CDF sees dark unified SUSY in lepton jets?

An experimental proof of most low-energy signatures of string theory found?

Because the LHC has been delayed by six months, the American experiments at the Fermilab have half a year to find something interesting in their results.

See: Physics World

And it is conceivable that the CDF team just found something shocking.

CDF from October 29th (PDF)

They claim that they see quite a lot of dimuon events in which at least one muon is produced further than 1.5 cm away from the collision point, i.e. outside the beam pipe. In the Standard Model, muons are normally born much earlier i.e. much closer to the collision point.

There has to be another particle that lives for a while - about 20 picoseconds - until it decays inches away from the beam pipe. A scrutiny shows that it cannot be any known particle. Instead, a new paper by Giromini et al. claims that there seem to be three new states with energies 15 GeV, 7.3 GeV, and 3.6 GeV. The heavier states cascade decay to the lighter ones while the lightest one decays into a tau pair after 20 ps or so: so the 15 GeV particle should decay to 8 tau's! To say that the masses of some dark sector states should be fine-tuned to be 2m_tau, 4m_tau, and 8m_tau surely looks bizarre.

More generally, however, we do see a cascade decay into many leptons that tend to fly in the same direction: "lepton jets". Let's not get carried away here: "many" has been redefined to mean "two" for the purposes of these particular events. And so far, "leptons" means "muon" because they are much easier to be detected in the "jets".



Halloween 2008 Superdark Moose diagram

Now, you can get a fresh model that seems to generate - or predict - lepton jets:

Arkani-Hamed, Weiner (PDF): LHC signals for a superunified theory of dark matter

In this picture, dark matter is composed out of particles in a hidden sector: they're charged under a hidden group, G_dark, that is broken near a GeV. This assumption may explain some recent anomalies found by ATIC and PAMELA Anderson ;-) collaborations in terms of dark matter annihilation: see a good enough interpretation of the positron excess at PAMELA released yesterday:

Cholis, Finkbeiner, Goodenough, Weiner

(However, the positrons could also arise from nearby pulsars, which would be unrelated to dark matter, as the PAMELA team hints.)

Adding the key building block: supersymmetry

Now, these models of dark matter require new light scalar fields which are typically unnatural at the quantum level. Much like in the case of the Higgs, this low mass has a natural interpretation if the world is supersymmetric.

So Arkani-Hamed and Weiner did the natural thing and extended their (and Tracy Slatyer's and Douglas Finkbeiner's) model of PAMELA data - that also includes some older concepts explaining "inelastic" DAMA and "exciting" INTEGRAL anomalies - to incorporate supersymmetry that can explain the otherwise unbearable lightness of the scalar masses. With this supersymmetric extension, they derived a new prediction: "lepton jets".

Why are they predicted? Because the MSSM superpartners are created by colliders such as the LHC (and perhaps Tevatron!) as initial states. And these superpartners eventually decay to the MSSM lightest superpartner (MSSM LSP). However, the latter is not the overall lightest superpartner (LSP). The true LSP - from the hidden, dark sector - is created much later, together with a new lepton (often muon).

It seems that this may have been just observed by the CDF collaboration. If true, which I now estimate to have chance about 30%, it is an experimental confirmation of a prediction by supersymmetry combined with a "natural" phenomenological model by Arkani-Hamed and Weiner originally designed to account for the PAMELA positron excess. ;-)

See also:

Jester about PAMELA, about CDF lepton jets, John Conway, Carl Brannen I & II, Tommaso Dorigo, Matti Pitkanen, Peter Woit

Needless to say, anti-stringy and anti-supersymmetry mujahideen Peter Woit has "understood" the paper by Arkani-Hamed and Weiner so that it rejects supersymmetry. The whole point of the paper is to predict what happens if supersymmetry is applied to the hidden sector model of dark matter. One would expect that even a linguist should be able to guess that the paper involves supersymmetry if the theory mentioned in the title is called "superunified".

Because the acronym "LSP" (lightest supersymmetric particle) appears more than 45 times in the paper, even slightly retarded children could start to feel that the paper predicting lepton jets has something to do with supersymmetry. Peter Woit doesn't. Or does he?

