Just three weeks after we learned that Lewis Pugh gave up his ludicrous plans to kayak to the North Pole, we have another story of the same kind.
MSNBC (click): Stuck in the Arctic for three weeks and counting
According to the normal rules of Nature that likes to punish excessive stupidity, these people should have been dead for weeks by now.
As pretty as it has been for eons...
However, someone manages to waste USD 50,000 a day for an icebreaker to keep these insane folks alive - yes, that's already a million bucks just for their survival - so you may expect that the ultimate result of their freezing trip to the Arctic will be a "document" about a devastating effect of global warming on the Arctic. ;-)
MSNBC seems hopeless but the L.A. Times think that the green bubble bursts. Almost no one cares about Obama's and the Democrats' suggestions to inflate the tires. Instead, the slogan of the day comes from the GOP: "Drill, baby, drill." ;-)
Václav Klaus in Portland, Oregon
The Czech president was/is visiting Oregon. Sorry, Gene, I didn't know about it in advance. See e.g. his speech
Karl Ockert, a brewmaster in Oregon, was late because he was having beer with the president (see the picture above). Klaus experienced some standing ovations in Portland and a dinner for 1,200 guests while a James Pitkin wrote some nasty things about Klaus in the local press.
Klaus' visit to the U.S. continues through October 4th. In Seattle, he joined Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani, and Jeb Bush and picked the Columbia Award. He gave this speech:
The Democrats mostly supported the intervention while the Republicans mostly opposed it. I watched the proceedings in the U.S. Congress and my reaction is: wow.
See also:Lawrence Summers: Taxpayers can still benefit from the bail-out, Financial Times
These guys have a lot of courage if not irresponsibility. Not too shockingly, Dow drops by 7% (by 778 points, biggest absolute drop in history), S&P 500 by 8.8%, and Nasdaq by 9.1% (and oil by 10%). On the "previous" black Monday, in 1929, Dow dropped by 12.8 percent so these quantities (but not others!) seem to be comparable by now. ;-)
Some of the Republicans have already claimed that the GOP with its loud "No" was reacting to Nancy Pelosi's partisan speech: well, I must tell you, that's a pretty bad policy to decide about the world economy according to an emotional reaction to an irrelevant bitch.
While I generally don't like interventions as a matter of principle, fundamentalism in these matters is simply a bad approach. Even though greed, irrationality, and panic is behind the bizarre developments, it doesn't mean that people should use the same values - greed, irrationality, and panic - to design the future.
In my opinion, the testimonies of virtually all of the liberals and conservatives who opposed the bill were populist and ill-informed in character. If someone says that "ordinary people" are innocent in this situation, he's simply neither a right-wing politician nor a realistic one. These problems began because many financially unsubstantiated mortgages were allowed for people who couldn't naturally afford them.
These transactions always had two sides, not one: the insufficiently liquid borrowers as well as the banks. Whenever they agreed about a mortgage that wasn't sensible, greed and irrationality played a role even though the detailed reasoning why the transaction was a good idea was, of course, different for the two sides. In the case of the lenders, political correctness has surely contributed, too. Without political correctness, the bankers would immediately know that most of those people were simply not wealthy enough to afford certain houses.
At any rate, the housing prices grew more than they should and people who were dangerously in debt were "owning" many of these houses. The housing bubble has inevitably burst and the trend has reverted.
But all these events belong to the past. They are part of the initial conditions of a physics problem that the lawmakers were supposed to solve today. I am afraid that their solution is incorrect.
Another opinion that baffles me is the belief of many of the lawmakers that the sentiments and events on Wall Street do not influence the "ordinary people", whatever is the definition of this bizarre, Marxist-sounding category. I view this opinion as a stunning misunderstanding of the economy. Whether someone likes it or not - or finds it politically incorrect or not - the banks, millionaires, and billionaires are much more important for the life of the whole U.S. and global economy than generic, "ordinary people".
It may surely sound as a very decent idea to try to punish the people on the Wall Street for the sick state of the financial system but what many people don't realize is that such a punishment will also (or especially) punish the "ordinary people". Some of them are also guilty - like those who have borrowed something they shouldn't have (and cheated when they described their financial situation) - and many of them are innocent.
A proper rational solution requires economics expertise rather than cheap populist and ideological references to "constituents" who have no idea what's going on and what will happen in different scenarios either. Bernanke is one of the leading U.S. experts in economic crises and Paulson has an extensive - and successful - experience with managing big financial institutions: his present job is not too different. Their calm and professional comments made much more sense than the comments of the passionate lawmakers.
I enjoyed e.g. the debate between Ron Paul and Ben Bernanke - they clearly agreed about most things even though their final, binary answers were different - but most of the other lawmakers simply didn't look like high-quality politicians to me.
While I am an enthusiastic advocate of the free markets, I believe that there exist several basic macroeconomic numbers whose reasonable values have to be controlled by the Feds and the administration. The value of money (whose time derivative is called the inflation) and the overall confidence in markets are among them. Just like the government has to guarantee that money is not counterfeited (if the system depends on the money, and the present world does), they must make sure that the money's value (and the accessibility of loans, which is closely related) is not compromised by other means. There exist certain assumptions that are necessary for capitalism to work. It is similar to the evolution of biological species: it works almost automatically but the physical laws must guarantee certain essentials of life.
Let me use the most general, non-technical description I can find: it is absolutely clear that if the confidence in the capitalist system itself goes to the trash bin and if most of the "assets" that have flooded banks and institutions become "toxic", unquantifiable, and unexchangeable, capitalism can't work well simply because capitalism depends on a certain degree of confidence in the system, in its players, on a well-defined value of assets, on easy enough trade, and on the positive value of most companies' actual assets - much like life depends on constant laws of Nature, well-defined numbers of copies of DNA molecules, the ability of living creatures to move, and the "alive" (as opposed to "dead") status of most animals in Nature that haven't yet been eaten or recycled. ;-)
Once we're talking about scary scenarios - where capitalism may become disrespected or even replaced by something else - I am surely in favor of interventions that should otherwise be as market-friendly as possible (and the reverse auctions etc. in the plan were surely highly market-based). You know, Central Europe can offer you many examples of situations in which the capitalism and freedom itself were replaced by something fundamentally different for many decades.
Well, I would prefer to sign a few papers and print a couple of otherwise unphysical and meaningless pieces of paper (such as banknotes). If I could have prevented the Great Depression after 1929, using a time machine and the present knowledge of economics, I would have done it. However, it is likely that the best solution would have to start years before 1929 just like the best solution to the current mortgage-related crisis would start already in 2003 or so. ;-)
The Feds and the administration should be in charge of the macroscopic degrees of freedom: there are still millions of more microscopic degrees of freedom left to the invisible hand of the free markets that naturally adapt to the external environment, including the macroeconomic parameters.
Because there is a feeling of an evaporating credibility of the markets that leads to dropping stock markets and increased volatility, something should be done about it. It's bad that the people who are actually important in the financial system (and wealthy) don't have a meaningful representation in the U.S. Congress. The body seems to be full of people who think that it doesn't matter whether anyone trusts any stocks, banks, funds, lenders, borrowers. But they're wrong. It matters a lot. More precisely, it probably doesn't matter for them because the number of jobs in the Congress is unaffected by the economy and their financial situation is arguably independent of the stock markets and banks, too. But the voters (including pensioners, investors, small businesses, large businesses, consumers, and charities) may live in a different world.
Let's hope that their mistake won't have excessively dramatic consequences.
The Guardian writes about a system that will monitor people's motion to make sure that they're not using cars and jets unless it is necessary to convince other people not to use cars and jets.
Andreas Zachariah was a graduate student at a college in London. But once he wrote the program that translates the GPS data from cell phones to the distance walked, cycled, bused, subwayed, trained, driven, or flown, he became the CEO of the Carbon Hero company. ;-)
The Guardian explains that the software will be useful for other companies to publicly chastise their employees for using the means of transportation with a large footprint such as cars. So you should better buy another minimalistic cell phone that may be used for your recreational trips that will be invisible to the Big Brother.
Airlines may use the gadget to detect the number of people in the airplanes. If it is realized that some of them could bike or swim, the motor may stop right after taking off to save the fuel (at least until it explodes on the ground). The advantage is that the sinners will never repeat their sin in the future.
Pachauri is working on a program that will monitor what you eat. Whenever you say "steak" into the microphone, the system will realize that you have either eaten or you plan to eat meat. You will have to buy carbon indulgences for USD 20. Another program will monitor the vibrations of your body. If it is cold and the program doesn't detect any shivering for hours, it means that you turned your heating on. Again, a visit of your local carbon priest will become necessary.
The Czech Republic celebrates the Czech Statehood Day today. Exactly 1,073 years ago, on September 28th, 935, Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia - now St. Wenceslaus, the Czech patron - was murdered by his brother Boleslaus. He was only 28.
Yes, Wenceslaus I is the same guy whom you know from "Good King Wenceslas", the carol in the video above (see lyrics, both English and Czech). In the carol, a poor man tries to find some winter fossil fuels. The good king indirectly helps him; Wenceslaus also saves his freezing page boy by a little bit of global warming emanating from the king's carbon footprints. (The environmentalists have literally rotated the "good" and "bad" upside down! Neither Czechia nor the Vatican is planning to denounce St. Wenceslaus because of his warm footprints so far.)
Sv. Václav - his Czech name - is also the Gentleman on the horse on the Wenceslaus Square in Prague, a place named after him, much like many other things. Boleslaus killed Wenceslaus while the latter was coming to the church: a very nasty scenario. It was enough for Boleslaus to succeed Wenceslaus as the prince of Bohemia.
Four new recordings of the Czech national anthem were presented for the anniversary.
AP informs that the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the civilization grew by 3 percent between 2006 and 2007, mainly thanks to developing countries. See Google News for more.
The approximate figure 3% shouldn't be so shocking given the fact that the world's GDP growth was about 4% and the GDP and CO2 production are intimatelylinked, except for some increases in efficiency that remain subleading. And they will remain almost negligible unless a completely new technology becomes economically more acceptable than those based on the combustion of fossil fuels, fermentation, alcohol production, animal agriculture, and cement manufacturing.
Analogously, the U.S. CO2 production increased by 2%, agreeing with the estimate based on the GDP growth, too. China defended its new status of the #1 producer of CO2, leaving the U.S. its #2 spot while Russia's #3 position is threatened by India.
If the output kept on increasing geometrically by the same rate as in 2007, which I expect to be exaggerated, the world's CO2 output would double every 23 years. But the people who think that the CO2 output may decrease by 50 or 80 percent even if no breakthrough involving non-carbon technologies emerges are living in a different multiverse. That includes the skittish IPCC pundits whose prediction in AR4 of a stagnant-or-decreasing CO2 output has been brutally falsified by the data. Consensus is obviously not sufficient to make sensible predictions.
Without a revolution in these technologies, which is a hypothetical event you can never be sure about and you can never order, a drop of CO2 output by 50 percent in a few decades would be equivalent to bombing us back to the Stone Age.
CO2 and warming rates
As Gene says, the benefits of those 3 percent of CO2 are huge. But what do they do with the Earth's temperature?
First, one must translate the growth of CO2 output to the increase of CO2 concentration. If the CO2 output grows "exponentially", it surely doesn't mean that the concentration grows exponentially, too. In fact, as the CO2 concentration increases, the geological and biological sinks get stronger, too. Consequently, a higher fraction of the human CO2 output is absorbed. It follows that the increase of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is not exponential but closer to a linear one: it is very likely that those 1.8 ppm/year will stay with us for a few more decades: see the Mauna Loa, Hawaii graphs.
When you consider the warming effect, there is another deceleration. Whatever the climate sensitivity is, the effect of CO2 is logarithmic. So the CO2-induced warming rate will decelerate even if the man-made human CO2 output grows exponentially with a rate similar to the current one. The CO2 concentrations would have to increase exponentially for the CO2-induced warming to increase linearly: that's because the exponential and logarithmic functions are inverse to one another.
Sane people should realize that unless new revolutionary technologies are found to replace the carbon-based ones (which cannot be guaranteed by any law or wishful thinking), it is impossible to substantially change the CO2 output and pretty much all "cheap" fossil fuels will eventually be used, leading to the same net total warming (whatever its exact size is: 0.5 °C or 2 °C from all the remaining fossil fuels). Because the future generations will have more viable alternatives than we do, it is more meaningful to use the existing fossil fuels sooner rather than later.
Incidentally, you may have seen the graphs proving that global warming reduces the number of pirates. However, today, pirates have seized a Ukrainian ship with dozens of post-Soviet people and 33 Ukrainian tanks - see Russia Today and Voice of America - so the global warming is obviously not as strong as some people have argued. ;-)
A Russian battleship was sent to Kenya to fight against the insufficient magnitude (or absence) of global warming. Meanwhile, an American ship is trying to help the Slavs and looks at the pirates. These friendly Africans demand a USD 35 million ransom. ;-)
Light up all the blue boxes. To do so, you must create a program, "main method", out of the basic commands (step, turn right, turn left, jump, light up) and two procedures, "f1" and "f2", that you may create, too. Press "Go" when your program is complete.
I completed the 12 levels with 189 commands. See more at ArmorGames.COM.
Hat tip: [...]
A Peruvian militant communist buzzword censored. Sorry, that's the price you pay for having nicknames as silly as senderista. :-)
A group of 61 U.S. science Nobel prize winners has signed a somewhat dumb letter endorsing Obama as a visionary leader who will furthermore give more money to science, offer everyone a lot of energy, cure all diseases, and stop the climate from changing. In other words, a true Messiah.
The letter reminds me of some of the "anti-Charter 77" documents supported by scientists and artists who wanted to show how concerned and politically correct they were during communism, by endorsing the only progressive party in the country and by condemning the reactionary elements.
Well, I don't know whether Obama is a visionary. I don't know whether he will give more money to science. And I don't know whether it is a healthy idea to do so. But I am pretty certain that this letter won't mean much.
In democracy, it is a bizarre idea that Nobel prize winners should organize their own political parties and it is a childish idea to think that their Nobel prizes give them a special tool to influence political questions that have nothing to do with their awards.
In the real world, politics and science interact in many ways but there are good reasons to keep them as isolated as possible in many situations. And it is the 61 laureates, and not George Bush - who is squarely in the field of politics, not science - who have transgressed the protective boundaries between science and politics.
And by the way, it would be even more naive to believe that these winners really think that Obama - the famous footnote adviser to Laurence Tribe's crackpot paper called "Curvature of Constitutional Space" - is an intellectual giant above all of the winners as they kindly suggest. :-) They probably have other reasons to write these ludicrous things, don't they?
It might also be interesting to notice that several (alive) U.S. science Nobel prize winners haven't signed it:
Günter Blobel, medicine
Baruch Blumberg, medicine
Paul Boyer, chemistry
Thomas Čech, chemistry
Steven Chu, physics
Elias Corey, chemistry
Eric Cornell, physics
Hans Dehmelt, physics
Gerald Edelman, medicine
Andrew Fire, medicine
Robert Furchgott, medicine
Daniel Gajdusek, medicine
Murray Gell-Mann, physics
Ivar Giaever, physics
Roy Glauber, physics
Herbert Hauptman, chemistry
Alan Heeger, chemistry
David Hubel, medicine
Russell Hulse, physics
Jerome Karle, chemistry
Har Khorana, medicine
William Knowles, chemistry
Edwin Krebs, medicine
Robert Laughlin, physics
David Lee, physics
Tsung-Dao Lee, physics
Yuan Lee, chemistry
William Lipscomb, chemistry
Roderick MacKinnon, chemistry
Rudolph Marcus, chemistry
John Mather, physics
Kary Mullis, chemistry
Ferid Murad, medicine
Joseph Murray, medicine
George Olah, chemistry
George Palade, medicine
Arno Penzias, physics
Martin Perl, physics
William Phillips, physics
David Politzer, physics
Irwin Rose, chemistry
Andrew Schally, medicine
John Schriefer, physics
Phillip Sharp, medicine
Karl Sharpless, chemistry
Hideki Shirakawa, chemistry
Hamilton Smith, medicine
George Smoot, physics
Samuel Ting, physics
Steven Weinberg, physics
Carl Wieman, physics
Kenneth Wilson, physics
Rosalyn Yalow, medicine
Ahmed Zewail, chemistry
Nothing against the 61 authors of the letter linked above - but thanks to the people in my list. ;-) With 54 non-signatories, we still lost but the results in November can be different.
Among the 54 people, I have spoken to a couple of laureates, including Gell-Mann, Glauber, Hubel, Weinberg, and Wilson. In the list of the pro-Obama signatories, I have talked to Gilbert, Glashow, Gross, Ramsey, and Wilczek, if I haven't forgotten about anyone (which is very likely), so if this filter of mine is included, it's already a tie! :-)
Well, I don't want to claim that e.g. Steven Weinberg will inevitably vote for McCain/Palin but you can't rule out this hypothesis by looking at the letter only! :-) And I am convinced that many people on my list will vote for the GOP ticket and I could even tell you some names if it weren't ... politically incorrect.
