. ;-)

As Larry points out, the figures behind the reserves don't include tar sands and shale oil either.

Stimulating research

At any rate, the current oil price is (already?) annoyingly high: people begin to protest in many countries. All the sensational solutions that may make us independent of oil are 10 times more profitable than they were a decade ago. If you discover a new set of technologies to replace oil, you may earn 10% of the world's GDP. ;-)

If that's not enough for you and other wise guys, it might be a good idea to at least admit the possibility that no magic solutions exist at this moment and no left-wing government is going to "social-engineer" such a solution (certainly not Hugo Chávez's government!). ;-)

On the other hand, I am confident that such a solution will exist in 42 or 84 or XY years. Such a new solution will materialize because of a simple combination of two factors: genuinely profound breakthroughs in technology (or even science?) and the new prices that will make less profound technologies more economically acceptable.

There is no good reason to try to speed up or to slow down the activity that will eventually lead to new solutions.

Spencer, Braswell: Fixing feedback diagnosis

In this dose of peer-reviewed skeptical literature about climate change, we look into Journal of Climate. Roy Spencer and William "Danny" Braswell wrote the paper called

Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Demonstration (click)

PhysOrg.COM offers you a press release:

Has global warming research misinterpreted cloud behavior?

Spencer et al. argue that whenever a correlation is observed (especially in the case of the cloudiness-temperature links), it is essential to distinguish which processes are the causes and which processes are their consequence.

They cleverly play with a theoretical toy model to demonstrate the wrong conclusions about the feedback strength that models and modelers often make - an approach that clearly makes theorists like myself happy. When the fixes are done, the climate sensitivity is shown to be much smaller. We have discussed this issue several times. For example, read the May article Spencer vs RealClimate.

In the press release, Spencer also repeats a thesis you may have read many times on this blog - namely that the climate is probably dominated by negative feedbacks, i.e. stabilizing mechanisms, not by positive feedbacks, i.e. destabilizing mechanisms. The apparent stability of the Earth for billions of years is a major reason to believe this general thesis.

Realists and Fritzl

For the sake of balance, let us also look at some cutting-edge research by the alarmist camp where the debate is already over so they can focus on more far-reaching aspects of climate science, including sociology and psychology. ;-)



At the beginning of 2007, Ellen Goodman discovered that climate skeptics were just like the holocaust deniers. The Right Reverend Gordon Mursell of Stafford (The Church of England), the Gentleman on the right side of the picture, has invented a better theory:

Climate change sceptics 'as bad as Fritzl'

Recall that Josef Fritzl of Austria (the left Gentleman on the picture) has created a shadow, six-children family with his daughter that has been locked in the basement for decades. Now, Dr Mursell says:

You could argue that, by our refusal to face the truth about climate change, we are as guilty as he is.

Needless to say, Dr Mursell is an excellent scholar so he also constructs a perfect proof of his statement, according to the AGW and IPCC standards:

We are in effect locking our children and grandchildren into a world with no future and throwing away the key.

Sounds convincing, doesn't it? :-) Mursell's theory has impressed most thinkers who believe the catastrophic man-made global warming. An isomorphism between the climate skeptics and a child molester is exactly the type of science that the IPCC expects and that the taxpayers from U.N. member countries pay for - which is why almost no one has complained. Excellent!

Stafford vs Chester

Mursell's colleague in the Church of England, Dr Peter Forster of Chester, was less lucky. Last week, he called "to allow science, not emotion, [to] lead the debate on global warming" which is a scientific "open question". Wow, what an explosive blasphemy! ;-)

Hasn't Forster noticed that, as pointed out in Mursell's profound words, science is just a lame excuse to do nothing and to continue with sins? What do you think that happened after Forster's shocking words?

Bishop’s call on climate change angers environmentalists

The article above also mentions another British-born heretic, Freeman Dyson. Friends of the Earth who plan the acquisition of the brotherly Church of England were particularly upset. They emphasized: "The debate is over. The alarm bells are ringing." Amen.

Well, it doesn't seem that the Church of England has a unified approach to the issue of the Anti-Christ.

The Church Times report on that.

Well, I think it is a kind of blasphemy that the Church of England allows degenerated intercourse-baskets of Mursell's type to scream in its cathedrals and to use the name of God to spread his witchcraft. ;-)

WMAP power asymmetry: FAQ

A lot of confusion - and downright nonsense - has been written about the power asymmetry of the WMAP data. The "contrast" of one cellestial hemisphere seems to be greater than the "contrast" of the other hemisphere.

Is there an asymmetry at all?

Yes, it has been described by Eriksen et al. in 2003. See also their 2007 update. It is not too strong but it is observable.

How do you divide the sky to the hemispheres?