Tommaso Dorigo who considers the CDF experimenters behind the paper exceptionally good is attempting to spread rumors that Arkani-Hamed and Weiner may have heard about the upcoming experimental paper in advance. I would like to stress presumption of innocence and I am confident that under fair and peaceful circumstances, Nima and Neal will tell us the full, honest story of their model. I am primarily talking about Nima because Neal Weiner has already declared that he has had no idea about the CDF paper.

Although there can't ever exist any 100% certainty, I absolutely prefer to trust every word by Nima than random rumors by Tommaso and I won't allow any conspiracy theorists to "work" on their purely speculative accusations in the comments. The model by the four authors accounting for the PAMELA and other data had to be constructed - which was somewhat non-trivial and couldn't be heard from the experimenters.

And the addition of supersymmetry was, on the contrary, very natural and the experimenters were not needed. Demanding supersymmetry is what a good physicist always tries to do when he or she sees unnaturally light scalar particles. And this addition often leads to spectacular results such as the lepton jets. I tell you it is what should be done; they were braver and have actually done so. ;-)

I know Nima too well to be certain that he can do much more non-trivial things than this simple, superficial homework for which he could share a Nobel prize. ;-)

String theory

The model proposed to match these experiments is a typical model that emerges from string theory, one with supersymmetry, preferrably gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking, a hidden sector, and a quiver structure of matter. People - string phenomenologists and other phenomenologists - were just used to think that everything in the hidden sector had to be very heavy. There might be a loophole, with these light particles that are nevertheless hidden.

Obviously, the next step is to look at more detail what the model actually is and which compactifications are preferred, a natural next step which may lead to new, detailed predictions. There is already a paper out,

Towards realistic string vacua

by Conlon, Maharana, and Quevedo, in which it is claimed that the string-theoretical models with D-branes at singularities (like D3- and D7-branes at del Pezzo singularities: see e.g. our comments about the Verlinde-Wijnholt local models) generically contain the required hyperweak gauge group and could account for the ghost muon anomaly at the CDF detector.

If this model or a similar model is correct, the MSSM should be observable at the LHC and I should also be going to win a USD 10,000 bet against Jester who doesn't believe SUSY. All the opponents of supersymmetry and perhaps string theory may be splashed into a toilet sooner or later - by a proof that they've been feeding their listeners by excrements for decades. But there is still this "if".

Sarkozy about the Czech EU presidency

Click the button in the right lower corner to get English subtitles if they're turned off.

Nicolas Sarkozy has made some funny comments that he would like to extend his presidency over the EU to 2009, overshadowing the presidency of Czechia and Sweden in H1 and H2 of 2009, respectively, and erasing pretty much all rules and agreements of the EU at the same moment. The gummi politicians are making fun out of this story.

Note that this show confirms the viewpoint (or stereotype) that the French are usually unable to distinguish any pair of countries on the East of France. This inability has led them to invent the term "Bohemian" describing a gipsy-like lifestyle of free-minded artists. In the 19th century, they used the word for the Czech Kingdom because they apparently believed that Czechia was the homeland to the gipsies. Well, not quite! ;-) Truth to be said, the Czechs also have the tendency to "intuitively" think that either Hungary or Slovakia or Romania must be the ultimate homeland(s) of the gipsies. :-)

But Columbus also thought that Native Americans had to be Indians so the mistake is not so embarrassing, after all.



Sarkozy (left): Europe needs a powerful, tall, and strong leader like me, not someone like the Czech PM Topolánek (right) :-). More seriously, Topolánek is about 190 cm tall, so these pictures are bound to look funny unless they are doctored.

Incidentally, Topolánek is a rock music fan and has a skillful finger and a pretty hard fist when protecting his son, Nicolas, against the papparazzis. He's also good in dancing with the gipsies but be sure that he still enjoys your humble correspondent's approval.

In the mid 1990s, Dr Vladimír Železný, the director of TV NOVA, the top Eastern European commercial TV station, imported the gummi political TV show into Czechia: see e.g. the hitparade Gumeso (Gummi Ace) featuring Klaus and many other top politicians from the mid 1990s. It was a lot of fun.