Off-topic: Climate Wars, a propagandistic BBC program about the climate science, has led to ... well, Climate Wars: see BBC again.
Herman Günther Grassmann was born in 1809 and died 131 years ago, on September 26, 1877, in Stettin, Prussia, Greater Germany (now Szczecin, Poland) to a family of an ordained minister who taught maths and physics.
It's an anniversary of his death, not birth, so this story won't be quite complete. But this mathematician had an interesting CV. Unlike others, he was a lousy student and it seems that he studied no maths and physics at all. Instead, he chose classical languages, philosophy, and theology.
Because of some twists and turns, he decided that he should teach maths at a Gymnasium (a job similar to his father's). But he needed an exam. His score was so-so but he was allowed to teach at the high school. It just happened that during that time, he made some crucial steps that eventually led him to his now-famous 1844 paper referred to as "A1". Not bad for a high school teacher.
What was the paper about? Well, he defined various formal, exterior (or "combinatorial" or "wedge") products, and discussed the concept of linear independence. The only other axiomatic system known before Grassmann was the Euclidean geometry so his new abstract system was quite revolutionary. With some updates, Grassmann's work also led Hamilton to discover quaternions and it influenced Felix Klein and Élie Cartan. Linear algebra and group theory would be virtually unimaginable without Grassmann's "momentum".
The Prussian government wanted to know how valuable "A1" was. So they asked Ernst Kummer (of the K3 surface fame). He obviously didn't read the paper in detail and wrote that the paper contained "commendably good material expressed in a deficient form". That ended Grassmann's hopes for a university job. What did he mean by the deficient form? Well, the approach of Grassmann was virtually identical to the contemporary approach to linear algebra, linear independence, exterior algebras, and abstract products - it was the approach that dominates 150 years after Grassmann's paper.
Besides linear algebra, Grassmann also discovered the law how colors add, Grassmann's law. These laws were correct, unlike Helmholtz's alternatives. Add some papers about mechanics, electromagnetism, and crystallography.
There are several things named after Grassmann. A Grassmannian is the space of all linear subspaces of another linear space; it is related to projective spaces. However, the first concept that physicists connect with Hermann Grassmann are the Grassmann (anticommuting) numbers. In the present form, this specific number system was defined by David John Candlin in 1956 but it seems pretty obvious why they were named after Grassmann.
As you can see, Grassmann was 100+ years ahead of his time. It shouldn't be shocking that he had to abandon mathematics. Instead, he learned Sanskrit, translated Rigveda, and collected folk songs. With this activity, he could achieve at least some recognition: for example, he was elected to the American Oriental Society.
As a linguist, he could also give a new meaning to the term "Grassmann's law": it's the rule that the first aspirated consonant in a pair of two consecutive ones loses the aspiration. The reason, as I see it, is that it would be pretty hard to aspire so many times and so quickly. ;-) This rule holds if the two consonants belong to two different syllables and if it is Sanskrit or Ancient Greek that we talk about. ;-)
Grassmann had 11 siblings and 11 offspring, 7 of which lived up to their adulthood (it's the opposite relation than in M-theory phenomenological models where 7 dimensions stayed small). In politics, he supported the unification of Germany. With his brother Robert, they published a text supporting this scenario in the framework of constitutional monarchy. However, the newspaper that had published it was going in a different direction and Grassmann's politics became inconsequential.
What about the black holes we see in the telescopes?
All of them are almost exactly electrically neutral - so you don't need the Reissner-Nordström solutions if you're an astrophysicist. But many of them have a huge angular momentum which is why the Kerr solution is important.
The Kerr solution prevents the angular momentum from exceeding a limit:
J < GM2
The rotating black holes that saturate the bound above are called extremal Kerr black holes. And they're the focus of their paper.
Video 1: GRS 1915+105, the heaviest known stellar black hole in the Milky Way, including fake pictures and its authentic sound translated from its X-ray spectrum to somewhat more melodic frequencies. (MSNBC about Wheeler.)
Are there any extremal black holes observed in the telescopes? Well, not exactly extremal ones. But can you get close? You bet. For example, a binary X-ray source GRS 1915+105 (wiki) has
J / GM2 > 0.98.
Wow, that's almost one. It's useful to know something about this object as well as extremal Kerr black holes in general. The object has mass about 14 solar masses.
Extremal Kerr black holes have entropy equal to A/4G, as all large black holes. But because the area scales like the squared radius and the radius scales like the mass, the area also scales like the squared mass i.e. like the angular momentum. The entropy is, in fact,
S = 2 pi J / hbar.
Note that in proper physics, the entropy of all simple enough black holes is naturally an integer (or rational) multiple of pi (and not of log(2) or log(3) or log(1917) as loop quantum gravity nuts would like you to believe).
Can they recover this entropy microscopically? Yes, they can. They first isolate the NHEK near-horizon limit of the geometry. This limiting geometry is written in coordinates "t, phi, y" and "theta". The "t, phi, y" portion is AdS3-like and it is fibered and squeezed over a compact "theta". The "y" coordinate is radial and "t, phi" are coordinates spanning a cylinder in which a CFT2 becomes chiral (left-moving).
Let's move to the boundary description psychologically
Consequently, the situation has a CFT2 boundary dual: it is the recently discussed chiral CFT of Strominger et al.: see the full video and brief transcript of his Strings 2008 talk. You may be surprised that a four-dimensional geometry has a two-dimensional dual. But you shouldn't worry too much because the extra coordinate "theta" is compact: you may imagine that it is analogous to the five-sphere in the AdS5 x S5 case.
The reparametrizations of "phi" generate a classical Virasoro algebra. If you construct the corresponding generators and compute their classical Dirac brackets, then you get the Virasoro algebra with a central extension. It may be another surprise that a classical calculation gives you the "quantum" central term but it does, roughly because the left-moving central charge is written as
cL = 12 J / hbar
in terms of the classical quantity "J". In other words, the "hbar c_L" coefficient in the central extension can be written simply as "12 J" which has no Planck's constant. That's why it can be seen in classical Dirac brackets. It works because the angular momentum is so large (in units of hbar).
When they compute the central term (and thus the entropy, because of Cardy's formula), they must be careful about the boundary conditions for different components of the metric at "y=0". They scale as different powers of "r" (or, essentially, "y"), depending on how "chiral" these components are.
At any rate, when the dust is settled, the (approximate, plus minus 2%) entropy of GRS 1915+105 calculated from the angular momentum (2 pi J) works, is close to 1 x 10^{79} (times Boltzmann's constant), and can be extracted from a chiral two-dimensional conformal field theory whose left-moving central charge is 2 x 10^{79}, including the numerical coefficient. ;-)
I've checked the numbers (using Planck units and assuming the central value of the mass) but yes, the error margin is about 50% because of the uncertain mass of the black hole.
With some mice and touchpads, the wheel only works in one direction (down; you can't return up). The cleanest way is to download and install a patch from this web page:
Search for light green "Download the chrome patcher" on the page above and click "here".
It will work afterwords. It is compatible with all versions of Chrome (2,3) that I have tested. Alternatively, you may go to the Control Panel, Mouse, Wheel, and switch from "Enable Universal Scrolling" to "Use Microsoft Office 97 Emulation Only" or something like that. Chrome will be fixed but some other places where wheel can be useful (e.g. scrolling the programs in the Vista start menu) may break.
You may write your experience with the hints above in the fast comments. It seems that starting with the real, non-beta versions 1.0.154.36 and above, released on December 11th, 2008, the bug is not there.
While your role in the game is to be God (or "a god", in this case) and help the creation of new life forms by your intelligent design, I guess that the people who play the game will end up believing and understanding evolution more than they did before.
Most negative reviews are complaining about a totalitarian system of digital rights management (activation). Spore creature creator (YouTube) is free (trial).
If you have a good idea that helps many people, you can win USD 10 million.
Your solution can be about anything, your imagination has no limits, but the resulting idea must be just like the First Mile Solutions or Hippo Water Roller to have any chance. ;-)
Meanwhile, Al Gore used Clintonfest to urge "civil disobedience" toward coal plants. The Reference Frame urges the people to obey the law and to protect their property against violent attacks with guns whenever necessary.
New president of South Africa
Many people are asking me whether the new president of South Africa, Kgalema Motl-anthe, is my relative. I don't know for sure. We may have a common ancestor but he probably lived a long time ago. Incidentally, Anthe is a moon of Saturn.
Physics fun link
Wired Science collected 10 pretty entertaining yet insightful videos with various interesting physical phenomena.
1E 0657-56, previously used to "directly see dark matter" (TRF I, II), is an example of such a cluster. I am not sure whether the present authors fully realize this direct link with dark matter: I would bet that there is only one new effect going on with these clusters, not two new effects.
The motion can't be explained by the normal FRW cosmology or anything inside the observable horizon, they claim. It's been called "dark flow", to make it sound as mysterious as "dark energy" or "dark matter".
The driver of the motion is arguably behind the cosmological horizon! The paper by Kashlinsky, Atrio-Barandela, Kocevski, and Ebeling will be published this week in online Astrophysical Journal Letters but you can already read the papers as preprints (hat tip: mtheory):
Recorded talks from Strings 2008 are available now. Choose among 41 talks and click "detailed record" to see the video.
Firefox
Even more off-topic: Firefox users should click Help / Check for updates, and update to Firefox 3.0.2, especially if Firefox was collapsing when quitting. It seems fixed now.
Gerolamo Cardano (or Girolamo Cardano or Hieronymus Cardanus in Latin) was born on September 24th, 1501, because his mother didn't succeed in her abortion attempts (at least this is what he was saying). As you will see, the pro-choice people want to prevent us from knowing how to solve algebraic equations. ;-)
He became quite a skillful physician. For example, he was also the first man who described typhoid fever. However, he couldn't really follow his interest in medicine professionally. The only reason why he wasn't admitted to the College of Physicians in Milan was that he was a bastard, both literally and metaphorically. :-)
Instead, he had to make living by gambling and chess and he became pretty good at both. These skills were useful not only for his practical life, to earn at least some money, but also for his gifts to the civilization. In the 1560s he studied game theory and was the first thinker to treat the concept of probability systematically. "Liber de ludo aleae" was only published a century later.
For a person who was both broke and bastard, he invented quite many things, including the combination lock, the gimbal (concentric circles attached to each other at different points, to allow the internal one to be horizontal), and the Cardan shaft (transmitting the power in motors without chains). The latter two inventions are mechanical devices with many degrees of freedom (and joints). Nevertheless, he understood that perpetual motion was impossible - except for the celestial bodies, as he said. These are pretty cool observations done a century before Newton was born.
Moreover, he was the first mathematician who studied hypocycloids, the curves drawn by a point on a disk that rolls around (or inside) another disk: the boundaries of the disks are also known as cardanic circles and were useful for first high-speed printing gadgets.
The Cardan grilles are well-known in cryptography. In a special sheet of paper, you have a few holes. Superimpose this sheet of paper on a seemingly ordinary letter and read: the subset of the letters you see will make up a secret message that was incorporated into the "non-secret" letter (that a skillful writer had to design by writing stuff around).
To make his family matters more dramatic, he had problems with his offspring, too. His favorite, eldest son was executed because he poisoned his cuckolding wife. The younger son was stealing money from Cardano (for gambling), cropped the ears of his son (Cardano's grandson), and "helped" his father to be prosecuted as a heretic for publishing Christ's horoscope in 1554. Gerolamo Cardano, the heretic, was forced to resign as a professor. But Pope Gregory XIII eventually decided to give him papal tenure (with regular annuities) and Cardano could complete his bibliography.
He has written many texts on alchemy, mechanics, medicine, probability, and natural sciences in general. However, he is remembered for discoveries in algebra, especially his formula to solve the cubic equations. But I have already written similar texts about these algebraic matters, so please read the article about Évariste Galois.
Richard Lindzen is not only a renowned climate scientist but also an experienced person who has met many people and understood how many institutions work. In his new, published 35-page paper that is also available via the arXiv,
he shows that institutionalized climate science is becoming an inefficient tool to answer scientific questions.
For a few decades, the discipline has been losing the creative confrontation between theory and observations and the standard practice of compact problem solving that can lead to results in a finite time. Instead, unconfrontational huge observational projects that never end and simulation took over. The amount and importance of bureaucracy has skyrocketed, a development that has affected many other disciplines, too. This has allowed various players to consciously politicize the field which is particularly important in the case of climatology.
Lindzen writes long and exciting pages about various, very specific examples of activists who have been promoted for political reasons and who help to cripple the objective character of climatology. You will learn what is happening with those scientists who are not "politically correct" in these matters and how the skeptical positions of late scientists are posthumously altered. It may be a scary reading but Richard Lindzen presents the story very calmly and rationally. Recommended!
Off-topic, for economy junkies: CSPAN-3 broadcasts the Senate grilling of Bernanke, Cox, and Paulson.
Recently, several people became interested in another discipline that could be overrun by string theory ;-), namely atomic physics.
Free fermions as well as the so-called fermions at unitarity might have dual AdS-like gravitational descriptions - that would only differ by boundary conditions - even though the details are not known.
However, a sensible candidate geometry is known and it has the desired symmetry, namely the Schrödinger symmetry, a nonrelativistic subgroup of the conformal symmetry which is the symmetry of the Schrödinger equation. It includes the Galileo group, scaling of time and space by different power laws, and some special conformal transformations.
As I said, the precise hypothetical dual theory is not known (for example, the replacement for the "number of colors" seems unclear) which is why I don't view the proposal too seriously at this moment but the relevant bulk geometry has two additional dimensions, rather than one that we are used to from holography. The other one is a compact light-like direction. And a few additional consistency checks work, too.
Spenta Wadia wrote a semi-technical review of string theory that might be useful for many TRF readers familiar with some related physics concepts but not with those of string theory:
The text includes a few pages about perturbative string theory, spectrum, interactions, AdS/CFT and fluids, cosmology, and particle physics in string theory.
But it also presents the correct microscopic calculation of black hole entropy as a nontrivial check that every theory of quantum gravity has to pass. In his opinion, holography might become the ultimate underlying principle that defines string theory at the end.
You know, the microscopic calculation of the entropy could have led to a wrong result: the correct result is thus a nontrivial piece of evidence supporting the theory. Because the result could have been wrong at the beginning, the theory is falsifiable. That's one of the important features that put string theory above the would-be competitors.
The hypothetical falsification would be based on observations only indirectly: the black hole entropy hasn't been directly observed but it can be calculated by semiclassical techniques involving the laws that have been established empirically. But this indirect character of the falsification doesn't matter: falsification based on indirectly known facts is as powerful a killer of wrong theories as falsification based on direct observations. So far, all other conceivable competitors have been killed in this way and chances are that all of the non-stringy ones will be killed in the future, too.
In this weekly dose of peer-reviewed skeptical climatological literature, we visit Springer's Climatic Change where Craig Loehle has the following article:
He shows that the tree ring proxies can completely mislead you. Even if you have reasons to believe that the tree ring width primarily depends on the temperature, there is one subtlety that can literally turn your results upside down: nonlinearity.
In his previous papers, Loehle has presented evidence that in fixed conditions (and moisture), the growth rate is bounded from above for a given species. Under normal circumstances, the growth rate increases with temperature. How is it possible that it is bounded? Well, it may (schematically) behave either as
rate = 1 - exp(-temperature)
rate = 1 - (temperature - optimum)^2
In the first case, the rate asymptotically approaches a given value. The second scenario may be even more realistic: the growth rate can actually be maximized for an optimum temperature and then it can decrease again. If you want to extract the temperature from the rate, you have to solve a quadratic equation that is famous for having two solutions. ;-)
Consequently, it is easy to incorrectly pick the other root of the quadratic equation that has the effect of flipping pieces of the graph upside down. So it's actually easy to get a medieval cool period instead of the correct medieval warm period if you're not careful enough: this wrong result may be hard to discover because all the statistical tests may be extremely encouraging.
The R^2 coefficient measuring the correlation in a test period may be as high as 0.99 (for example, on the picture above); nevertheless, the qualitative conclusions outside this interval can be completely wrong (in the picture, the upper solid line between the years 200 and 600 is the right one but you get the lower, dashed line instead). Loehle also proposes possible tricks to deal with this problem, including truncation.
There are of course many other difficulties that may complicate the reconstructions based on tree rings but that doesn't mean that you should forget about this one. If you are impressed by the nonlinearity argument, you should take Loehle's previous reconstruction a bit more seriously because it avoided all tree rings. See also Loehle vs Schmidt.
The host of "Newsnight" is Jeremy Paxman. TRF readers may know him from The Great Global Warming Swindle where he is shown as an example of a new kind of morality based on man-made global warming: "Now the Prime Minister's back from his holiday. He's unrepentant and unembarrassed about yet another long-haul destination."
But let's now return to the LHC first beam day, the most symbolic day of experimental science in the last 3 decades. The old, senile, and obnoxious guy who says that he doesn't give a damn about science (and a penny for science) unless it feeds his throat is - believe me or not - the president of the British Association of the Advancement of Science, David King.