There is clearly no "canonical" way to divide the sky but it just happens that the dividing plane that maximizes the asymmetry is rather close to the plane of ecliptic - i.e. the plane of Earth's orbit around the Sun. As you might know, this plane is also very close to the ecliptic plane of the Milky Way, i.e. our galaxy.

Is the asymmetry statistically significant?

Yes, it is. It is approximately by one order of magnitude larger than the expected strength of "noise".

Cannot you get rid of this effect by some trivial "fix"?

The answer is probably Yes. In 2006, Freeman et al. have shown that the asymmetry for "l" smaller than 8 disappears if the WMAP dipole vector is increased by 1-3 sigma (i.e. 2-6 km/s, from 368.11 km/s). The asymmetry at higher values of "l" probably goes away if the foreground near the ecliptic (the galactic processes that "pollute" the global picture near the "equator") is treated more carefully.

If that's not the case and if new physics is required, is the inflaton enough to create such an asymmetry?

No, the inflaton predicts nearly isotropic data. A new field that can modulate the power, known as the "curvaton", or something equally powerful would be required. With a new field, you can get all kinds of new effects, of course, including the differences between the two hemispheres.

If the asymmetry is "real", is it a specific problem for inflationary cosmology?

No, the asymmetry - if it were real - would be surprising for pretty much every "minimal" model replacing inflation, too. A slight modification such as the addition of a "curvaton" would be enough to account for it. But once again, the effect is probably not real, as discussed above: it is rather an artifact of a wrong dipole and ecliptic subtractions.

Is there a rationally justifiable link between these asymmetry questions and the arrow-of-time debates?

Not at all. All the hints referring to similar links are absurd and meaningless inventions of a Chris Lintott who likes to "promote" cosmology, primarily among the audiences with IQ below 20. BBC was helpful for such a goal and their recent article was, from a scientific perspective, a breathtaking junk.

Recall that the fantasies that there remains an unsolved "arrow of time problem" that could even be related to cosmology contradict the very basics of thermodynamics and statistical physics that have been known for more than 100 years.

The existence of the arrow of time - i.e. the second law of thermodynamics - is a rule that applies to all systems with many degrees of freedom. Cosmology is just another context where the second law holds. The second law can be applied and should be applied to cosmology but cosmology cannot be applied to the second law.

The validity of the second law in a terrestrial context has clearly nothing to do with cosmology and cannot be linked to issues in cosmology such as the WMAP power asymmetry. The validity of the second law in the lab can be derived - and has been derived - from statistical physics properly applied to the large number of degrees of freedom describing the lab.

Whoever misunderstands these things should take an undergraduate course of thermodynamics and statistical physics again because he or she is severely failing in these subjects.

Is there a known relationship between the multiverse ideas and the power asymmetry?

There could exist such a relationship but no such relationship is known at this moment. The very existence of a multiverse doesn't imply that the power spectrum should be symmetric or asymmetric and the asymmetry doesn't imply that the multiverse should or should not exist.

If the asymmetry is caused by "new physics", this new physics must clearly be considered simultaneously with inflation (or any other picture that you choose to replace inflation) because the asymmetry is a feature of the very same dataset. The comments that the asymmetry would tell us something about the Universe "before the inflationary era" or even "before the Big Bang" are completely unsubstantiated.

Once again, these reports are cheap, pseudoscientific, pornographic material addressed primarily to readers with IQ below 20.

Sherwood, Allen, and radiosondes

The media recently wrote far-reaching comments about the latest Nature Geophysics article by Steven Sherwood and Robert Allen (Yale University):

Warming maximum in the tropical upper troposphere deduced from thermal winds.

The authors - or at least the media - have claimed that a new method to "measure" the tropical tropospheric temperatures has removed all contradictions between the theoretical and empirical warming rates in the troposphere.

Recall that the greenhouse-dominated models predict rapid warming in the troposphere, roughly 10 km above the equator. The satellite measurements (UAH MSU, RSS MSU) show an actual warming rate that is at least 10 times slower than the theoretical predictions. The data from balloons and radiosondes they carry, for example the Hadley Center data, confirm the satellite figures. Detailed numbers will be discussed below.

That seems to be a problem. Every acceptable solution to this problem must either find serious errors in both the satellite and balloon data or a serious error in the theoretical models (or both).

Steven Sherwood and his pre-PhD student, Robert Allen, use a different strategy. They pretend that the discrepancy doesn't exist at all. How do they do it? Well, they want you to believe that the measurements of the temperatures don't exist. Instead, they propose their own, idiosyncratic, elaborated "measurement" of the tropospheric temperatures. Well, there is one additional immediate problem: it's not really their own method, as we will see. ;-)

Sherwood & Allen vs Pielke Sr

They look at some patterns in the thermal (?) westerly winds, manipulate them to obtain a rather continuous function, and claim that this function of the winds data is ... a measurement of temperature that is apparently better than the thermometers. Their method is not really original: it is a small subset of the methods discussed by Roger Pielke Sr and two co-authors in 2006 and especially by Pielke Sr and four co-authors in 2001. See also Pielke's comments about his priority.