Too bad that Dr Železný has been kicked out of his own TV by a Mr Ronald Lauder, a mollycoddled boy from a rich family. The degree of creativity of TV NOVA has measurably decreased.

Update

On Friday, Topolánek and Sarkozy met in Paris and Sarkozy surrendered: he will graciously allow the Czech Republic to take over the EU. Thank God. ;-)

How media and blogosphere promote crap and mock good science

I would like to review two articles on the blogosphere that completely distort the information about the quality of two technical papers about physics.

Everyone knows that the media often help to ruin the quality control in climate science - a discipline that has become extremely politicized, overrun by ideologically-driven hacks and opportunists. But we can see that glimpses of such dynamics can also be found in disciplines that have not been politicized - cosmology and theoretical physics.

The point shared by all these examples is that P.R. techniques, hype, fear, and ignorant masses manipulated by inconsistent and irrational arguments are used to overshadow the strength of fair, technical arguments.

One of the two blog articles we will look at was written by Sean Carroll who promotes their own preprint about

Dark Photons

that, as I will argue, is not scientifically valuable and brings no interesting results.

On the other hand, Sabine Hossenfelder is trying to mock a fair article about Q7-branes as

Gibberish

because she doesn't have the slightest idea about professional theoretical physics.

In both cases, the bloggers use completely irrational pseudo-arguments to improve the position of weak science and hurt the position of good science. Many of their readers whose vast majority has no idea about physics either are irrationally adopting their bloggers' views and help to create the atmosphere in which bad research is more powerful socially than good research.

Dark photons

Let me begin with the dark photons. Sean Carroll tries to lead his readers to believe that there is something new about the very idea that the dark sector - the particles species that cannot be seen in the telescopes and that make up the dark matter that only manifests itself by its gravitational effects - may include several particle species and/or a force or forces. And if this idea is not completely new, he suggests, it's been only studied for a year or so.

This is of course complete nonsense. Since the very moment when dark matter was considered for the first time, people were asking what it was made of. Quite obviously, if there are new particles, they should probably be elementary spin-0 and spin-1/2 particles or heavy spin-1 bosons supplemented with some new spin-1 (or spin-0) force carriers. The phenomenology of the dark sector is, in some sense, analogous to the phenomenology of the visible sector, i.e. the Standard Model. And the amount of creativity one needs to realize this general point is close to zero.

Every physicist knows it.

It doesn't make much sense to study these things in too much detail and to construct too contrived theories because there are clearly many options and experiments are unlikely to settle this question in a foreseeable future: in fact, it is much more likely that a full picture of dark matter will emerge from progress in pure theory - I mean string theory. Nevertheless, people have written quite a lot about the possible structure of dark matter.

The only thing that is relevant for dark matter model building is the analysis of subtle anomalies. An article to be written very soon will look at recent remarkable predictions of lepton jets (for the accelerators) that were made by combining supersymmetry with a model of dark matter designed to account for the ATIC, PAMELA, DAMA, INTEGRAL observations of dark matter. See CDF sees lepton jets?

Such models actually have a significant chance to be on the right track. This particular one requires new spin-1 bosons in a hidden sector (dark matter particles) and studies their co-existence with the LSP (a different particle) and the LSP of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. And the model actually has some results: you only choose some of its properties to agree with some anomalies and other anomalies agree automatically - and you even predict some additional, much more spectacular ones that may have been confirmed, too. ;-) You can check that Sean's paper ignores all the important empirical developments - DAMA, INTEGRAL, ATIC, PAMELA - and correspondingly, all particles have wrong spins and interactions in the model.

But let's return to some older stuff.

More than ten years ago, people have published lots of papers studying very detailed properties of dark matter sectors with additional scalar and gauge interactions. Let me mention one prominent example. In heterotic string theory, a major detailed model of all four forces investigated for more than 20 years, one may have two E8 groups in ten dimensions. One of them is broken to the Standard Model while the other E8 is "redundant" and whatever exists or happens inside this "hidden sector" only interacts gravitationally with us. For decades, people knew that the other E8 is likely to participate in supersymmetry breaking.

You know, this is like Sean Carroll's photon multiplied by 248 and coupled with "Garrett Lisi's" E8 group, except that the papers actually make sense and they were written decades before the meaningless papers by Garrett Lisi and vacuous papers by Sean Carroll.