Do you think that Mr King has the right job to advance his deeply anti-scientific sentiments and that he has chosen a good day to ventilate them? Prof Brian Cox (CERN), a former rock musician, fortunately had something more cultural and sane to say about this issue. ;-) The only thing that Cox forgot to mention was that King, much like the LHC alarmists, was a tw@t (even though, at 4:52, Brian was pretty close to this goal!).
Note that at the beginning, Paxman apologized that the BBC has referred to hadrons as "heydrons" - because of their pure ignorance. Needless to say, David King complains two minutes later that we already know too much about the heydrons. :-)
Jeff Id (noconsensus.wordpress.com) provides us with some new perspective on the new hockey stick graph, Mann et al. 2008. It seems that the paper is not only a case of sub-prime science but an example of scientific fraud.
For example, look at the two graphs of the temperature in 1700-2000 above (click to zoom in). Imagine that you have two curves, the purple one and the blue one. Imagine that you are Michael Mann and you want to write a paper about global warming. Which one would you use?
What do these two lines mean? The purple line comes from 64 datasets that were not used, for unspecified reasons, while the blue line comes from 55 datasets that dominate Mann's extrapolation procedure. Wow, it's just amazing.
The numbers 55 and 64 are pretty large. Don't tell me that you will get these two qualitatively different curves by averaging "random" subsets of the datasets. Unless Jeff has made a mistake, the "convenient" datasets were clearly chosen by hand while the "inconvenient" ones were manually thrown away.
If this is not fraud, what is?
But other things are even worse. 1,083 proxies out of 1,209 were "completed": the last 50 years were invented.
The absurd "blade" in the last 50 years in the graph above (click to zoom in) was completely fabricated: it comes from invented data, too. This is actually not the first time. Would it be really so difficult for some officials to notice what's going on here?
Exactly 100 years ago, on September 21st, 1908, Hermann Minkowski gave a talk titled "Raum und Zeit" ("Space and Time"; book version) in Cologne, Germany in which he proposed a natural interpretation of Einstein's special theory of relativity in terms of a geometry with an indefinite signature.
Using his words, space and time lost their independence and only their union remained physical. The distance between points (0,0,0,0) and (t,x,y,z) in spacetime is
ds² = -(ct)² + x² + y² + z²
and must be preserved by the allowed transformations of the spacetime which include both the ordinary rotations as well as the new "boosts" responsible for switching to different inertial frames (as well as translations).
This talk hasn't changed anything about physics of special relativity, as understood by Einstein, but it has affected the way how we think about these phenomena. And Minkowski's picture has made it easier for Einstein to develop general relativity in the following decade. Minkowski, who thought that his ex-student Einstein was a "lazy dog", didn't see these developments because he died in 1909 (ruptured appendix).
This video is cute because it shows how naturally elastic the Minkowski spacetime is. The areas or volumes are preserved, much like the 45° angles associated with the light rays. It follows that the distances are contracted and the processes are slowed down from the viewpoint of reference frames in the state of motion.
Some memories
When I was a 10-year-old kid, there were all kinds of articles about special relativity that made me excited but none of them explicitly mentioned the indefinite signature of spacetime. Instead of rediscovering it instantly, I remember proposing a bizarre theory of a Euclidean spacetime that obeys the normal Pythagorean theorem.
Because this spacetime disagrees with the rules how the speed of light should be combined with others, I designed some even more bizarre rules how the coordinate times and proper times should be extracted from the spacetime diagrams. As a result, the composition of the speed "c" and a small speed "v" only differed from "c" by terms proportional to "v^2/c" which, I believed, was compatible with the available experiments.
Needless to say, it was a thrilling moment to realize how natural the whole picture of spacetime becomes when you admit that the metric is indefinite. Everything suddenly makes perfect sense. Einstein had to be absolutely certain about his theory once he combined the bits and pieces.
Relativity remains emotionally unappreciated
It seems obvious to me that many people interested in physics still don't appreciate the true power and the real content of the Minkowski geometry of our spacetime. All those people who want to describe gravity in terms of triangulations, condensed matter systems, spin networks, loop quantum gravity, and all these "wonderful" ideas completely miss the point. They are still thinking in the old three-dimensional way.
Since 1905, and especially since 1908, the Lorentz transformations mixing the space and time have been exactly as fundamental and well-established symmetries of Nature as ordinary rotations. They're a new part of the Lorentz group. If your hypothesis doesn't allow one to derive that the Lorentz invariance holds, it is exactly as severely flawed as a hypothesis that doesn't allow objects to be rotated in space.
Frankly speaking, I view even the "legitimate" attempts to experimentally find violations of the Lorentz invariance to be artifacts of people's inability to get the message of 1905 and 1908. Why aren't they equally eager to look for violations of the rotational symmetry? I think that the only sane explanation is that they still haven't appreciated what the years 1905 and 1908 mean for physics.
As has been explained many times on this blog, the Lorentz symmetry can't be emergent in any sense. If there exists no formulation of your theory that shows that the Lorentz symmetry is exact - or that the theory is a small deformation of another theory where the Lorentz symmetry is exact - then there is no reason to expect that the violations of the rules of relativity will be small. In that case, your theory is dead.
If there were any "atomic structure" filling the spacetime - aether, spin foam, causal dynamical triangulation, or any other term of this kind - then you could just check what happens with the structure when you apply the Lorentz transformations from the video above. The structure would clearly squeeze and become singular. There would exist a preferred reference frame in which the structure looks most isotropic. Relativity would be brutally violated.
The vacuum must be absolutely empty. There must be one microstate corresponding to the vacuum: the entropy density must be zero, otherwise this density - being the time-component of a four-vector - would violate the Lorentz symmetry by itself. Any kind of "matter" that is similar to the gases, liquids, and solids in any nontrivial way that would fill the space would kill relativity (and your theory).
General relativity makes relativity stronger, not weaker
I want to emphasize that these powerful constraints dictated by special relativity are not "weakened" by general relativity in any way. The Lorentz symmetry must be as accurate a feature of the local phenomena in general relativity as it is in special relativity. General relativity is called in this way because it is still relativity i.e. it includes special relativity but it is generalized because the transformations that don't change the form of the laws must include all diffeomorphisms, not just the Lorentz transformations.
Moreover, a region of spacetime that can be approximated by the Minkowski spacetime must be symmetric under the Lorentz transformations itself: this symmetry can't be broken, not even spontaneously. Which regions have to satisfy these constraints? Surely all regions that are small enough, relatively to the curvature of the surrounding space. But in fact, the condition must also be satisfied by large regions of spacetime as soon as all the sources of curvature inside this region may be approximated by small enough local perturbations.
Relativistic quantum field theories are the only "immediate" examples of theories that satisfy both the rules of relativity and quantum mechanics and string theory is the only theory that "goes beyond" the most obvious, local quantum field theories but keeps their essential properties. Some aspects of it probably continue to be misunderstood but whoever wants to return physics to the epoch of the aether, before 1905 and 1908, is a severely deluded, slow thinker, not a revolutionary.
summarized some experimental evidence suggesting that the decay rates of nuclei could periodically vary every year - by up to 0.5% or so. They link the variations to the Earth-Sun distance which doesn't seem inevitable: the phase doesn't seem to work too well (there's a lag). There exist other quantities that may change during the year - such as the relative orientation of the Earth's and Sun's magnetic field etc.
At any rate, if these oscillations are real, they're really bizarre. Some people suggested variations of the fine-structure constant as a function of the distance from the Sun or an effect of the neutrino flux. The first explanation is far-fetched while the latter is down-to-Earth. There could exist even more down-to-Earth explanations.
Once the police found the body and confirmed the sad news, the headline was changed.
It was known from the beginning that the ambassador, Ivo Žďárek (47), was in the hotel (the Marriott Hotel ★★★★★ in Islamabad) during the explosion. Bastards!
A month ago, he worked as the ambassador to Vietnam but moved to Islamabad. His office covered both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The one-ton-of-explosives truck (the truck followed a small car that hit the gates and "opened" them) suicide attack has also killed 50+ people (mostly hotel staff and drivers) plus CIA agents whose number remains classified.
I wonder whether Pakistan is able to protect their nuclear weapons if they cannot protect a five-star hotel against cheap old dirty Al-Qaeda tricks.
While the 30-ton transformer has been fixed, a large spill of helium occurred because at least one of the 1,700 superconducting magnets failed.
The event known as "quench", caused by a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, heated up roughly 200 magnets in the sector 34 (the last sector that was just being commissioned) by 100 °C. The vacuum may have been lost in parts of the pipe, too.
This story will delay the LHC at least by two months (needed to warm it up, fix it, and cool it down again; update: sorry, at least until Spring 2009): Special CERN announcement, Thaindian, FoxNews, New York Times. The LHC alarmists may enjoy several additional days of life. :-)
The problems are disappointing but surely not unprecedented. The LHC's predecessor in the same tunnel, LEP, was nicknamed "Lots of Extra Problems" because many things broke at different stages of the project.
This is LHC, Les Horribles Cernettes, about liquid nitrogen, not helium, but you may get the idea anyway. :-)
We just returned from the ice hockey match. In a dramatic contest between two beer towns, HC Lasselsberger Pilsen defeated HC Mountfield Czech Budweis 9:4. It's pleasure to watch such games. ;-) After 5 matches, Pilsen has all 15 points and stands at the top of the Czech Hockey Extraleague - something that we haven't seen for very many years.
Now I just saw that those who have some stocks had a pretty good day, too. The Russian figure should actually be 28.7%, not just 22%: it reverted most of this week's losses. (Yes, the numbers such as 28.7% and 11.73% are new national records for a daily jump.) Earning money must be relatively simple for the people who have some access to fast tools and capital.
Peter F. didn't like that I haven't criticized the bailout plans of Paulson et al. Well, I accept the criticism. But I am already annoyed by this (mostly verbally fabricated) crisis, too. Markets are statistically wiser than bureaucrats in distributing resources and quantifying the value of things. But when it comes to overall quantities such as the "general confidence in the markets", they can behave in a crazy way.
The U.S. administration could in principle be more sensible - at least in isolated cases - and it seems that it is the case right now. The markets started to behave like if we lived in another Great Depression - and we're technically far from anything like the recession (the last U.S. GDP growth was 3.3% annualized): they seem to be as mad as hysterical women in the asylum or as global warming alarmists. And it's just good that someone is trying to stop them.
So I admit that I have some understanding for their "uniform pumping" of dollars into the economies. This is pretty much a flavor-blind adjustment of the overall global economy - an intervention of the same type as the adjustments of interest rates - and governments and central banks should probably be allowed to do similar things. They're just protecting a sensible "value of the money" and the agreement between the official interest rates and the psychologically determined risk aversion of the typical market players.
If companies like AIG had been allowed to go bankrupt, it would be cleaner from a market perspective but it could have influenced many other innocent players. Maybe, the U.S. economy could be the first one to face serious problems. And we could say that other economies won because they were stronger. Well, I understand that Paulson et al. wouldn't like this outcome and they have the right to do something about it. In this sense, Paulson behaves as a skillful manager of a huge company (the U.S.) and big financial institutions are branches of his company.
These interventions probably help the global economy, too, at least in the short-time and medium-time perspective. In 20 years, the interventions they are just doing may have slightly negative consequences but they may protect us from five bad years etc. which could be more important than what happens in 2028. These guys have already allowed Lehman Brothers to die - which means that they allowed the laissez faire principles to be more healthily destructive than during any other previous administration. So I am not going to criticize the U.S. administration for the newest "socialist" bailouts because others would have to be criticized as well.
And let me honestly confess that I am not sure whether I would have the courage to allow other big financial companies to die if I were responsible for the broad U.S. economy. Moreover, the ideas to make money market accounts safe may be good, too. Normal accounts like that simply shouldn't be risky, especially if you can avoid the risk by putting the money into your fridge (you would only sacrifice interest rates which are now pretty low in the U.S. and many other countries): it's about the definition of the money and the central banks and treasury departments and ministries of finance have the responsibility to do such things.
I have some half-baked ideas about new rules how to "naturally" regulate excessive leverage and volatility in the markets. For example, it would have similar effects as the ban on short selling that SEC is going on impose on financial stocks. Short selling is something a priori legal and sometimes helpful but in the case when it helps people to benefit from companies' losses that are mostly caused by the irrational behavior of third parties, I agree that short selling is an evil, ethically problematic, and counterproductive activity.
It is not quite the same thing as normal selling: the difference is sometimes similar to the difference between building houses and demolishing houses. Both of these things may be useful but I still think that the building part is just more important and valuable in most cases and the total profit that people make by demolishing things should be smaller than the total profit from building things - because demolishing is easier. It just sounds bad if the profits from these two activities are equally large. And whenever they are (almost) equally large, it means that the leverage in the markets is huge which is simply bad and creates instabilities.
(As you can see, I have the same opinion not only about ordinary markets but also about other things - including people's good name and even scientific theories' respectability. Empty criticism without alternatives and even without a coherent simplified picture is something I can't stand.) But let me postpone this topic.
At any rate, sorry if I have disappointed the advocates of free-market solutions who are more "clean" than I am.
See also the short version and many U.K. versions on the opposite side of the barricade. This commercial is not as funny as various anti-PC pro-Mac ads (that provoked the reply above) and the people in it are not quite as cute as Ellen Feiss but it is one of the few ads that may deserve the word "honest".
I certainly don't think that Apple computers suck and I surely don't think that the Mac people must be bad, especially not Ann :-), but I noticed that many of them literally believe the stereotype advocated in the pro-Mac ads. They believe that in certain "hip" occupations and groups, they have to use Mac instead of a PC. This followed from many conversations.
But in fact, the validity of the basic message of the commercial above seems completely obvious. In every profession or group of people, there exists a substantial percentage of people - usually a majority - who use the PC. It's somewhat sad that many people haven't yet noticed. Maybe this ad will help them. And maybe it won't. Meanwhile, the reason why they seem to think that they're better people with a Mac will stay beyond me.
A hacker - namely a student nicknamed Rubico who is the son of Mike Kernell, a Tennessee state legislator (DEM) - has hacked into Sarah Palin's e-mail account, gov.palin@yahoo.com, and published some content on the web. It was easy: he or she has only reset the password by answering a few trivial questions such as the ZIP code and the place where she met her husband (Wasilla High). What he or she or it or they have found seems innocent so I can show you:
You will find some ordinary family-related photos, friendly messages from her friends-believers that she shouldn't care about the negative press. Of course, she shouldn't. And there are some complaints from her collaborators about obnoxious Alaskan (right-wing) radio hosts, too. ;-)
I happen to think that the people who violated her privacy in this blatant way are criminals and they should be found and put in jail for a little while if it is possible. Whoever helps to legitimize these crimes is helping a crime and is a mean person, too. Needless to say, a significant portion of the media, e.g. ABC and ZDNet, care about something completely different than human rights, law, and privacy. They ask how could she dare to use a Yahoo account.
What is wrong about using a Yahoo account for e-mails? Millions of other people are doing the same thing. Are they criminals? Or are mayors and governors stripped of these basic rights? Really? At Harvard, we would have permanent problems with the network: for bizarre historical reasons, the group had a separate cluster that had no permanent administrator. It was often causing a lot of problems and one was always hoping that the problems wouldn't be repeated - which is why he never switched - but they were repeated all the time.
Some people prefer to use e-mail services such as Yahoo and Gmail while others favor their organization's domains (for example because they feel more respectable with the "official" domain in their "From" line: how stupid). But what's the physical or legal difference? None of the e-mails should be read by other people - whether the messages are about family or about political issues - and both of them can be looked at (or erased) in special situations: so there is no difference from a political perspective. Yahoo may be more reliable (and safer) than a computer account managed by an Eskimo computer administrator in the crystal meth capital of Alaska.
I am simply scared and outraged by the loud folks who try to pretend that it is effectively a crime e.g. to use Yahoo as an e-mail account. Every sane person must know that there's absolutely nothing wrong about it and whoever claims that it's wrong is simply a morally questionable person who loves to attack other people and cripple their freedom without having a glimpse of a rational reason. In some sense, such people try to destroy the privacy of other people to the very same degree as the hackers themselves. The people who try to "enrich" the political correctness by similar unjustifiable limitations should be kicked into their buttocks for hours every day. They're at the bottom of the society.
Some of the very same people - like Glenn Greenwald - who would protest if the telephone calls of dangerous terrorists' contacts were monitored are suddenly on the same ship with the hackers because an innocent mother of five should surely have "nothing to hide". Surely that people in civilized societies that respect human rights always have something to hide: it's called their privacy.
These Greenwalds are foes of the modern democratic civilization. They're squarely on Al-Qaeda's side, against the human freedom. It is very clear whose interests they protect and whose interest they want to harm and if I were the U.S. president, I might treat them in a remotely analogous way to the terrorist networks.
Most of the fast comments are dedicated to passionate debates about how the public and professional mailboxes of elected officials should be separated.
In this dose of skeptical peer-reviewed [see some debate about the adjective in the comments] literature about the climate, we look to Energy and Environment. In the August 2008 issue, David Douglass and John Christy have the following article:
Yes, it is also an arXiv preprint! The authors use a very natural strategy to determine the CO2 contribution to the warming trend. They look at the tropical and extratropical data from the last 30 years, as collected by UAH MSU and HadCRUT3.