So the idea is that instead of proving global warming, you prove global blowing :-) and then you argue that blowing and warming sound similar, especially according to your model that links the two. This strategy has the advantage that when the climate begins to cool down, you can also say that global blowing is the same thing as global cooling and the cataclysmic warming can continuously "rotate" into a new kind of catastrophic cooling. :-)

The problems with the particular conclusions by Sherwood and Allen have been discussed by

Roger Pielke Sr,

too. He is preparing a technical manuscript on that issue. The main drawback of their approach is circular reasoning. They want to demonstrate that the models are consistent with reality but what they actually call "reality" is extracted from the models, too.

More precisely, the relationship between the winds and the temperature is derived from the very same models that are shown to disagree with the actual temperature measurements by the balloons and satellites. So the arguments they show only support the compatibility of one particular theoretical prediction with the observations - namely the quantity describing winds as predicted by the very same models.

But a correct model should agree not only with one but with all observed quantities - especially with the temperature if this quantity is the main focus of your models. ;-)

The models also link this quantity related to winds to the temperature but the real measurements actually falsify the predicted temperature trend and the Yale authors don't change anything about that. To a large extent, they only demonstrate a "self-consistency" - which really means uniqueness of one prediction by the models that characterize the winds. It is not shocking that the predictions of such a model are self-consistent; it is much more non-trivial constraint that they should also be consistent with the real data.



A weather balloon (click).

Radiosondes vs models

Finally, I want to show the status of the "direct" predictions and measurements of the temperature and to mention two graphs from Climate Audit.



This chart, taken from RealClimate.ORG, shows the overall warming expected from the doubling of CO2 concentrations from 280 ppm before the industrial revolution to 560 ppm expected around the year 2100 (assuming business-as-usual, i.e. a pretty constant rate of CO2 emissions in the future), as predicted by the GISS model E, dominated by the greenhouse effect.

Look in the middle of the picture, above the equator. You see the dark red "hot spot" over there. At the height (y-axis) corresponding to the pressure of 200 hPa, you are in the middle of the dark red cloud where the total warming should be not only higher than 3 °C (between 3 °C and 14.6 °C) but much higher than that, probably around 5 °C or so. This figure (5 °C) is roughly 1.5 times the surface warming (around 3 °C according to the IPCC's central figure and around 1.8 °C according to the picture above) - a classical feature of the greenhouse models.

Now, in 50 years, we add about 100 ppm of CO2 and we should therefore induce more than 1/3 of the effect of the CO2 doubling. So in 50 years, the place above the equator where the pressure is 200 hPa should heat up by more than 5 °C / 3 = more than 1.5 °C. (The CO2 emissions in this 50-year period were actually closer to the "earlier" emissions that should have a higher warming impact, because of the logarithmic slowdown: so my figure is probably an underestimate.) Does this significant warming actually occur in reality?



This is the actual graph of this tropospheric temperature record as measured by the Hadley Center's radiosondes (balloons). The net warming during the last 50 years is at most of order 0.2 °C and probably much smaller than that: Steve McIntyre calculated that since the beginning of the "satellite era" in 1979, the balloon trend has been actually negative (cooling). At any rate, it is very close to zero - and it is certainly much smaller than the 1.5 °C of warming predicted by the greenhouse models, as explained in the previous paragraph.

And yes, March 2008, the most recent month they have released, was the HadAT2 200 hPa tropical radiosondes' coolest month at least since the late 1950s (since January 1958) - one that was only matched by 1 month in the early 1970s, namely January 1972 (both Jan 1972 and Mar 2008 had -1.4 °C in the column, check the link in this paragraph).

This place above the equator is the most natural place where the temperature should be measured if your aim is to verify the greenhouse theory of the climate - simply because the signal is predicted to be maximized in this region. And the observations are smaller than the predictions by an order of magnitude or more.

Now, one order of magnitude is not a detail. If you accept that it is fair to compare economics and climatology because their "typical" predictions are comparably inaccurate (and I think that it is fair), the order-of-magnitude discrepancy between the theory and the observations is similar to a prediction by a group of economists who use their "consensus models" to forecast that the GDP will grow (or drop) by 40% a year - because of some effect - but the reality is only 4%. It's a pretty bad prediction, even in the fuzzy context of economics, isn't it?