A very representative example is Petr Hořava's 1996 paper about gluino condensation in heterotic M-theory, the correct description of strongly coupled heterotic strings he discovered with Edward Witten half a year earlier. In this setup, the Universe has two boundaries, each of them carries one E8 group, and supersymmetry could be preserved if there were one boundary only. However, it is broken by the co-existence of both of them which leads to some new interesting scaling laws etc. You know, this is a nice paper with an interesting result.

Note that the E8 sector actually plays some role here: it breaks supersymmetry. Even if it didn't play any role, it is not an ad hoc addition to the theory: its existence can be derived from heterotic strings (or from anomaly cancellation). And Hořava's paper actually leads to some non-trivial and intriguing results that can't be seen or guessed just a few seconds after you decide that the E8 sector should break supersymmetry.

Despite these intriguing results, Hořava never felt the urge to hype his discovery because he was considering dark E8-gluons that could exist inside the dark aliens and the dark E8 aliens must surely be more interesting than others. He could have also said - Wow, it's so exciting that the dark aliens have SUSY-breaking E8 gauginos in them. But he didn't. An extra E8 is simply predicted by heterotic string theory and heterotic M-theory. Even though this gauge group is actually established under certain assumptions - and not just a random guess like in Carroll's paper - it's not a new victory worth celebrating. The new victory of Hořava's paper are the promising formulae that follow from his new non-trivial global, topological effect and that are connected with other phenomenologically viable features of the model.

The existence of a new, a priori surprising twist is a feature that one cannot say about the paper by Carroll et al. In this paper, they only reveal some obvious consequences of having a dark "electromagnetism" that nevertheless seem to contradict the available observations of dark matter for reasonable choices of the parameters. So they describe this bad news in "neutral light" as upper bounds on the strength of their new interaction or the lower bounds on some masses.

You know, this is exactly the situation when a newly proposed phenomenon is not interesting in physics. If you artificially make your model of reality more complicated and more contrived, such a sacrifice should either lead to a more complete or more accurate description of reality (including new details) or it should explain some coincidences that were previously unexplained or it should solve a problem that has been interesting for some independent reasons.

The paper by Carroll et al. does neither: it is just spamming the world of phenomenology by new random useless ideas that don't seem to help anything and that don't really seem to work unless you carefully adjust their parameters for them to become invisible. The main purpose of this kind of science seems to be to make the taxpayers pay.

Humbling dark matter?

More generally, Sean's way of thinking about physics suggests that much like Lee Smolin and others, he prefers irrational hype that may impress readers who have no idea about the subject over actual scientific explanations and scientifically valuable and pretty results. For example, look at his very first sentence:

It’s humbling to think that ordinary matter, including all of the elementary particles we’ve ever detected in laboratory experiments, only makes up about 5% of the energy density of the universe.

Sorry but this is an irrational prayer similar to what can be found in low-brow journalism. In this case, it was clearly written to increase the value of papers that contain the word "dark matter" even if there is nothing interesting these papers. What's wrong with the sentence?

Well, from a scientist's viewpoint, there is nothing "humbling" about the baryonic matter being 5 times lighter than dark matter and 15 times "lighter" than dark energy. Why? Because a sensible person doesn't tie his or her body mass into his or her self-worth; Penny from The Big Bang Theory is the only one who can get an exception. ;-) What makes us humble is the "wisdom" and "complexity" that actually hides inside objects, not their mass expressed in kilograms. Do you need some examples?

An average Asian elephant weighs 5 tons or so. Should we feel humbled whenever we think about them? Well, they're just heavy but the mass is just one number and the mass is not the main (or only) determinant of humbleness. So unless you are directly threatened by elephant legs, you shouldn't exaggerate your respect to the animal.

The proton is 1836 times heavier than the electron. Most of the visible mass in the Universe is composed out of protons and neutrons. Does it mean that the electrons are 2000 times less important? Well, it doesn't.