The tropical temperatures are nicely described by a linear function of the ElNino/LaNina (ENSO) region-3.4 index: the correlation is very strong. They determine the two coefficients (linear and absolute) and subtract this ENSO contribution from the original temperature anomaly. The remainder is not visibly correlated with CO2 - wrong fingerprints - and it apparently comes from additional effects in the extratropics.
Nevertheless, whatever the origin is, they can extract the underlying linear trend and it is currently 0.6 +- 0.1 °C per century (from the 1979-2008 data). This matches the normal greenhouse calculation without any feedback i.e. the climate sensitivity close to 1 °C. There could exist positive feedbacks but they would have to be canceled by negative forcings to match the data.
They use a paper by Chýlek (2007) to argue that the aerosols are too small to influence the tropical temperature enough. They also think that the negative forcings can't have a solar origin: with these beliefs, they can formulate their finding as an upper bound on the climate sensitivity. Qualitatively speaking, there exists no known cooling mechanism that could explain the cooling between 1998 and 2008 - that remains essentially flat even if the ENSO index is subtracted. Note that the IPCC would imply up to 0.45 °C of CO2-induced warming in this decade which can be pretty much falsified.
These calculations seem to imply that the total feedbacks are essentially zero and, assuming that the trend comes from carbon dioxide, the CO2 climate sensitivity is close to 1 °C, as can also be determined in other ways (see e.g. Schwartz). In other words, one should conclude that the CO2-induced warming in the 21st century will be close to 0.6 °C, the same centennial trend that they extracted by their analysis. This signal is smaller than the effect of an ordinary El Nino or La Nina.
The Škoda cars (the logo shows an arrow with wings) used to be among the world's best cars during the First Republic (Czechoslovakia 1918-1938). Well, communism changed things a little bit. But at least, the cars arguably remained the best cars in the socialist bloc. They were exported to many places including the U.K. where they provoked uncountable jokes.
With the Volkswagen's decision to buy the Škoda factories, things began to change. You know, when a great company deteriorates for half a century, it simply needs a leadership by someone who has known what he was doing. So you should imagine that their business is a result of the somewhat cheaper Czech labor and the talents of the local engineers who are comparable to the German ones but also the German experience and habits (effectively those from Porsche) wherever you could have reasonable doubts about the Czech skills and approaches or a missing know-how.
First, Škoda became able to produce some standard, average Western cars such as Fabia, Octavia (the most popular product so far), and the old Superb: all these names were recycled from the good old days 50-80 years ago.
It's the first car that has the Twin-Door system: you can open a smaller trunk or a gigantic trunk. ;-) It can park automatically and there are many other electronic achievements that would look unthinkable for a Czech car as recently as 10 years ago.
I've spent some time looking at the car whenever I was waiting at the Prague Airport ;-) and if you're buying a car, this one is recommended to you. In the U.K., it debuts today: see Škoda U.K. It starts below GBP 15,500 but it may be destined to beat the cars in the slightly higher category, too.
CNSNews: Astronomical influences affect climate more than CO2, say experts
The article explains that many scientists begin to think that cosmic rays are the primary player behind climate change and we may expect 30 years of cooling (also because of PDO). Willie Soon is quoted as a skeptic among skeptics - he doesn't like the cosmic rays explanations.
Incidentally, it's freezing in Pilsen right now, with temperature being slightly below 0 °C. How much do you think that the Pilsner people worry about global warming when this thing happens in the summer? ;-)
Among the fourteen national editions of Google phone published in 2007, one guess was essentially correct: the "West Turkish" Google phone produced by HTC in Taiwan.
HTC Dream will cost USD 199, be compatible with T-Mobile (owned by Deutsche Telekom) plans in the U.S., and use Google's "Android" operating system (modified Linux for mobile gadgets). The design has changed slightly from the video above.
See Google News and a presentation from Tuesday (I loved the "blue dot" with the detection of the gravitational/inertial force). The model will show both "Google" and "HTC" (and the carrier). Well, it is not too different from iPhone, is it?
According to many sources such as the U.K. Times, the LHC will begin collisions at the beginning of the next week!
This goal could have been achieved already this week but the 1-week delay was caused by some power failures affecting the cryogenics. These transformer problems are now fixed.
But don't expect the end of the world yet, like the authors of the artistic film, "Our Final Days", above. The center-of-mass energy will be around 900 GeV (6% of the ultimate goal) only so the LHC will behave as a half-Tevatron.
The only explanation why God would initiate the judgment day at the LHC - and not the Tevatron that has already seen such collisions - is that many Europeans are infidels. :-)
By October 12th, they should already try collisions at center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV which can already create new things, such as dragons and the a new galaxy like in the video above. :-)
The formal inauguration ceremony will take place on October 21st. The LHC will no longer be a virgin. It might even be the mother of several superpartners but we will probably not know yet.
After a few weeks of collisions, the winter recess will prepare the LHC for the 14 TeV energy in 2009.
Off-topic: If you're surprised that the animated counter in the right sidebar shows thousands of German visitors to this blog right now (more visitors even from Witten than from Princeton), in fact, well over 10,000 today, it's because of a very innocent link from Spiegel online (at the very end of the article about LHC doomsday humor) to the CMS stop button that Rae Ann sent me.
A few years ago, a creative far-right website offered this map of Europe as of 2015.
Well, they may have been close to the truth; however, note that they included Italy but not Kosovo into the Albanian Federation so the reality is already exceeding their expectations at least at one spot.
In North Pakistan, they are establishing sharia courts that will work simultaneously with the old British courts (that will be temporarily allowed as long as there remain some infidels on the island):
It has not been explained whether Al-Qaeda and Taliban will share the responsibility for security with the old, white male British police, at least for the crimes by the citizens of North Pakistan who have already been properly converted to Islam. ;-)
The preachers have already figured out that they can make Britain an Islamic state without an external war: it's enough to follow the Albanian recipe to steal Kosovo from Serbia, namely to have more children.
Hat tip: Vitalik
Bonus
While Al Gore invented the Internet, John McCain invented the BlackBerry. Consequently, John McCain is also behind the Perimeter Institute and he can be credited for loop quantum gravity, variable speed of light (Sarah P. will surely like this one), ekpyrotic cosmology, and 31 octopi in the spin foam. ;-)
McCain's senior aide, Matt McDonald who invented freedom fries and cheesburgers, claimed that the inventor of BlackBerry was very modest and denied the invention of anything.
In this text, I would like to talk about the infinities and divergences in physics - what they are, what is bad about them, what is not bad about them, and what transformations their character has undergone during the most recent centuries and decades. People often scream "divergences are bad" but these screams are often motivated by irrational justifications.
The story will probably require the reader to understand physics at an advanced undergraduate level but anyone can try to penetrate through it, anyway. On the other hand, I don't expect professional physicists to learn something materially new here but it is plausible that the organization of the ideas is different than how they think about it.
Pre-scientific image of the world
Before the era of Galileo Galilei, philosophers would talk about infinite things quite often. The world seems to be larger than our houses. In fact, it is much larger. It makes sense to approximate the world by something that is larger than anything you can visually imagine in a compact region of your brain: the world is (almost) infinite. The same concept has led to the Flat Earth paradigm and many other notions.
If we imagine that the Universe is infinite, we avoid a lot of inconvenient, a priori meaningful questions such as "what is there at the end of the world". Because of this reason, many people couldn't even imagine that the Universe could have been finite (spatially or temporarily). Their dogma about an infinite world was wrong but let's admit that it could have been difficult to realize this fact without the Riemannian geometry and related insights.
Also, people have always been thinking about the infinitely small things. But they didn't know how physics works at distances shorter than what their eyes (or magnifying glasses) could see. So they couldn't say too many interesting things about the short distance physics and they mostly realized this ignorance (although some philosophers tried to discover how atoms looked like by pure thought: without QFT and string theory, their dream was doomed from the beginning). The world at even shorter distances was uninteresting: nothing new was happening there.
The practically oriented philosophers realized that all physically meaningful questions talk about finite numbers and additional finite numbers can be calculated by various mathematical rules (such as the Pythagorian theorem). The infinite ones are unnecessary. Nevertheless, people found it useful to construct mathematical concepts for many kinds of infinite and infinitesimal numbers. These "infinite" notions were often promoted by philosophers (who were mathematicians or amateur mathematicians at the same time).
The infinitesimal numbers became very useful in calculus and they were mathematically formalized in several ways. The infinite numbers found their place in mathematics, too. Later, they have been formalized as cardinals, ordinals, the signless infinity in the complex plane, and others. The different types of infinities in mathematics would deserve a very long text by itself: different types of mathematical questions lead you to think about the "infinity" in very different ways.
But in physics, where we're normally interested in the "continuous" types of infinities because fundamental building blocks in physics seem to be continuous (most useful gadgets to measure things generate continuous numbers - and probabilities are things that will probably remain continuous forever), the infinite values are not terribly interesting because once you say that something is infinite, all other numbers that depend on this something turn out to be infinite (or otherwise singular), too. It's much more interesting to check the number 137.036 predicted by your theory than the dull and universal "infinity".
With infinities, all the nontrivial, arbitrarily accurate information is lost. Unlike philosophers, physicists prefer finite numbers because they correspond to things that can actually be measured. Thinkers mostly realized this fact before the first dynamical laws were written down. But because the discussion of physics without any dynamical equations sounds a bit vacuous to me, let's quickly switch to the following epoch.
Classical mechanics
In classical mechanics, objects were described as point masses. They had positions and velocities. All these numbers had to be finite. The equations of motion - the first ordinary differential equations that were written by a human - evolved them into other finite numbers after any finite time. That was easy. There were no infinities and divergences in dynamics of point masses. That's why we must quickly look at a more interesting era from this viewpoint.
Classical field theory
Many point masses may combine into something that is almost indistinguishable from a continuum. The continuum behaves according to new, "effective" equations that can be derived from the laws for many point masses, assuming that the latter were complete and correct and that you know how to deal with statistics, but you don't need to know about the "atomic" origin of the laws that govern the continuum. At any rate, the ordinary differential equations from mechanics, pioneered by Newton, are promoted to partial differential equations that govern the continuum.
In the case of gases, fluids, and solids, the laws governing the continuum are derived as long as you believe that the materials are made out of atoms. But electromagnetic and related fields also use partial differential equations that are mathematically analogous to the equations of hydrodynamics. However, as has been fully appreciated only with the birth of special relativity in 1905, the partial differential equations governing the electromagnetic field should actually be thought of as fundamental equations unrelated to any point masses. The luminiferous aether was not only unnecessary: it was actually wrong.
The partial differential equations that governed the electromagnetic field - and similar equations people could have imagine - were typically evolving finite numbers (in the initial conditions) into finite numbers again. Some subtle phenomena related to turbulence may count as exceptions but these exceptions belong to the 20th century, anyway: we will discuss another major 20th century exception later. So whenever people chose "well-behaved" partial differential equations before 1900, they found no infinities. Again, nothing to talk about. We must combine the concepts:
Point masses in fields
Finally, we find some infinities here. If you describe the reality as a combination of classical fields and classical point masses - a hybrid framework that may look contrived and that is only good as a phenomenological one and we will replace it by a more "unified" picture of quantum field theory later - it is possible to find objects that are infinite. For example, if you calculate the self-energy of a classical point-like electron, you obtain an infinite amount of energy. The closer you squeeze the different parts of the elementary electric charge, the higher interaction energy you obtain. For a mass point, it is infinite.
That's terrible because the total energy of a system (including one electron) shouldn't be infinite. I guess that most physicists who have ever started with physics as kids were struggling with this problem at some point. The energy of an ordinary electron in its own electric field is infinite. It's terrible! The electrons are everywhere so this looming catastrophe surrounds us completely. The most obvious way to get rid of this problem is to try to modify the fundamental equations describing the electromagnetic field and its interactions with the charged particle.
Such a modification should disappear at long distances and it should only cure the short distance problem: it should make the electrons (or the fields around them) smoother. Indeed, it can be done. But if you think what you have actually achieved, there is a lot of uncertainty how you should exactly modify the physics at the short distances. None of the "improvements" is really canonical i.e. exceptional, qualitatively better and more sensible than the competitors. Did you achieve anything by these modifications? We will see that the newer answer to this question, based on quantum field theory, is essentially No. You shouldn't try to play these games: they're analogous to the attempts to find the best building blocks of the aether.
But there exist a similar short-distance divergence and singularity where the answer is Yes. If you study how an accelerating charged object interacts with the electromagnetic field, you find out that it emits electromagnetic waves and loses its energy. An electron should eventually fall to the nucleus, after a fraction of a nanosecond. It is also a terrible problem. Again, it's natural to try to change the laws of physics. In this case, the attempt is going to be successful: if you think properly, you will discover not only a small modification of the laws how the atomic particles emit light but you will actually discover quantum mechanics, the most profound conceptual revolution in the 20th century science.
There exists another type of divergence - the ultraviolet catastrophe - that will lead you to quantum theory, too (the term "quantum theory" refers to the application of quantum principles to fields rather than point masses). At a fixed temperature T, each quadratic degree of freedom in the Lagrangian contributes kT/2 to the total energy. The electromagnetic field - even in a finite box - has an infinite number of degrees of freedom, namely the Fourier components of the field that behave as a set of infinitely many harmonic oscillators. That's why the electromagnetic field should carry an infinite energy at any nonzero temperature.
Once again, you might try to modify this catastrophically absurd conclusion. If you're lucky, your name will be Max Planck and you will discover the correct quantum black body formula that will lead to the concept of a photon, after many confusing years. ;-)
The divergences and infinities that were obtained by extrapolations of the physical phenomena we could have directly observed at long distances were annoying. It was natural that physicists tried to modify the laws of physics. And indeed, some of these attempts were successful. However, it's interesting to note that the modification of the equations hasn't really changed the functions that appear in the fundamental equations - e.g. the "1/r" electrostatic potential. Instead, it has replaced the whole conceptual heart of physics, replacing the old classical quantities by operators on a Hilbert space (or one history by all histories combined by a path integral).
The equations controlling these operators remained pretty much unchanged. Who could have thought?
The infinite self-energy of an electron was another example of a disturbing divergence of the classical field theory combined with point masses. I told you that the attempts to modify the rules of physics are not too successful in this case. Quantization itself doesn't remove the problem: it gets translated into divergent one-loop Feynman diagrams we will discuss below. These divergences will be removed by renormalization - which is a process nearly independent of the detailed modification of the short-distance rules. You can imagine that some new short-distance structure calms down the infinities but all the details of such a structure will be inconsequential for all the predictions that you can actually extract from the theory.
When we discuss string theory at the very end, the details of the short-distance modifications of physics will matter again because the theory will predict the exact physical results rather than any kind of long-distance approximation. Before we get there, we must discuss singularities in general relativity and the new insights of quantum field theory.
Singularities in general relativity
When I said that well-behaved forms of equations of classical field theory normally preserve the finite character of the numbers, I neglected one important counter-example: the general theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity.
In this theory, you can start with perfectly smooth and finite initial conditions, e.g. ones describing a star, and the evolution will inevitably end with a geometry (a field configuration) where certain quantities diverge at certain points in space and time: they diverge at singularities. Penrose and Hawking wrote down famous (singularity) theorems that imply that such a dramatic outcome is often inevitable.
This new aspect of gravity is related to the tendency of gravity to "clump" things. The natural final state that is being approached in the far future is not the uniform gas/liquid/solid that you would expect in non-gravitational physics or thermodynamics but rather one black hole that can eat everything. In non-gravitational systems, the uniform systems tend to maximize the entropy. In systems that gravitate, the entropy is actually maximized for non-uniform systems. That's why galaxies could have been born. The maximally non-uniform "bound" system with the highest entropy is a black hole whenever the gravitational force is a part of your physical cannon.
In the text above, I have described several annoying short-distance singularities in classical physics
infinite self-energy of the electron
atoms collapsing to a point
ultraviolet catastrophe (thermal radiation)
gravitational singularities
and we will look what happened with them. We will also see new divergences, the infrared ones, and discuss the differences between the two types.
Quantum field theory
As we mentioned, the quantization itself works and quickly solves some of the problems. If we quantize point-like particles, the atoms immediately become stable. The "orbits" of the electron can't be arbitrary. The electron can't fall too close to the nucleus, essentially because of the uncertainty principle. The energy is bounded from below. There is a ground state. The atom in the ground state no longer radiates.
This quantum mechanical description of point masses can be seen to be a limit of quantum field theory (with Dirac fields added) so this success is reproduced by quantum field theory, too.
Quantum field theory is obtained by the application of the same rules of quantization - that worked for point masses - to the case of fields such as the electromagnetic fields. The fields can be bosonic and fermionic. And the massive fermionic fields (such as the Dirac field for the electron) will have a very convenient, realistic description in terms of individual point-like particles. Quantum field theory naturally unifies waves and particles. Each particle is a demonstration of a field and each field allows one to create and destroy a particle of some type. The incoherent mixture of point masses and fields that we used in one epoch of classical physics is replaced by a unified, coherent picture that may be surprising and hard-to-understand for beginners but once you understand it, it makes sense.