Now, I want to emphasize that we must be a priori very open-minded because there can exist problems both with the observations as well as with the models. On the other hand, when you look at the weather balloons and the radiosondes they carry (see the picture on the left side), it is not too easy to imagine that there is some serious problem with them. These radiosondes measure the temperature (and the wind speed/direction) by thermometers and transmit the resulting numbers to the terrestrial radio receivers; see the Wikipedia text about radiosondes.

Try to think hard and invent an explanation why such a simple system would be sending warming trends that are 10 times smaller than the "real" ones (predicted by the models). I don't know of such an explanation. But once you find one, you should be ready to solve 1 or 2 similar puzzles - namely why the completely different satellite methodologies also lead to the same negligible warming trend if the "real" trend prescribed by the IPCC should be approximately 10 times faster.

I think it is sensible to expect an explanation what's wrong with the balloon and satellite numbers before someone's presentation of certain numbers from some computer games has a chance to be considered as "reality" by sane people.

Good luck. Before you find your ingenious method to solve these key puzzles, I will continue to think that the IPCC predictions have pretty much been falsified because the order-of-magnitude discrepancy we observe is pretty much the most serious discrepancy that we could a priori expect and if that were not enough for falsification, nothing would be enough. The qualitative agreement in one quantity of minor importance (related to winds) is not enough to confirm your models if more important predictions (temperature) fail.

Now, the balloon data may be very non-uniform and the "local noise" in them can be high. But it is fair to say that if the actual (accurate) thermometers can't demonstrate any significant warming trend over there, the "life on Earth" probably won't die because of such a warming either. A deadly fever is usually strong enough to be visible by thermometers, especially by the most accurate ones created for this purpose. ;-)

So think hard but try to imagine that your assumptions could be incorrect, after all.

And that's the memo.

String theory animation

This is what they had to create as an "introductory animation exercise" in Andrzej Zarzycki's course, "Advanced Computing Studio", in Fall 2007. Wow.

Hat tip: Naomi Clare

Euro 08

Euro 2008 (Wikipedia) begins tonight, at 6 p.m. local (Swiss) time, by the match Switzerland vs Czechia. Petr Čech, which means Peter Czech, is one of the sharp tools of the Czech team.



The goalie - attached to the Russian Wheel of the Vienna Prater - differs from others because he is 42 meters tall and has 8 arms.

He must also constantly wear the helmet because of his complex post-fractures of the skull - a feature he shares with his small model that will actually be allowed to play.



Basel is preemptively flooded by Czech fans. ;-)

Update: Czechia:Switzerland 1:0, good!

Only His nonexistence could excuse Him

Tom Levenson, an MIT professor of science writing, wrote an interesting analysis of Einstein's relationships to Judaism in particular and religion in general.

Einstein's characteristic attitude is revealed by the following quote in his letter to Edgar Meyer (January 1915):

I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him.

I have heard many people saying that Einstein was a deeply religious person. It was never clear to me why they ever thought so (if they actually did). Even a superficial reading of Einstein's texts - including at least some of the things hidden in between the lines - must assure a sensible reader that Albert Einstein was as strong an atheist as e.g. Steven Weinberg.

Einstein's nice words about Jewishness largely reflected his compassion with other Jews who have also been harrassed because of their ethnicity. Einstein's references to God in general speeches were engineered to maintain his good relationships with other Jews while all of his authentic comments about God were metaphors about science (for example, the remarks about God who didn't play dice).

I remember reading his "Mein Weltbild" that makes many of Einstein's opinions about religion, Jewishness, pacifism, Nazism and German politics, quantum mechanics, origins of relativity, dynamics of rivers ;-), principled theories in physics, other giants of physics, and many other topics manifest. The book was translated to English as "The World As I See It": unfortunately, the translation is not quite complete.

Among thousands of other ideas, he explains that he thinks that religion was born out of fear while the "other" type of religion - linked to moral values - has almost nothing to do with the classical concepts about God.

In this short text, I don't want to claim that Einstein's opinions were good or bad but they have been whatever they have been. What I find more surprising is the easiness with which some elementary historical questions - such as Einstein's opinions about religion - can be rewritten and clouded in myths. It is both tempting and doable to employ authorities of Einstein's magnitude as drivers of a particular world view.

Smartkit: I/O game

Full screen (click)

There are no instructions, so you must solve it yourself. ;-)

It told me that the total time was 5 minutes. If you solve it, you will see 6 words in the first line of a small window. In the fast comments, write the first word that hasn't been written by anyone before you - so that the successful solvers eventually write the whole message.

More games like this one: smart-kit.com

Bonus: An interview with Brian Greene (3x 10 minutes, about the World Science Festival, the destruction of the world by the LHC, and similar topics)