All of chemistry - the structure of atoms, molecules, and bonds in them - depends almost exclusively on electrons and their quantum motion in pretty much classical external fields. In fact, the electrons are so important exactly because they're so light. If you want to understand why chemistry and biology works and what physical phenomena are responsible for it, be sure that you will have to study electrons most of the time. This conclusion is much more general. Lighter particles are usually more important than the heavy ones because they have long Compton wavelengths which is why they dominate long-distance physics.

In the very same way, dark matter may be 5 times heavier than the baryonic matter but that doesn't mean that in the future, physicists will have written 5 times more articles about dark matter than about the visible matter. Again, mass is not the same thing as importance.

Quite on the contrary: it can be expected that once the structure of the dark matter is understood, its physics will be fully described on a few pages of a future "complete book about physics" that will mostly talk about the visible sector. Quite likely, the textbook will only say that the dark matter is made out of neutralinos and it will mention five equations about their mass and density.

By the way, the same comments apply to the cosmological constant. Dark energy makes up 70% of the mass of the Universe but the figure 70% is just one number (that only manifests itself in the observed acceleration of the cosmic expansion). Dark energy has almost certainly no "internal structure" and a full understanding of it is equivalent to a proper calculation of one number.

At this moment, we don't know what the proper calculation is - and some people believe that we will never learn too much more about it. But whatever the correct answer will be, there is only one calculation of one number (either known or unknown to us). It is crazy to change the direction of physics because of this number. One number is just one number - as opposed to millions of numbers that the rest of physics explains - and whether the number is 1% or 70% of the total energy of the Universe doesn't influence the "intellectual" importance of this number. I am much more humbled by the "bulk" of physics that actually works and calculates even though it is relevant for 5% of the mass of the Universe only. There are so many amazing things in this bulk of physics!

We know how to describe the cosmological constant phenomenologically and the importance of the search for its underlying origin is independent of the actual percentage.

Another, related sentence in Carroll's blog article that I find unscientific is the first sentence of the second paragraph,

It’s irresistible to imagine that the dark sector might be interesting. In other words, thinking like a physicist, it’s natural to wonder whether the dark sector might be complicated, with a rich phenomenology all its own.

Well, I don't find this guess "irresistible" in any way. Quite on the contrary: I find it irresistible to imagine that it is very easy to understand what dark matter actually is. In fact, I am convinced that this is the principle that a scientist should follow. As Occam said, notions shouldn't be added unless it is necessary (to agree with observations or to increase the internal consistency of the ideas). The fact that some people find it irresistible to add useless junk that plays no role, explains nothing that we cared about previously, and leads to no surprises or interesting mathematics is troubling.

Why is Occam's razor wise? Of course, it is no fundamentalist rule that one has to obey at all times. But it is wise because whenever gears and wheels are added into our image of the Universe without a good reason, it becomes unlikely that it is the right set of gears and wheels. The more arbitrary and unjustified stuff - and independent pieces - you have in your theory, the less likely it is that your theory is correct. Why? Simply because there are many conceivable but inequivalent sets of wheels and gears and almost all of them must be incorrect (while the correct ones are equivalent to one another).

Sometimes people are lucky (or visionaries) and combine a lot of wheels and gears exactly in the right way that is proven to be true later. But one can't transform science into random guesswork. The visionaries who have made the correct "guesses" were almost never working "randomly". And in many cases, including the case of Einstein, their work was pretty much systematic inductive and deductive research and classification of possibilities.

Also, science is valuable exactly because we can get more out of it than what we inserted into it. If you must insert all the detailed - and otherwise unmotivated - assumptions about the dark sector and you can only derive some statements about the same dark sector (whose equivalence to the assumptions is pretty much obvious and guaranteed to exist from the beginning), it is a case of GIGO phenomenology: garbage in, garbage out.

Let me also say that I find it ethically problematic for a blogger to promote his own papers, especially if it must be very clear to him that the papers are not exactly "Earth-shaking", if I have to use a euphemism. In this sense, blogging may become a clash of interests.