Quantum field theory also solves the ultraviolet catastrophe. Only the oscillators (Fourier modes) of the electromagnetic field with frequencies for which hf doesn't exceed kT by too much contribute (almost) kT to the total energy. The high-energy ones contribute much less and the total energy stored in the field converges. Problem solved. And we only needed to "add hats" i.e. to quantize the same equations.
The remaining two problems, the infinite self-energy and the gravitational singularities, are different. The infinite self-energy of the electron survives in quantum field theory. It is one of the "loop divergences" in quantum field theory. You might try to modify the rules of quantum field theories but at the end, you will find out that theories such as Quantum Electrodynamics should be used as effective field theories, i.e. theories that are meant to predict phenomena with a limited accuracy only - and the accuracy should improve according to a power law of the distance as you go to longer distances i.e. lower energies i.e. more accurate answers (but you may still demand an arbitrary accuracy as a function of your coupling constants, at least in the form of a Taylor expansion in the fine-structure constant etc.).
Once you know it and you have some idea how the modifications influence the predictions, you will realize that it makes no point to study the modifications in too much detail. You may encode them as irrelevant interactions. The physics you care about is encoded in a finite number of relevant and marginal interactions. If you want to improve the accuracy at shorter distances (more than you normally need), you can include a finite number of additional nonrenormalizable interactions, starting from the low-dimension operators. So you don't really answer the question from your childhood, "how is the electron exactly smoothed to become finite" but the old paradox goes away, anyway.
The divergences themselves can be cured by a combination of
regularization
renormalization.
Regularization means that you must find a usable description of the divergence. For example, you imagine that there exists a maximum allowed energy or momentum - the cutoff Lambda - and you restrict the integration. Or you imagine that you live in 4-2.epsilon dimensions. The answers you originally wanted are obtained by sending Lambda to infinity or epsilon to zero: these answers (limits) are still infinite. But the virtue of allowing Lambda and epsilon to be finite and nonzero is that for these finite values, the cross sections will be finite, too.
Still, you see that the answers for the measurable quantities - probabilities of collisions etc. - would be infinite if you substituted the right numbers for Lambda or epsilon. Infinite answers are bad so you should not hurry with announcing the answers. ;-) Instead, you should realize that the fundamental constants that appear in your Lagrangian - masses, coupling constants, and the overall normalizations of various terms - are allowed to be infinite themselves.
It may sound counterintuitive for the fundamental constants in the Lagrangian to be infinite but there's actually nothing wrong about it because these numbers are not directly measurable. So they can be whatever they need to be in order for others to be happy. For renormalizable theories, it can be seen that it is always possible to choose the fundamental constants in the Lagrangian to be appropriate infinite numbers - such as "1/137+ln(Lambda)" or "1/137+1/epsilon" - so that the numbers that can be measured, such as the probabilities of collisions, are actually finite: the terms like ln(Lambda) or 1/epsilon cancel between the "infinite parts" of the fundamental constants and the "infinite parts" of the integrals that represent the loop diagrams - such as the self-energy of the electron.
It took a decade, until the late 1940s or so, before people realized that the (seemingly nonsensical because divergent) loop corrections are actually fully physical and contain high-accuracy information about the phenomena in electrodynamics (or another field theory). They learned how to extract this information by the procedure from the previous paragraph: by the methods of renormalization (i.e. allowing the fundamental constants to diverge in such a way that the physical answers are finite and a few measurable quantities are adjusted to the right measured values).
It took physicists 25 more years to understand the philosophical framework explaining why this seemingly bizarre procedure works. The framework is called the Renormalization Group and Ken Wilson pioneered it in the early 1970s. The Renormalization Group explains that the long-distance behavior (up to some chosen accuracy) of many physical systems is "universal" - in analogy with the critical behavior in statistical physics - and only depends on a couple of constants. That's why there must exist a toolkit to make predictions without inserting any new constants (and details about the "regulating physics"). For example, you only add the regulator "Lambda" - the maximum allowed energy - and do the calculations as you would normally do, with the appropriate choice of divergent fundamental parameters in the Lagrangian.
The previous paragraphs were mainly talking about perturbatively renormalizable but incomplete theories such as Quantum Electrodynamics - the most accurately experimentally verified theory of physics (for good reasons, this particular kind of leadership of QED will probably continue for a few centuries or more). From a theoretical viewpoint, QED is neither complete nor hopeless. It is somewhere in between.
However, there exist quantum field theories that are
better behaved
worse behaved
The better behaved theories such as QCD can actually be formulated as complete theories that give completely unambiguous predictions - not only in the perturbative expansion. You don't have to treat them as effective theories: you may imagine that they're completely accurate, complete descriptions of a physical system (but surely not exactly our world because they don't contain gravity and other things that surely add some new problems at shorter distances). In QCD, you still need renormalization but the finite results that you obtain at the end are "canonical" and don't depend on any choices how you can regulate the physics. Pure QCD has no dimensionless adjustable parameter.
The worse behaved theories (than QED) are the non-renormalizable ones. For non-renormalizable theories, you obtain infinitely many "kinds" of different divergent integrals in the Feynman diagrams. All of them affect your predictions, even at the accuracy that you determined at the beginning. The fundamental constants in the Lagrangian must still have "divergent parts" but you need infinitely many divergent parts for these constants, in order to cancel the infinitely many types of divergences from the loop diagrams. And each infinite constant in the Lagrangian also has an unknown finite "remainder".
The parameter space of the types of "critical behavior" is therefore infinite-dimensional. Fermi's four-fermion interaction (responsible for beta decay i.e. weak interactions) and pure general relativity (responsible for gravity) are canonical examples.
Such theories need genuine modifications of the short-distance laws of physics to get rid of the infinities - infinities that are now really serious. In the case of the four-fermion interaction, you need to add W,Z bosons and transform your theory into a gauge theory with a spontaneous symmetry breaking: it's the only solution that makes any sense. In the case of gravity, you need to extend the theory to the full string theory: it's the only solution that makes any sense.
But I have to emphasize that the true problem wasn't the scary "infinite result". Physicists are not hysterically afraid of the figure "8" rotated by 90 degrees. ;-) What they're actually afraid of is a lack of predictive power. It is always possible to "cut" the theory so that the integrals will end up looking finite etc. But there are many ways to do so: in fact, there are infinitely many continuous parameters that parameterize the space of possible ways to get rid of the infinities. All of these parameters matter for the very questions you wanted to ask - for example, what is the cross section of the four-fermion interaction at the 250 GeV energies. These infinitely many unknown numbers are associated with the "counterterms", new terms in the Lagrangian with divergent coefficients that we mentioned above.
You would first need to determine the infinitely many parameters of your theory to be able to predict anything. And you would need a lot of time (probably an infinite time) to extract the infinitely many parameters from your measurements. ;-) Such a theory sucks. A theory shouldn't be required to be completely unique but in principle, after a finite number of steps or measurements, you should be able to supplement your theory with all the necessary information for the theory to actually predict. Theories with infinitely many unknown parameters are too bad. If you ask questions where only a finite number of such parameters are really important (given your pre-determined accuracy), it's kind of OK. But for questions where all of them matter - e.g. the questions about scattering at the energy scale where the divergences become really strong - the theory is clearly unusable.
You need genuinely new phenomena - and particles such as W,Z bosons or excited string modes - to get rid of the infinitely hard ambiguities. And they fix it. The better theories with the W,Z bosons or the strings are manifestly superior in comparison with their approximate four-fermion or general-relativistic counterpart. And they seem to be unique (up to dual descriptions of the same physics). We are used to describe general relativity as one of the most beautiful theories people have ever found, but from this technical viewpoint of ambiguities, it is completely analogous to Fermi's four-fermion theory. And string theory is analogous to gauge theory except that it is much more unique than gauge theories.
Infrared divergences
All the singularities and divergences discussed so far were related to phenomena at short distances (or high energies). But in quantum field theory, you also encounter other divergences that seem to be connected with very long distances and low energies, for example with the low (vanishing, in fact) mass of the photon.
While the problems at short distances told you that you should try to renormalize your theory or modify its short-distance rules - replace it with a more complete theory - the long-distance (infrared) divergences tell you something completely different. They tell you that you should keep your theory but replace your mouth, brain, or spokeswoman - because you have actually asked a meaningless question (or at least, you were sloppy).
For example, if you ask about the probability that an accelerating charged particle emits exactly one photon with a finite energy and nothing else, the theory will lead you to an answer with infrared divergences. Why? Because the accelerating particle actually always emits many very low-frequency photons (the literal answer to your original question - with one photon only - is actually zero and the divergences are an unusual expansion that tries to push towards zero).
And you should have asked what's the probability that the accelerating particle does what it does - but you should also allow the particle to emit an arbitrary number of virtually undetectable additional "soft" photons whose energies are below a certain conventional energy "e". Here, "e" must be nonzero for the question to be meaningful and to have a finite answer. But you can choose "e" very small.
If you formulate the question in this way, realizing that the very soft photons are generically produced (instead of pretending that you think that it's impossible), the infrared divergences cancel. The "dogmatic" form of your question where the number of photons in the final state was assumed to be exactly one is just physically incorrect. There are other examples of wrong types of questions that lead you to infrared divergences.
String theory
So now we know that infrared divergences don't prove any defect of your theory but a defect of your mouth because you have asked a sloppy question. So only the short-distance divergences may be viewed as problems of your theory.
String theory is based on new, more powerful principles, that actually remove all short-distance divergences. For example, in perturbative string theory, which already covers a huge portion of the questions you want to be answered by string theory, it can be shown that any potential short-distance divergence is actually a manifestation of an infrared divergence. (For example, one-loop closed-string diagrams can be mapped to a torus, and a thick torus can be rotated by 90 degrees and presented as a very thin one.) And there are many cases in which you can prove that such a potential infrared divergence is absent, anyway.
String theory is finite. It is not only free of divergences but it is also free of related ambiguities. As we have emphasized, the latter criterion is actually more important. Quantum Electrodynamics has one adjustable continuous parameter related to the interaction - the fine structure constant. The Standard Model has dozens of them. Non-renormalizable field theories have infinitely many of them. They're "completely" ambiguous.
String theory has none. It is a completely rigid, unique, robust structure - this fact is the true physical face of the finiteness. It has "parameters" in various environments but these "parameters" can be proved to be dynamical degrees of freedom. Their values can change in space. In realistic environments/vacua of string theory, it can be shown that all these dynamical degrees of freedom are massive, so they sit at some preferred value that minimizes the energy.
There is also a large, countable number of the minima of the potential energy across the configuration space of string theory: the landscape. But because the number of the vacua is countable, you don't have to measure any continuous number arbitrarily accurately to learn what the theory exactly is. Certainly, you don't have to measure an infinite number of quantities accurately in order to supplement your theory with the required parameters, like in non-renormalizable field theories, to allow it to predict things. You only need to get a piece of qualitative, discrete information: which of the vacuum was chosen in this Universe. A finite number of bits of information.
The fact that there exist countably many solutions to some equations shouldn't be surprising. Even a harmonic oscillator has infinitely many eigenstates. The function pi.sin(x)+sin(pi.x) - I really wrote random symbols - has infinitely many minima. It shouldn't be shocking that the correct theory of everything is at least as complicated as a harmonic oscillator or two sine functions.
The only class of singularities that hasn't been discussed so far are the gravitational singularities. String theory tells us completely coherent stories what happens with many types of such singularities - orbifolds, conifolds etc. - i.e. what new physical and understandable phenomena (such as topology change and branes) replace the mysterious source of infinite confusion and ignorance that the singularity used to be in general relativity. The confusion and ignorance about what e.g. the naked singularities could emit was the real problem: not the character "infinity".
There are also other singularities, such as the Big Bang singularity itself, whose detailed physics is not understood too well. These singularities are typically time-dependent (localized in time); consequently, they break supersymmetry. In the story above, there have been many conceptual revolutions that had to be made in order to remove the fog from various types of divergences and infinities. The infinities and divergences emerged as disgusting enemies but they were transformed into friends and powerful tools to find better theories and better answers to physical questions.
The case of the initial singularity (and analogous singularities) is arguably the only one that remains to be fully solved. And because this last mystery of singularities seems to be connected with the beginning of the world, it is reasonable to expect that the answer will teach us something about the selection of the right vacuum in the landscape and it will replace the provisional and probably wrong theories about the vacuum selection problem such as the anthropic principle.
Lehman Brothers were established, under this name, in 1850 when Mayer Lehman, the youngest brother (the guy on the right side), joined his older brothers, Henry Lehman (the real founder) and Emanuel Lehman (the guy on the left side), and emigrated from Bavaria to Alabama. Their first businesses were based on using cotton as a currency.
The company has grown and survived many twists and turns, world wars, Great Depression, internal battles, and many bankruptcies of competitors in the financial ecosystem. However, it failed to survive the subprime-related crisis and today, after 158 years, it filed for bankruptcy, listing USD 613 billion of debts, making it the largest bankruptcy ever.
Well, such things happen. I think that there are too many momentum speculators, derivatives, and investments detached from the fundamentals. The risk of many types of investments - arising at various time scales - has not always been properly quantified. From this viewpoint, it's great that one company focusing on these things will evaporate, together with the employees who are also focusing on things different from the actual content of the economy and the products.
What is less great is an additional period of irrationality and volatility that we can expect. Many speculators will extrapolate various downward trends dramatically, causing additional problems to the world economy. I wonder why so many people are doing these irrational things and adding so much noise to the system. Cannot they try to invent their own realistic picture how the world should look like and what the prices should be, and simply sell overpriced things and buy the undervalued ones?
Right now it also seems rather likely - because of the excessive volatility we have seen - that futures traders and other speculators (and not supply and demand) have been the main players behind the dramatic fluctuations of the oil price during the last year. That's too bad because speculators should normally help to quantify the true value of things - like commodities - and stabilize the prices because they should know when the price is undervalued or overpriced. This idealized picture apparently didn't occur during the last year or so.
There are too many gadgets that try to extrapolate recent trends, whatever time scale they choose for the extrapolation. Such extrapolations inevitably lead to increasing leverage, growing bubbles, bursting bubbles, instabilities, and skyrocketing irrationality. There exist surprising additional sources of such instabilities. Other investment formats that superficially look like stabilizing effects actually act as destabilizing ones.
For example, there exist twin-win funds that allow investors to earn money both in the case when a price increases as well as in the case when it drops. For example, if the oil price increases by X%, you get 0.95 times X% from your initial investment after 5 years (aside from the money you have paid). If it drops by X%, you receive 0.5 times X%, another positive number! This sounds great but it is probably not hard to achieve. The expert who manages the fund simply buys oil for your money, but as soon as the price drops below the initial level, he shorts oil.
You might think that the existence of twin-win funds would stabilize the oil price because the fund manager is motivated to keep the oil price constant because when it is constant, he won't have to pay you much. ;-) However, when I thought about the situation twice, such a reasoning turned out to be flawed.
Whether someone is motivated or not is not important. What matters is the actual impact of the decisions he is led to make. The fund manager doesn't directly determine the oil price. You must look what he is actually doing to eliminate the risk and to get the money that the investors will demand (plus some profit). For the sake of transparency, I will be talking about the strategy of a fund manager who doesn't rely on others (option sellers) who would be parts of the system. In other words, my fund manager below plays the role of all the traders who are needed to make the fund work. The conclusions of my discussion will be universal; if you considered a more complicated strategy, involving option seller etc. (a topic intensely debated in the fast comments: do options influence oil price? LM: They do!) and you would include all of their decisions into your research of the oil price, the oil price would be affected pretty much in the same way. OK, so what does my fund manager do?
If the oil price exceeds the initial level, he must actually own the oil, so that he will be able to pay his investors if the oil price increases significantly. On the other hand, when the oil price drops below the initial level, he has to short oil.
This means that such managers are going to short oil just when it decreases below the initial level (and buy it if/when it returns above the initial level). If you think what it means, it brings instability to the system because buyers stabilize the price when they "rationally" buy the product when the price goes below their perceived "fair interval". And they sell it when it gets above their perceived "fair interval". This is the standard sign determining the relationship between the supply and demand that helps to stabilize prices. But the twin-win fund manager is doing just the opposite. He sells (or shorts) oil when it gets below the initial value and buys it when it gets above the initial value. ;-)
You can see that no one else in our example is buying or selling oil because of the existence of the twin-win fund. It follows that the twin-win fund magnifies market fluctuations. But honestly speaking, we shouldn't forget that the fund doesn't influence anything at time scales longer than 5 years because at the end, it sells all the oil that it bought and buys back all the oil that it shorted. ;-) But 5 years could be too long a time and the economies can be shattered earlier than that.
This kind of instability from similar financial tools is going to be rather generic. Does it mean that your humble correspondent is going to defend some kind of regulation? Well, I have mixed feelings about it. But yes, if the government wants to punish a certain kind of behavior of the market players, the behavior of those who destabilize the system - who are doing things that can be demonstrated to have a destabilizing effect - should be among the punished ones. Such things should be taken into account when various policies (e.g. tax policies) are being designed. I could tell you formulae for Lumo's friction taxes that would moderate hysterias. ;-)
In the ideal capitalist world as I imagine it, the fluctuations should be much lower.