Q7-branes

In 2007, Bergshoeff, Hartong, and Sorokin wrote a paper about Q7-branes with the following abstract:

We show how, by making use of a new basis of the IIB supergravity axion-dilaton coset, SL(2,R)/SO(2), 7-branes that belong to different conjugacy classes of the duality group SL(2,R) naturally couple to IIB supergravity with appropriate source terms characterized by an SL(2,R) charge matrix Q. The conjugacy classes are determined by the value of the determinant of Q. The (p,q) 7-branes are the branes in the conjugacy class detQ = 0. The 7-branes in the conjugacy class detQ > 0 are labelled by three numbers (p,q,r) which parameterize the matrix Q and will be called Q7-branes. We construct the full bosonic Wess-Zumino term for the Q7-branes. In order to realize a gauge invariant coupling of the Q7-brane to the gauge fields of IIB supergravity it is necessary to introduce an SL(2,R) doublet of two distinct Born-Infeld fields on the Q7-brane world-volume.

Now, every decent grad student of theoretical physics above the first year must understand this paragraph. It is very obvious that non-physicists won't get it but I assure you that the paragraph makes sense and whoever finds this paragraph inpenetrable should give up her or his dream to become a physicist.

The paper talks about more complicated types of 7-branes, introduced in the 1998 paper by Meessen and Ortin, among others. The latter has over 100 citations and is kind of similar to the 2007 paper above. You know, it is very obvious that there are many kinds of 7-branes in type IIB string theory besides D7-branes (see the classification of singular fibers in F-theory) and they are associated with monodromies. It's clear that the solutions described in these papers are a priori worth discussion even though more subtle physical phenomena may make some of them unphysical.

At any rate, these are important and well-defined tasks about the very basic objects in one of the five superstring vacua in 10 dimensions.

Now, blogger Sabine Hossenfelder modifies the abstract of the 2007 paper a little bit, using software whose proper usage she doesn't understand. It can still be seen that her abstract came from the abstract by Bergshoeff et al. And I would even claim that the content is largely preserved: even in her messed up version, the abstract makes sense. It's because the technical jargon and mathematical expressions have a very high concentration of information which is why very small snippets are often enough to reconstruct what was meant - or at least the topic that was studied.

Now, she writes that her modified abstract was "on the same level of comprehensibility" as the original text, a fact she considers "tragic" and "humorous". What I consider much more tragic is how many supervillains have advanced degrees. Graduate schools should do a better job of screening those people out ;-) and giving these degrees for actual knowledge of physics and results in physics rather than for a different type of non-brain organs than the type that most physicists have.

Journalistic brainwashing: P.R. fine-tuning of the level of complexity

As far as the sociology goes, what I find amazing are the transparent double standards that are used by the bloggers and journalists to promote mediocre research. What do I mean?

Let's ask the question: how complicated a good paper about XY should be? Now, this is a tough question because most people - and even most scientists - prefer to read simple and comprehensible papers over the tough and incomprehensible ones. On the other hand, it is very obvious that if a paper is too simple, it is probably simple-minded and cannot have the capacity to address a difficult problem properly. If a paper is written by a layman, one can usually see it right away.

Every person has a different level of complexity that he can understand or swallow. But note that the only rational, scientific way to decide whether the complexity of a paper was too low or too high to solve a problem is to objectively study the same scientific problems in detail. There is no "universal" criterion that could determine the right complexity and all "subjective" criteria are clearly irrational.

What the bloggers and journalists are doing is something different. Whenever they can withstand a higher level of complexity than their readers and to think about (slightly) more complicated concepts than the readers, they sell themselves as fantastic and irresistible cartoon heroes who are possessing special skills and who are doing something new and fascinating.

But whenever someone is doing a more demanding research than they do, they do everything they can to abuse the readers' innate hostility to complex ideas. These populist demagogues will write that the papers with higher standards than their own are gibberish, not even wrong, incomprehensible, overly complex etc.

Of course that in the hierarchy of knowledge, they will find lots of people who will agree (below them). After all, most people have no idea about science whatsoever. But you can see that if they were using this method consistently, their own work would have to be labeled as gibberish, too.

One can summarize the troubling character of their "strategy" as follows: the problem is that their research is fundamentally addressed to the less educated and less informed people: what they are doing is P.R., not science. Real science is fundamentally addressed to the smarter people or at least the peers. That's why people like the climate alarmists (who desperately try to pretend that the boring discipline of climatology is important for a common man) and most bloggers who write about science have almost nothing to do with the honest scientific approach to reality.