Meanwhile, the bloody fate of Lehman Brothers could remind the greedy investors that their strategies based on the analysis of the momentum (the time derivatives of the prices) - and not the fundamentals (the absolute value of the prices) - could turn out to be just another form of lottery.
What do you think?
Bonus: Famous companies save the world from climate change
(Hat tip: Demesure)
There have been two great companies that passionately led the global efforts to save the world from climate change. We should follow their examples. The names of these two companies were:
Enron
Lehman Brothers
While Enron did everything it could to make the U.S. sign the Kyoto Protocol, the Lehman report "The business of climate change II" has been enthusiastically praised by the environmentalists, to use a polite word for the loons.
The two climate change reports represent 50% of the recent Intellectual Capital :) of Lehman brothers (PDF files below the last link). You can buy this capital for 0.3% of the price one year ago. James Hansen is a part of the package.
Will you join these two wise companies that can compare costs and benefits and quantify all the risks so well? ;-) Isn't it cool that these crooks are gone?
Al Gore and Lehman brothers
Yes, it's true. Check the National Post (Canada) where Richard Lindzen says the following about Al Gore:
... And he's on the on the board of Lehman Brothers who want to be the primary brokerage for emission permits. ...
Rae Ann has pointed out that the information is not quite accurate but it has some true core, see the fast comments. More details at IceCap.US and ClimateAudit.ORG.
Isn't it funny? ;-) BTW, if you didn't know, flurge is a hybrid of flush and purge. But what "Clinton" actually meant was FLIRG, a male organ in the state that is not erect (also, "flerg" means a foreskin). It stands for "First Lady Is Really a Guy/Gay", an acronym that should probably explain the flaccidness. ;-)
New SiteMeter was much less usable than the old one
As you can check, they managed to return to the old SiteMeter within 24 hours. Congratulations. The whole text below becomes obsolete.
Update:Sitemeter claims that they have heard us and they will be implementing a rollback to the website immediately. So please, give them some time. Your patience is what they deserve in this painful situation.
SiteMeter.com, a web service responsible for the counter near the bottom of the right sidebar of this page, has switched to new servers with new software. Click the picture below to zoom in.
The statistics is suddenly shown in Flash applets. Because of the following and other reasons, I believe that the old SiteMeter was more usable:
the new SiteMeter is much slower than the old one; it takes 20 seconds to get to the statistics page (useless clicks, unlinkable subpages, initiation of the Flash, illogical default settings for sorting criteria that have to be changed)
the fonts are too small and ugly and they cannot be magnified; characters in Flash are not designed to look as pretty and flexible as those in the full-fledged HTML
the new SiteMeter doesn't seem to show the number of visitors during the last week or month (and not even the total number for today, as far as I can say)
the new SiteMeter doesn't seem to show the (verbal) domain associated with the IP of a visitor
most of the lists in the new SiteMeter don't fit the space reserved for them which is why only a few visitors/pages are shown, each having a small number of initial characters of the URL (in my case, all URLs are displayed as http://motls.blogs)
consequently, it's impossible to understand the URLs without scrolling down and right for each of them separately; this problem significantly increases the time needed to extract something useful from the page
I still don't know how to access the statistics of other users who have made their data "public": it was easy before (and conversely, I don't know how to allow you to access mine)
and let me finish because there are many other problems that make the new system virtually unusable. The creators of the new system probably like Flash (and for many purposes, I also think that Flash is simply great) but what I simply don't understand is why the owners of SiteMeter.com allowed a change that manifestly makes things worse from a user's viewpoint.
The new programmer can perhaps know the "progressive" technology of Flash but there are dozens of other, more important things that decide about the usefulness of similar services: common sense, the knowledge of users' actual behavior, some basic knowledge of information theory, experience with similar and competing gadgets and the knowledge of their features. It's not true that every change is a positive one and SiteMeter.com seems to have forgotten about this fact.
Whenever I am changing something in the template (or in any program etc.), I am asking whether a vast majority of the users will be able to do certain favorite activities as easily as they did before. It is bad to move things around because people are used to certain locations inside the menus etc., but in the name of a greater good, it is often logical to move and unify gadgets and items. But are there equally usable and fast replacements for all important services of the old system?
If the answer is No, the change simply has to be rejected. Many visitors think that the technological aspects of this blog are excessively complex and I understand their objections: in fact, I've been hearing these things since 1994 when I dared to place the first animated GIFs and forms on my web pages, being 10+ years ahead of time. ;-) But sometimes, albeit rarely :-), I prefer the "minimalistic" design, too.
I tend to think that the lists of visitors are effectively text-based packages of information that are the least appropriate ones for Flash. The programmers behind the new SiteMeter might disagree. But I can't believe that they don't understand that if their service slows down by an order of magnitude (as measured by the typical time needed to get the information that the users typically want) and loses a portion of the data such as the domains, it is simply bad for the user.
For example, it takes a lot of time to learn that this SiteMeter article now attracts about 10% of the traffic to this blog - something that I could have seen by 1 click (on a button in my Firefox taskbar). And I have actually done enough "research" to know that this problem of the new SiteMeter won't go away if I spend more time by learning to deal with the new setup.
I encourage SiteMeter.com to restore a classic version to view the data or one that is as close to it as possible, at least as an option. It seems that almost all users agree with me:
Positive reactions are yet to occur. The old SiteMeter wasn't perfect and I would have a lot of suggestions how to improve it and speed up the activities that typical users/webmasters like to do. But it seems that the actual changes went exactly in the opposite direction.
On September 13th, Time magazine (click) informed their readers that "Northwest Passage's navigability was dramatically demonstrated".
Two ships coming from the opposite directions met and astonished Eskimo cheers from both crews echoed through the rock-bound channel. ;-)
The only problem is that it was not September 13th, 2008 but September 13th, 1937. :-) Well, it shouldn't be too shocking because the current Arctic temperature is pretty much what it was in the late 1930s.
The residents of Texas beaches near the eye of the hurricane Ike were informed about their "certain death" if they wouldn't evacuate.
Well, about 3 or 4 people died in the U.S. as a result of Ike - which was a tropical storm when this article was first posted and a tropical depression when you read it now - and none of them was in Galveston. In another group of the casualties, a boy tragically died because his father was afraid of Ike and decided to cut a tree and except for two Ike evacuees. Once again, the number of victims of the alarm may exceed the number of victims of the hurricane, suggesting another overreaction.
Tens of thousands of Galveston residents stayed and survived, despite the deadly warnings and despite the memories of a hurricane in 1900 that killed 8,000 people at the same place (and add 400 casualties of a similar hurricane in 1915: they don't really look like man-made events; the majority of the costliest hurricanes since 1900 occurred before 1950).
But Ray Wilkinson (67) of Surfside Beach, TX (check the Google Maps: it's actually a very long island) has literally humiliated the warnings.
He spent the stormy night between Friday and Saturday on the porch of his apartment, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, watching the flying debris, and celebrating the power of the elements, including the 100 mph wind and a 20-feet surge. ;-) Newspapers in
describe the story and claim that Wilkinson is stupid. Well, they may be right but more importantly, he is also the kind of guys after whom things like WMAP (The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) are called. If you're not afraid of microwaves, razor blades, swords, and winds, you can sometimes invent or discover something new. At least another bottle of beer. ;-)
Needless to say, next time, Wilkinson will stay home again.
JET, the Joint European Torus, was so far the most successful realization of the Russian "Tokamak" (co-authored by Tamm and Sakharov) toroidal technology (the acronym stands for "Toroidal Kamera/Chamber with Magnetic Katushkas/Coil") to sustain thermonuclear fusion: it was able to produce 16 MW for one second.
ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (or "way" in Latin), officially funded since 2006 and under construction in Cadarache, France (Google Maps, Google Earth overlay), is designed to break the record and produce 500 MW for at least 1,000 seconds. However, it is a USD 10 billion project scheduled for 30 years and the energy production might occur after 2018 (the energy will be lost because this is an experimental gadget).
Huge currents (52 kA) and magnetic fields (6.4 T) are needed here. Russia managed to construct the superconducting Nb-Ti wires, Europe succeeded in incorporating them into a broader structure, and Japan successfully tested the superconductor during the last 4 months (see above). It will work.
Great. But shouldn't they try to speed up the project a bit?
You see that from the mass of 5 GeV that enters, you produce about 0.4% of energy. The particular reaction above is preferred because it has the lowest activation energy/temperature among the competitors. The optimal temperature is 100 megakelvins (=9 keV: this is no high-energy accelerator!) and one only needs 20% of the produced energy to heat up the plasma at the beginning.
At any rate, if this technology succeeded in a decade or two, I suppose that many industries would be switching to electricity (e.g. heating and a large fraction of transportation; there would surely be a lot of power outlets on the street where you could recharge with your "credit card" of the day). The fuel reserves for thermonuclear fusion are "almost" unlimited.
Deuterium is a part of heavy water which is about 0.016% of sea water. Tritium, being unstable (half-life is 12 years), has to be artificially produced in nuclear reactions, most conveniently from lithium ("breeding").
If you go to page 7 ("9 of 145" in the PDF file), you will see the percentages "how many people in each country view climate change as a serious problem". The results are sorted from the sanest countries to the dumbest ones in this respect:
45% Czechia
47% Portugal, Italy; 50% Poland
52% Bulgaria; 57% U.K.; 58% Lithuania, Estonia
60% Romania; 61% Spain, Belgium
62% EU average; 63% Ireland; 64% Malta
66% Slovakia, Latvia, The Netherlands
69% Austria, Luxembourg
71% Hungary, France, Germany, Denmark
73% Finland; 74% Sweden; 80% Slovenia
90% Greece; 92% Cyprus
You see that the differences are substantial and the numbers seem to be largely uncorrelated with the latitude and GDP per capita. But it's arguably scary that only 3 EU members seem to be dominated by climate skeptics.
Related: Czech president Václav Klaus talks about climatism at the Mont Pelerin Society.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is slowly flip-flopping on climate change which is an extremely bad idea, not only because she is rightfully criticized for flip-flopping. As far as the support from the voters goes, there was clearly nothing wrong with her skepticism.
Today, dozens of mostly British media including Nature, The Telegraph, The (London) Times, Register, First Post, and many others have exaggerated a story about a "battle of titans": Prof Peter Higgs "attacked" Prof Stephen Hawking, they argue. ;-)
What actually happened was that Stephen Hawking wanted to be interesting, so he "conjectured" that the LHC won't find the Higgs boson. Instead, it could find SUSY or something completely different (or unfamiliar), Hawking claimed. The money he bet, USD 100, are unlikely to bring Stephen Hawking close to bankruptcy. ;-)
Well, if recent high-precision measurements as well as SUSY are correct, SUSY could indeed be found before the Higgs particle and the Higgs could even come so late that it could become not only uninteresting but it could even remain undiscovered by the machine.
Prof Higgs was irritated a bit and began to talk about Hawking's paper that is "not good enough". Well, I don't think that there exists any real technical paper by Hawking that supports his no-Higgs scenario. Strange things can happen but the papers that argue that there is nothing like the Higgs boson at all have so far been crappy so I would say that Peter Higgs was correct - and excessively diplomatic because those papers are not really "not good enough" but rather piles of sh*t - and he was correct even if he was talking about a non-existent paper by Hawking.
It sucks, anyway. ;-) Stephen Hawking is a revolutionary physicist but if he wrote a paper claiming that nothing like the Higgs sector exists, such a paper would really be "not good enough", to use the diplomatic jargon. The journalists clearly misunderstand that science doesn't mean that some people's work becomes uncriticizable once they repeatedly appear in the media. Every scientist can write a wrong paper and almost all of them have. And Hawking's Higgs-less paper doesn't even exist. ;-)
Update: A commenter has pointed out that the relevant paper actually does exist and was written in 1995: Virtual Black Holes. The paper talks about some S2 x S2, CP2, and K3 quantum gravity (!) instantons. These instantons may perhaps be interesting (not sure why he doesn't talk about del Pezzo and other shapes) but I don't think that they can possibly have anything to do with physics at the LHC scale.
In this paper, Hawking doesn't seem to be bothered by the difference between a TeV and the Planck scale at all and the acronyms "GeV" or "TeV" don't even appear in the paper which means that the accuracy of his analysis is too rough to address any of the counter-proofs discussed below. So my comments about this paper hold even when I saw it. That doesn't mean that I don't consider Hawking to be an amazing physicist. But this paper is just crap.
If the appearance of quantum gravity at the electroweak scale was not bad enough for you, Hawking also includes another favorite meme of that time, a loss of unitarity. Among low-energy effects, these non-unitary effects are supposed to influence scalar fields only (and solve the strong CP-problem, too) because of reasons that look manifestly wrong to me (if he were right, we shouldn't observe other low-energy spin zero particles either, for example para-hydrogen). I thought that he has already abandoned these non-unitary things!
Tree unitarity
How do we know that something like the Higgs boson must exist? Consider some process of elastic scattering. We could talk about quarks or gluons or leptons (that usually collide at the colliders) but because this argument is theoretical in character, we can choose any particles we like as long as they are already known to exist.
So let's scatter one W+ boson with one W- boson in the initial state and the same pair in the final state. These particles have already been observed. They exist so it must also be possible to scatter them.
For technical reasons, it is especially useful to consider particular polarizations of the spin. These W bosons are known to have spin 1. As all massive particles with spin 1, their wave functions have 3 complex components (for m=-1,0,+1, if you wish). These components are in one-to-one correspondence with a complex vector in 3 dimensions.
Because of rotational symmetry, the particle can be polarized with respect to any axis. Let's take both W bosons in the initial state and the final state to be longitudinally polarized - which means that the projection of their spin to the direction that connects the two W bosons is zero (instead of -1 or +1). For massive spin 1 bosons, the longitudinal polarization is as physical as others. In gauge theory, you know that it comes from "eaten" components of the Higgs multiplet but you can pretend that you don't know about this origin of the polarization.
Now, what is the cross section of such scattering? The first relevant Feynman diagram comes from a quartic vertex - four W bosons meet at one point. And then there are Feynman diagrams with a photon and a Z boson in the intermediate state (of an s-channel). These diagrams must contribute because quantum field theory with these known particles (photon, W, Z) works, at least at low enough energies.
If you only sum the diagrams above, you get a cross section - or, more conveniently, the scattering amplitude - that doesn't behave well enough at fixed angles, high energies (that are scaled to infinity). In fact, you could prove that the total probability that similar reaction occurs could exceed 100%: the cross section would increase too rapidly with the energy, as a power law with too high an exponent.
Needless to say, Nature knows how to fix this thing. There must be another Feynman diagram i.e. another contribution to the elastic scattering process. Instead of a photon or a Z boson, it has a Higgs boson (so far undiscovered particle) in the intermediate state. This contribution only becomes significant when the energy of the W bosons approaches the mass of the Higgs boson. But when it is so, the leading behavior of the new Higgs-induced term at high energies is exactly correct so that it cancels the most divergent part of the previous diagrams that only included the observed particles.
The full sum, including the God particle in the intermediate state, behaves much more nicely at high energies, as can be easily checked. But the paper by Cornwall et al. actually implies that the opposite implication is also true, given some assumptions: the only way how to make the massive bosons interact "nicely" at high energies, so that the limit 100% for probabilities is never exceeded, is to generate their mass from an interaction with a Higgs boson.
Now, you could try to look for loopholes. There could be large loop corrections. Maybe: except that the electroweak coupling constants are known to be pretty small near the 1 TeV scale and they shouldn't matter much (if the loops were able to cancel the tree diagrams, you would also be close to the point where the theory diverges and collapses, anyway).
You could also think that the new diagrams could be much more complicated than the exchange of a single scalar particle. Something composite and "non-perturbative" could be exchanged instead. Maybe: except that this new object must "effectively" look like a scalar Higgs boson at the TeV energies, as can be proved.
Perhaps, there can be two Higgses or infinitely many new things that are exchanged in between the W bosons. If you chose this comment, you would be entirely correct. The supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, or the MSSM, indeed requires two Higgs doublets. And in theories with very large or warped dimensions, you could get infinitely many new players - especially the Kaluza-Klein modes of known particles.
If you look at all the possibilities, you will always see that there must exist something new that is being exchanged: the Standard Model with the known particles and the known interactions is simply inconsistent because the probabilities can exceed 100%. And this new object must look like at least one scalar particle at the TeV energies. Such a new particle - with the new diagrams - must enter the scene early enough to prevent the probabilities from exceeding 100%.
A priori, you could think that the new possible physical mechanisms occupy a wonderland full of dragons. But if you ask the right question - e.g. what is the cross section of the WW elastic scattering - and study the cross section carefully, with all expansions and other mathematical tricks you have learned, it is actually possible to get rid of the dragon nightmares. There are no dragons but the Higgs boson must be there.
This reasoning implies that at least the lightest Higgs-like particle among those that contribute must be lighter than something like 800 GeV: the theory where the lightest Higgs-like particle is as heavy as possible is actually the normal Standard Model. Other theories with many Higgses, such as supersymmetric models, typically require the lightest Higgs boson to be lighter or much lighter than 800 GeV.
To summarize, something that behaves almost indistinguishably from the usual point-like Higgs boson must exist to restore the unitarity of the WW elastic scattering. In principle, it may be composite but such a possibility - compositeness - is not unrestricted. There are all kinds of constraints that show that the compositeness must be pretty much undetectable by the LHC.
We will see what the right answer is but as long as the LHC will operate for many years, Stephen Hawking's provocative yet wishful thinking (his dreams to create a complete confusion in theoretical particle physics) will almost certainly be proved incorrect.
Greenpeace celebrates that six ecovandals who have made about GBP 30,000 criminal damage to the Kingsnorth coal power plant (as counted by the costs of removal) were declared not guilty!
The jury decided that they were saving the world, so it was fine to damage the smokestack by painting ("Gordon bin it", but they failed to write "bin it" in time).
Wow. James Hansen played an important role of an "expert" witness in this story. He has participated at many fringe left-wing events in the past, too. In fact, it can be said that James Hansen is the spiritual father of this particular act of eco-terror. One year ago, he said:
It seems to me that young people, especially, should be doing whatever is necessary to block construction of dirty (no CCS) coal-fired power plants.
Let's hope that someone will paint their noses red to really save the world.
Click any square and the square plus four adjacent squares - in a plus-shaped cross - will change their state. Limited number of moves per level; 35 levels.
The observation of superpartners at the LHC would become the most spectacular discovery in experimental fundamental physics in the last 35 years, to say the least.
Expected breaking news: the LHC first beam day is celebrated by the world, including the Google main page.
Embedded Sky News Live TV was here and removed when the main events ended.
The "First LHC beam" webcast began at 9:00 am, Prague=CERN Summer Time (midnight Californian daylight saving time). At webcast.cern.ch, there were only 2,000 connections: sorry, you're unlikely to connect directly. Qbrick offers a working mirror of CERN TV but at some moments, I embed Sky News Live instead: their programs occasionally differ.
When you're bored, try the other one (Qbrick vs Sky). Sometime after 2:00 p.m., Sky News returned to non-LHC topics for a while (but it's back to the LHC now) while the CERN TV / Qbrick broadcast stopped at 6 p.m. Prague Summer Time.
Unfortunately, a 17-year-old Indian girl was so devastated by the moving pictures (the end of the world) that she committed suicide. Other Indians blame the LHC for an earthquake in Iran. On the other hand, the LHC is supported by all obedient Christians.
After the noon, the beam 2 was getting ready for a counter-clockwise trip. Around 1:40 p.m., the first sector (78) was added to the beam's journey, followed by 67 at 2:02 p.m. when the point 7 (betatron cleaning) was penetrated. Cryogenics was behind the slow progress of this stage. (Sectors around the sector 8 were not always as cool as desired.)
Around 2:15 p.m., the beam unexpectedly stopped right after the point 6 (dump). A difficult period of the LHC history started and it ended by 2:23 p.m. :-) when the beam was already knocking on the CMS (point 5): the glitch was caused by optics. The point 4 (RF) and 3 (momentum cleaning) followed at 2:38 p.m. and one minute later.
At 2:44 p.m. and 2:51 p.m., points 2 (ALICE) and 1 (ATLAS) joined the winners. ATLAS (the only point at the Swiss territory) gave the green light at 3:03 p.m., allowing the beam to reach point 8 (LHCb) and celebrate the second round trip! The director could finally say some nice words to his employees (in French). Each beam took an hour or so to make a round trip, debunking all kinds of pessimists.
There have been many fascinating people who were speaking on the live webcast - bosses of different teams at the LHC, numerous former and current leaders of CERN, Nobel prize winners, and other famous physicists (such as Rubbia, 't Hooft, Smoot, Randall, and even Mariňo :-) of the topological string fame, among many others). Unfortunately, I can't repeat the whole days of interesting comments.
Supersymmetry (SUSY) would also count as the first experimentally confirmed prediction of string theory that was historically not a postdiction.
Its discovery would double the spectrum of elementary particles in a way that is not obvious, that was was qualitatively predicted for decades, and that some people still find unbelievable. It could be interpreted as a discovery of new, anticommuting dimensions of space. The discovery of supersymmetry would surely be considered as one of the most amazing discoveries of experimental science of all time.
It sounds fantastic. It sounds too good to be true.
Nevertheless, some of us are now predicting that the LHC is more likely to see SUSY than not. A figure "60%" has recently become popular as a description of our confidence that SUSY will be there. Of course, if you evaluate many arguments, it is extremely unlikely that you end up with a posterior probability that is so close to 50%. So what many of us actually expect may be a number close to 90% or higher. We just want to be modest and cautious so we artificially reduce the estimate to 60%. We mix our qualified opinions with the sociological priors. ;-)
In this text, I want to explain why I think that supersymmetry is more likely to be found there than not.
See also Gordon Kane's explanation of the same question, why SUSY should be there at the LHC, written for Cosmic Variance.
First, to have some fun, you can watch the fate of the protons at the LHC - from various pre-accelerators up to the collisions.
Let me start with a couple of wrong fairy tales that are often presented as "counterarguments" against SUSY. Each of the comments below has been raised by various people who either don't know what they're talking about or who are confused by their own emotions, as we will explain in detail.
SUSY should have already been seen
SUSY is contrived: there are too many unnecessary particles
SUSY breaking as a principle is contrived: there are too many parameters
There are many alternatives
Anthropic arguments imply that a low-energy SUSY breaking scale is unlikely
1. SUSY should have been seen
First of all, if SUSY would have already been seen, there would be no need to analyze the question whether SUSY exists.
Fifteen years ago, some people may have guessed that the superpartner masses could have been as low as 30 GeV. But these were not real predictions justified by scientific arguments. They were just guesses mostly based on a wishful thinking. The low values reflected a "sensationalist" bias of the phenomenologists who often want to say something spectacular that could be observed soon. Phenomenologists like to proceed "from the bottom up" which means that they often want to see new dragons "right behind the corner".
As a person thinking in a top-down fashion, I think that this bias is cheap, irrational, and somewhat dishonest. So whether new things are "right behind the corner" or "much further" - and how easily "testable" the new phenomena are - is what I leave to Nature. There may exist arguments that something is right behind the corner or far away. But wishful thinking is not a rational argument. And it is unreasonable to try to intimidate Nature.
There has never been a fair argument that new supersymmetric particles should be that light. The electroweak scale - the Higgs vev - is around 246 GeV so this value (and even somewhat higher masses, even by an order of magnitude) are clearly good and natural enough an expectation for the superpartner masses. Moreover, the people who predicted very light superpartners typically expected a very light top quark, too. It turned out to be at 172 GeV or so which is much heavier than the lightest estimates. Things were simply not "behind the corner" as some people wished.
And it was surely not the first time when Nature showed that some approximate theories have a much wider range of validity - and new phenomena are much further - than some people wanted: see, for example, David Gross's review of a 1938 conference. This fake argument is often voiced by phenomenologists who can't quite separate facts from wishful thinking, not even a decade after it has been proven that their previous wishful thinking was incorrect, and by theorists who are eager to participate in a permanent revolution.
The fact that SUSY hasn't been seen yet is nothing mysterious. Because of various decisions that were not good for science, the current colliders (before the LHC) were testing energies that didn't differ much from those 90 GeV, the mass of the Z boson that was discovered 25 years ago. There's been not much progress in the brute force of the colliders so SUSY hasn't been discovered either.
2. SUSY brings too much baggage
This argument is usually not presented by phenomenologists but rather the people who really have no clue what physics is all about. It just look complicated to them because their mind is not powerful enough and they deduce that it must be complicated for everyone else and Nature, too. But Nature doesn't necessarily share these severe limitations.
While it is true that supersymmetry doubles the number of elementary particles, it is not true that each new particle makes the theory "more contrived" or "less likely" because of its apparent complexity. The new particles are not independent at all. Supersymmetry is really one principle, not dozens of principles: it is not one assumption for each new particle. And this one principle predicts dozens of new particle species, among many other things.
The doubling of particle species is not quite new in science. When positrons and antimatter were discovered, the number of particle species was essentially doubled, too. Supersymmetry is really one assumption and the spectrum of the new particles are its predictions. In science, it is always good for a theory to have a small number of independent assumptions (because each independent assumption makes a theory more contrived and less likely) and a high number of predictions (because they're what the theory is actually used for and they prove that the theory is not a vacuous truism). In this counting, supersymmetry is doing extremely well.
The assumption of supersymmetry is very natural because it's the only new conceivable symmetry that doesn't commute with the normal spatial (Poincaré) symmetries. It might be expected that such a new, unusual symmetry would have to be incompatible with basic observed features of reality. Surprisingly enough, it's not incompatible which is itself a nontrivial argument in its favor.
3. SUSY is too ambiguous
What is true is that supersymmetry must be spontaneously broken and if we don't know what mechanism exactly does the job, there are many qualitative possibilities and each of them must be described using many new "soft terms" at low energies. This makes the space of possible "broken SUSY" effective theories hugely multi-dimensional.
What does it say about the likelihood that SUSY is correct? It says that if you pick a random small region in this multi-dimensional parameter space, it is extremely unlikely that you will pick the right one. That's indeed the case. People don't know what the superpartner masses will exactly be, among other unknown things. But that doesn't make SUSY as a principle any less likely. The likelihood that it is correct is the sum of the probabilities for its distinct detailed manifestations. Each of the detailed models becomes less likely if there are many of them but the sum doesn't.
Certain predictions are universal for all SUSY models and others are model-dependent.
Eventually, all the parameters of the "soft SUSY breaking" can be calculated from a detailed underlying high-energy theory, at least in principle (and they can be measured, too). The situation is analogous to the electroweak symmetry breaking by the Higgs sector. The only obvious difference between these two cases is that in the case of the electroweak symmetry, there exists a "canonical", simplest way to break the symmetry, namely with Weinberg's toilet (one Higgs doublet). In the case of SUSY, there are many possibilities for the SUSY breaking sector and none of them is "obviously better" than others.
So this fact prevents you from saying which detailed realization is the right one but again, it doesn't change anything about the probability that at least one of them is correct. The details of the supersymmetry breaking is one of the aspects that is not well understood - even though there has been a lot of progress in the last two years. But that doesn't mean that everything is badly understood.
4. There are alternatives
This is a popular talking point among some physicists except that the sentence doesn't seem to be true and the likelihood that it is true seems to be decreasing.
Supersymmetric models usually assume that the Higgs particles are point-like and elementary although there would be no contradiction otherwise. But composite Higgs bosons are simply not needed. The unbearable lightness of Higgs's being is guaranteed by the supersymmetric cancellations, not by a substructure of the Higgs boson.
As we will mention in the second part of the article, the Higgs boson is known to be rather light but it is very hard - and unnatural - to explain, for a theory valid up to extremely short distances why the Higgs should be so much lighter than the Planck scale. SUSY is the canonical solution to this problem and the only alternative solutions talk about some kind of "compositeness" of the Higgs boson.
The composite models of the Higgs - technicolor and generalizations - have all kinds of general problems. As some high-precision indirect measurements indicate, the compositeness scale has to be extremely high - essentially above the energies detectable by the LHC - so the bosons would look as elementary particles even at the LHC. There's a lot of problems to get the right fermion masses, especially for the (heaviest) top quark. Technicolor at the LHC seems to be almost excluded.
Once you admit that the Higgs is a point-like particle up to very short distances, not far from the fundamental gravitational distance scale, supersymmetry is the only approach that explains the hierarchy problem. The composite models have technical problems and I would also claim that they're unmotivated a priori. Also, string theory seems to suggest it is "uneconomical" to view Higgs doublets as composite particles.
5. Anthropic counting of vacua
This method is often used by big shot physicists who however believe the anthropic principle. They count "almost all" vacua of string theory. Sometimes they find out that "most of them" don't exhibit any supersymmetry at the TeV energy scale. This argument is bogus because the number of vacua is really infinite, so there is no "uniform probabilistic measure" (the total probability wouldn't converge). Even if there were such a measure, there is absolutely no reason why the measure should be close to a uniform one i.e. why the numerous types of vacua should "win".
Most of the bound states of the Hydrogen atom have "n" (the principal quantum number) much greater than one but that doesn't mean that most of the Hydrogen atoms you find in Nature have an infinite value of "n" in average. Many of the "typicality" arguments are demonstrably wrong and those that are not demonstrably wrong are unjustified. And even if you believed that the "typicality" assumption is correct, it remains a controversial topic which of them really win.
There is one more argument related to the Higgs mass and the anthropic principle that I would like to mention. It is sometimes said that the huge gap between the Higgs mass and the Planck scale is not a problem that requires an explanation because the gap is needed for stars (and animals) to be long-lived and large enough.
Well, this observation is pretty much a truism. Life as we observe it as well as certain "similar" life establishments need the constants to be what they are. But if we agree with this truism, it doesn't mean that other arguments or explanations become prohibited. In science, there exists no legitimate justification of a "ban" that would prevent you from using certain (old-fashioned) kinds of rational arguments. At most, the anthropic tautological observation may have a vanishing impact on the perceived probabilities of various scenarios, just like all other truisms.
I could have also discussed possible phenomenological problems for SUSY such as the flavor-changing neutral currents etc. They're genuine problems but they are solvable and many satisfactory solutions to them are actually known within the SUSY framework. Moreover, most of these problems seem to be general for all models of new physics. In the context of SUSY, they're not insurmountable.
Fine. Let us now turn to the positive side of the story.
Positive arguments
Let us sketch five general arguments why SUSY is highly promising and likely, maybe even at the LHC:
Hierarchy problem
Improvement of the cosmological constant problem
Dark matter candidate
Gauge coupling unification
String theory
1. Hierarchy problem: why the Higgs is light
The W and Z bosons have masses around 80 GeV and 90 GeV which is much more than 0 GeV, the mass of the photon. The discrepancy requires the electroweak symmetry to be broken. The breaking agent must be effectively equivalent to the Higgs ocean. The Higgs field expectation value must be around 246 GeV to obtain the right masses of the W and Z bosons.
However, the Higgs mass is not quite known (even though I would bet it won't be far from 115 GeV). It is not known because the quartic Higgs potential can be multiplied by a real constant without changing the position of the minima at +-246 GeV. The overall normalization of the potential is related both to the Higgs mass as well as the dimensionless quartic coupling.
The coupling can't be too small because that would imply that the Higgs boson is very light and should have been already seen (but it hasn't). However, it can't be too high either. When the dimensionless coupling is greater than a number similar to "one", it also starts to "run" as a function of the energy scale. The interaction, as quantified by the dimensionless parameter, grows stronger at higher energies and at some point (the Landau pole), it gets infinitely strong and the theory breaks down.
That shouldn't happen in a good family of Mr Higgs: the theory would be either inconsistent or, at least, incomplete. These conditions imply that the quartic coupling is a number smaller than one (but not much smaller) while the mass is between 50 GeV and 800 GeV. If we assumed that SUSY is correct, we get a shorter interval between 114 and 200 GeV or so which seems to be perfectly consistent with other, e.g. high-precision measurements. The self-consistency of this lighter-than-necessary Higgs predicted by SUSY is another detailed argument in favor of SUSY.
But decades before we had these detailed arguments, we understood that the Higgs mass must be lighter than 800 GeV or so but it is actually a hard conclusion to understand from a fundamental theory. The loops attached to the Higgs propagator give it ideally divergent corrections to the Higgs mass. It seems that the Higgs mass naturally wants to become as heavy as the heaviest energy scale where your theory dares to say anything. It should really have the Planck mass. Most of the other particles that acquire their masses from interactions with the Higgs would be this heavy, too. They're not.
Supersymmetry implies cancellations that keep the quantum corrections to the Higgs mass zero. Even when it is spontaneously broken, you can show that the quantum corrections to the Higgs mass won't be huge - such as the Planck scale - but they will only reflect the mass differences between the light particles and their superpartners: the Higgs should be as light as the superpartners which sounds OK.
This was the old "qualitative" argument that attempted to solve the otherwise puzzling hierarchy - gap - between the Higgs mass and the Planck mass. But I would like to emphasize that it was not the last word about the question. Imagine that a few years ago, you would have some probability estimates that MSSM or SUSY was correct. Later, they would become your priors. Now, I claim that your posterior for MSSM or SUSY must be higher than the prior - the probability has increased - because MSSM or SUSY have made some correct and nontrivial (although not totally accurate) statements about the Higgs mass.
Without SUSY, the Higgs mass should be between 50 GeV and 800 GeV or something like that. In fact, the best fits suggest that the Higgs in a pure Standard Model should be around 85 GeV which is excluded by direct tests. It is not a truly strong falsification but it may be annoying: it should slightly reduce your belief that the pure Standard Model is a correct theory up to 1 TeV. On the other hand, the Higgs in the Standard Model can be as heavy as 800 GeV or so. The model doesn't pinpoint the mass any more accurately.
On the other hand, SUSY makes more specific predictions for the Higgs mass, between 114 and 200 GeV, and this 8 times more accurate a prediction (shorter interval) seems to be consistent with all newer (high-precision and other) measurements. So in this sense, SUSY has successfully passed a non-trivial test whose a priori probability of passing was just 1/8 or so. The signal of this test is not too strong but it is another hint. The probability that SUSY is correct has recently increased.
2. Vacuum energy: the cancelations may improve
The vacuum Feynman graphs (without external legs) produce the vacuum energy density that enters Einstein's equations as a source, curves the spacetime, and accelerates its expansion. Cosmologists observe this cosmological constant to be 10^{-123} in Planck units even though the generic prediction of a non-supersymmetric theory would be around 1 = 10^{0} in Planck units. That's a discrepancy of 123 orders of magnitude, the infamous cosmological constant problem.
With supersymmetry, the vacuum energy density is controlled by the SUSY breaking scale and the discrepancy drops to 60 orders of magnitude only. That's still bad enough but it's progress. At the same moment, the estimate is "more robust" because there's less freedom to fine-tune the energy density in a supersymmetric theory. But I kind of believe that supersymmetry is one step in the solution to the cosmological constant problem and we misunderstand something about the other step(s).
If I were brutal, I could say that this Bayesian inference increases the chances of SUSY by 60 orders of magnitude because it passed another test - that the C.C. is between 0 and 10^{-60} in Planck units - that would almost certainly fail (chance would be 10^{-63}) in a non-SUSY theory but has a chance close to one in a SUSY theory. Because I don't quite think that the distributions should be uniform on the linear scale and that this argument should be taken too seriously, I wouldn't say that the cosmological constant counting increases the likelihood of SUSY 10^{60} times. But I just happen to think that it does increase it, anyway.
3. Dark matter particle
Besides 70% of the mass of the Universe stored in the cosmological constant (more generally called "dark energy", an invisible structureless medium that penetrates all of space), about 25% of the mass density in the Universe is dark matter, something that clumps in invisible halos around galaxies but something that doesn't fill the whole space. It's been determined that a big part of the dark matter must be composed from a new kind of particle whose energy is close to the energies measured by the LHC. So whatever it is, the LHC is likely to find it or at least show some hints.
Neutralinos in SUSY theories (electrically neutral fermionic superpartners of the photon, Z boson, Higgs boson, and their mixtures) seem to have all the desired properties to be the dark matter particles which is another piece of non-trivial evidence in favor of SUSY. The theory predicts these new particles and they are needed (or "observed") by cosmologists, too.
4. Gauge couplings unify
Before SUSY was discussed by phenomenologists in the 1970s, grand unification was the most popular "very high energy" framework to construct new promising and pretty quantum field theories. In this setup, electroweak and strong interactions have to unify at a higher energy scale. The simplest grand unified (GUT) theory has various problems, for example that the strength of the three (U(1), SU(2), SU(3)) interactions don't quite unify: three lines in a graph don't cross at a point, simply speaking.
The simplest GUT theory with supersymmetry included solves this discrepancy. The three lines intersect at a point, as far as we can say with the available accuracy. Again, this is a test that didn't have to work. Because it did work so well, it increases the probability of the simplest SUSY GUT model - or any other model that looks the same way at all energies below the GUT scale.
It is true that other models with a lot of unknown corrections from various unusual particles could pass the test, too. By chance. But most of them would not. When you try to compute your confidence in various theories, it is useful to remember the following rule: If a model has actually passed a test, it was surely "doing better" than a model that had just a "chance" to pass the test. This is about the basic logic and the rules of inference. Needless to say, if SUSY is indeed found, this argument about gauge coupling unification, when combined with observed SUSY, will hugely strengthen the case for grand unification and the big desert, too.
Again, it won't be a proven thing but it will sound extremely reasonable. The gauge coupling unification doesn't influence the probability of models whose spectrum significantly (and "unpredictably") differs from the minimal SUSY GUT model.
5. String theory makes SUSY almost crucial
Finally, my most important reason to believe that SUSY is correct is that it seems to be a crucial part of all truly promising string theory models - namely superstring models - that we know. Supersymmetry was first discovered by Pierre Ramond (among other, mostly independent discoverers in the Soviet Union motivated by other, more mathematical considerations) who wanted to incorporate fermions to bosonic string theory.
The worldsheet SUSY can be shown to be almost necessary to do so naturally. Several natural models in the highest dimension then respect spacetime supersymmetry, too. In some sense, supersymmetry always seems to be present in string theory but it can be spontaneously broken. The hierarchy arguments above imply that assuming all the data we have, superpartners near the electroweak scale are the most likely ones. But it is true that I cannot derive a low-energy SUSY breaking scale from the first principles (of string theory).
And the anthropic arguments to estimate the supersymmetry breaking scale are either demonstrably wrong or rationally unjustified. If there are too many vacua of a certain kind, it is a hint that these vacua are unlikely to be relevant for the real world (see the analogy with the Hydrogen atom discussed near the beginning). The anthropic people believe the opposite thing but both of our beliefs are just biases, not scientific arguments.
After the LHC
If the LHC observes SUSY, it will be stunning.
However, indeed, the LHC is not guaranteed to see SUSY. If it won't observe SUSY, the probability that SUSY at meaningfully low energies is correct will decrease but it will not decrease to zero. Such a complete drop is simply very unlikely. The arguments above won't just die away. We will be just chased into a smaller "corner" of the parameter space which will reduce the probability but it won't annihilate all the chances.
Someone might like if theories could be killed by a particular collider but that's simply not how science works. We simply don't know at this moment what the mass scale should be so we're not guaranteed that the LHC is powerful enough to make the final verdict. Someone could pretend that a particular theory is (or should be) so "courageous" that it will either win or die at the LHC: everything or nothing. But the matter of fact is that there doesn't exist any promising and motivated enough theory worth talking about that would guarantee such a decision by the LHC. The purpose of science is not to be as "courageous" as it gets but to be as "correct" and "accurate" as we can. ;-)
The LHC is not an omnipotent cathedral to ask any question to Nature. It is a great experiment but it is just another experiment for a few billion euros only and there will be many more expensive experiments in the future (unless the primitives will take over the civilization). Nevertheless, it will tell us something and it may even be stunningly exciting.
The U.S. benchmark is currently above USD 102. The previous article about a similar topic - and peak oil - was written when the Brent price was near the record USD 147.25 per barrel, almost 50% above the current price. Is it fair to call it a bursting bubble?
Kasatochi Island is one of the Aleutian islands arranged in a strip located Southwest of Alaska.
Just when the Olympic games were getting started and Georgia attacked South Ossetia - between August 7th and 8th - Kasatochi volcano erupted. The picture above is from Kansas and was taken from a FoxNews story.
Recall that these nice colors have the same reason as the fact that the sky is blue, namely Rayleigh scattering.
This eruption is also likely to cool the climate just a little bit. A much bigger explosion of Mt Pinatubo (Philippines) in 1991 contributed to more than 0.5 °C year-to-year cooling at that time.
UAH MSU reported a 0.07 °C cooling between July and August 2008. The August anomaly was negative: -0.01 °C. It means that the last month was cooler than the average August since 1979.
Also, GISS & sea surface data imply a 0.11 °C cooling between July and August. In August 2008, their anomaly was 0.39 °C, coolest August in this century so far. According to HadCRUT3, the month-on-month cooling was 0.025 °C.
Originally posted on September 4th
RSS MSU shows that the temperature anomaly in August 2008 was 0.146 °C which is 0.001 °C cooler than July 2008. So the month was somewhat warmer than the recent very cold months but it was still cooler than any month between January 2005 and October 2007.
For example, August 2008 was 0.22 °C cooler than August 2007 (one year ago) and, for example, 0.03 °C cooler than August 1991. Also, the January 2008 - August 2008 period was the coldest January-August eight-month period since 1994.
The Solar Activity (or the lack thereof) was perhaps even more interesting: August 2008 was the first spotless month since June 1913 - almost in 100 years.
You may also be interested in the sea level rise during the last 15 years. Click at the following picture from Accuweather to zoom in:
Because of winds and other things, even the sign of the sea level rise is very non-uniform. For example, all readers in California experienced a sea level decrease in the last 15 years. The global average was 3 mm/year.
Also, if you care about the Lewis Pugh kayak expedition to the North Pole: no padding today because they didn't find a break in the ice. ;-) At least, they're preparing 192 flags and they met a polar bear. The map indicates that they're trying to return to Spitsbergen.
Update, September 10th: Švácha, the more famous scientist, was released while Kučera, his assistant, was given 3 years of prison. The asymmetry wasn't quite explained.
Today, a court in Delhi, India decided that a Czech entomologist, Mr Petr Švácha, and his assistant, Mr Emil Kučera, will be imprisoned for at least 3 years (at most 7 years: to be decided on Wednesday; plus, much less importantly, a USD 200 fine) for collecting about 200 beetles and their larvae in India, despite calls from 800 scientists from the whole world who wanted their colleagues to be released (petition).
Petr Švácha (Entomological Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences) needed some butterflies plus a few specimen to complete his book about longhorn beetles. The trip was partly funded by the Czech Entomological Society. The good Indian folks not only stole a few dozens of the small (living) animals but, incidentally, also all of their equipment.
Officially, the researchers' "crime" was that the place where they collected the insect was a national park: it is not clear whether they even knew about this fact. These coincidences have led to a violation of the local 1972 Wildlife Protection Act. Well, the Indian people who want to put the scientists in jail are wild life forms themselves and when wild life becomes existentially dangerous for humans, it might be a better idea not to protect it too much.
Insect is the most overpopulated class of animals on Earth, containing about 90% of all the animal species - about 30 million species even though the error margin of this figure is nearly an order of magnitude (partly because scientists are not allowed to work). And I don't even want to talk about the trillions of the actual pieces of insect that live with us on this planet. There's so much of it - and of the species - that you will never see most of the species and the diversity only has a real value for true experts such as the two Czech scientists.
Cucujus bicolor (click), the most precious piece on a list that was identified. This ugly guy can send you to a dirty prison for 3-7 years and you don't even have to kill it. The Indian guys clearly think it is more valuable than a human being. Holy cow. Whoops, holy cows are also infinitely valuable there. ;-)
I wonder whether the Indian authorities behave as science-hating primitives only because they have lost the enlightened imperial supervision by the United Kingdom. But when I read what a top U.K. science adviser said about particle physics and space research yesterday, I am inclined to believe that the Indian independence is not the main reason of their barbarian behavior. ;-)
At any rate, if they are indeed going to be arrested, I wish the scientists to be able to neutralize the guards and escape from the prison as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the entomologists and other scientists plan protests in front of Indian embassies across the world.
It just happened that he was a member of the renaissance music duo, Bedlam Boys, founded in Boston in 1998 (a song at YouTube).
Also, Grant Foster signed with his name while his Hotmail e-mail address included the word "tamino" and a simple number. Who do you think tamino is at this moment?
Using your guess who tamino is, where do you think that Grant Foster was writing papers in the late 1990s? Check your prediction.
Did you solve the homework? What's your answer? :-) Is it the Gentleman on the right side of the picture?
The BBC has created a pretty nice introduction to the Large Hadron Collider, the marvelous experiment where the protons should begin their revolutions (but not yet collisions) on Wednesday.
I chose these comments about the Grid (computing). But he also talks about CMS, Atlas, Alice, LHCb, Tunnel, Grid, and others. Videos, pictures, and words are included.
On Wednesday, at 9:00 a.m. Prague Summer Time, you should watch CERN Webcast with the first beam. The TV program (that you know from Strings 2008) is already broadcasting some stuff now. Enjoy.
Meanwhile, most of the media coverage (hundreds of articles) talks about the end of the world. What would you expect? Find "communication" in IQ in different fields. Only teachers and public administrators are lower. ;-) For example, what's your estimate of the IQ of Sarah? My estimate is 85.
Around 1:20, Obama says that "McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith". Now, because this is not a cheap blog abusing three words for political reasons, let us analyze the slip a bit more closely.
At the very beginning of the video, the host (George Stephanopoulos) talks about Obama's Christian faith. The discussion becomes a bit contrived and Obama suddenly mentions "my Muslim faith".
So what did he mean in that sentence? I see three basic answers:
he meant "my Christian faith", as the host corrected him
he meant "my alleged Muslim faith [that doesn't exist]"
he meant "my Muslim faith" because he just happened to open his heart at that moment.
At some moment, I found the answer "2" to be the most likely one. Imagine that someone may claim that you're a gay but you're not. Would you say "McCain hasn't talked about my homosexuality?" I doubt it. You would use a formulation that makes it clearer that it is a false accusation.
Also, if Obama meant "my alleged Muslim faith", I find it unlikely that he would "okay" the host's correction afterwords. The host suggested a correction "my Christian faith" and Obama agreed with the correction. If he meant "my alleged links with Islam", he would have insisted on that when the host tried to correct him. He kind of did it, too - but only another second later. Obama simply looked very confused about what he actually wanted to say. So does it mean that "1" is correct and Obama was talking about his Christian faith?
I find it unlikely, too. First of all, the term "my Christian faith" doesn't make much sense in the context. Whether McCain talks about Obama's Christian faith is almost completely irrelevant. In fact, no one does so because all these politicians are Christians, at least formally. There's nothing to talk about. Moreover, "my Muslim faith" seems to be a compact term that you probably wouldn't say if you haven't trained it sometime in the past. So "1" seems strange.
We are led to "3". He just wanted to say that the press shouldn't deconstruct private things such as Palin's pregnant daughter - and I agree with that. He deeply feels that his Muslim faith is analogous because it is his private thing - and I tend to agree with it, too. It's just a taboo that he may have broken it. Do you agree?
Marin Mersenne was born on September 8th, 1588, which is exactly 420 years ago. Exactly one week ago, on September 1st, we also celebrated the 360th anniversary of his death (lung abscess). Together with the two new numbers (two new largest known primes) announced below, we have a quadruple opportunity to talk about Mersenne.
After two years, the GIMPS project found two new Mersenne primes (of the form 2^p - 1) almost simultaneously. Only 46 such numbers are known and only 44 of them are known to the public so far. ;-)
The numbers are called after Marin Mersenne and I will talk about him below.
M45 and M46 were announced on August 23rd, 2008 and September 6th, 2008, respectively. The verification process took two weeks or so (in each case): the exponents are therefore around 40 million which means that they will exceed the 10 million decimal digits condition to win USD 100,000 (one-half of which goes to the person who runs the program).
The exponent found in August 2008 is 43,112,609, almost 13 million digits, while the September 2008 exponent is 37,156,667, around 11 million digits.
Marin Mersenne
Marin Mersennus was born to peasants in the West of Paris (Maine). He was educated in Le Mans but not on the 24-hour sports car endurance races but rather at the local Jesuit College. He became quite an authority in theology but he also studied mathematics, music, and the work of other great French minds such as Descartes, Étienne Pascal, de Roberval, de Peiresc, and others.
He devoted years to writings about philosophy and defense of science - or his version of science. His theological writings were addressing topics that no longer seem too hot today ;-) but his texts were directed against cabalism, animism, pantheism, and magical and divinatory arts. He defended Descartes against various other clerical critics.
The text above could indicate that he was a sort of religious zealot but a crackpot in mathematics and physics.
However, that would be a gross oversimplification. He coined the Mersenne primes, although he has also formulated many invalid (and naive) hypotheses about them (roughly speaking, that almost all numbers of the form 2^p - 1 are primes, which is ludicrous). He also played with doubly Mersenne and Catalan-Mersenne numbers. The latter are 2, M(2), M(M(2)), and so forth, where M(p) = 2^p - 1. I did extremely similar things as a small child, too. :-)
In music, he proposed a new tuning system with the frequency ratio corresponding to an equally tempered semitone to be (2/(3-sqrt(2)))^{1/4} which is close to 1.059 or the 12th root of 2 (the "optimal" way to divide the octave) except that his ratio could have been "constructed" by the usual geometrical methods. This looks like a completely meaningless numerology to me, an educated musician. If he used 1.059, which can also be co
Andreas Zachariah was a graduate student at a college in London. But once he wrote the program that translates the GPS data from cell phones to the distance walked, cycled, bused, subwayed, trained, driven, or flown, he became the CEO of the Carbon Hero company. ;-)
Richard Lindzen is not only a renowned climate scientist but also an experienced person who has met many people and understood how many institutions work. In his new, published 35-page paper that is also available via the arXiv,
He shows that the tree ring proxies can completely mislead you. Even if you have reasons to believe that the tree ring width primarily depends on the temperature, there is one subtlety that can literally turn your results upside down: nonlinearity.
Exactly 100 years ago, on September 21st, 1908, 
describe the story and claim that Wilkinson is stupid. Well, they may be right but more importantly, he is also the kind of guys after whom things like WMAP (The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) are called. If you're not afraid of microwaves, razor blades, swords, and winds, you can sometimes invent or discover something new. At least another bottle of beer. ;-)
Today, a court in Delhi, 