Democracy and expertise

If there should exist information flows between different "classes of people", it is very clear that the more "special" people in the hierarchy should try to learn what the more "ordinary" people want while the more "ordinary" people should try to learn what the more "special" people know. It's because the direction where the society goes depends on the people and not the "elites", as long as we talk about democracy, while the knowledge is associated with the "special" scientists, as long as we talk about a society where people appreciate that there exist experts and non-experts in many questions.

Whenever these two flows of information are reverted, we deal either with elitism & dictatorship or with mediocracy & idiocracy. Both of them are bad for the society.

And that's the memo.

Snow in London, freezing Florida

In the morning, Londoners saw the first snow in October since 1934: This is London, Daily Mail, Blog Search. The snow that has overrun the Northern Ireland's roads is going to take over Wales tonight.

Meanwhile, vast portions of Florida experienced the record cold temperatures for this day: Google News.

Three days ago, Anthony Watts mentioned the record cold temperatures in 10 U.S. states, as a big snowstorm was going to close a major highway and schools in the Northeast, including PA, NY, NJ, and VT, catching everyone off-guard.

In New Jersey, it was the biggest October snowstorm since 1972. Thousands still lack power.

Yankees shouldn't complain because nearby Ottawa, Canada was hit by a snowstorm, too. Because of Ottawa's location, it's not shocking that it affected both Ontario and Quebec. The worst snowstorm on record in Tibet has made a recent 6.6-magnitude earthquake tougher.

The total Arctic sea ice area is currently almost 2 million square kilometers higher than one year ago. It is near normal for the end of October, humiliating some would-be "predictions" (self-serving and ideologically driven, unsubstantiated lies) of a new record low for 2008.

John McCain won't regulate greenhouse gas emissions if elected, Sarah Palin announced. 

It is unfortunately not too likely but their newly revealed decision will probably not hurt the G.O.P. ticket because 82 percent of the Americans think that climate change is either non-existent, natural, or harmless.

Weather and warming

Because this question - what is the relationship between the weather and "climate change" - is repeating itself so often, let me give an answer once again. What do these weather events show?

Do they show that some carefully (and arbitrarily) defined average temperature on Earth hasn't changed for 30 years or won't change in the next 30 years? Definitely not. The temperature has changed and is guaranteed to change in the future, too.

But do these events show that nothing qualitatively detectable is changing about the weather and the climate - i.e. that people should always be ready both for warm as well as cool weather because different types of weather keep on switching just like they always did?

The answer to this question is definitely "Yes" and I think that only a person detached from reality could disagree with me.

In the very same way, one can perform a statistical analysis of the global mean temperature in the last 13 years. The result is that there has been no statistically significant warming.

Does it mean that the trend resulting from the linear regression was exactly zero? No. Does it mean that this trend is not worth talking about for the purpose of policymaking? The answer is definitely "Yes". At the time scale of 13 years, "global warming", if the latter notion deserves to exist - and I surely think it doesn't - cannot be even statistically extracted from the noise. This is a fact.

One would need a much higher signal-to-noise ratio for the signal to become not only measurable (with accurate thermometers and precise programs to calculate the statistics) but also relevant for the practical life of the mankind. Because the local temperature fluctuations are much greater than the fluctuations of the global mean temperature, one would need an even higher signal-to-noise ratio, i.e. much longer a time (probably centuries), for the hypothetical "trend" to influence the life of people in specific regions.

Do these apparently ordinary snowstorms imply that the weather in 2050 won't be warmer than today? No. But do they imply that it will be warmer? Once again, no.

Do these events mean that you can't make a safe bet that the next winter in London will be warmer than the previous one or the Winter 1948? Yes, they definitely do. It can be warmer or cooler, the odds are close to 50:50, and any other frantic opinion is a reflection of an irrational bias inflating a gigantic bubble of hot air.

Yes, all these data - and in fact, even the selected events summarized in the "weather records" category itself - show that every person who thinks that "global warming" is a real, urgent, and serious problem qualitatively affecting generic nations or generic people is an individual with severely malfunctioning common sense and it's just too bad that our civilization offers a "bailout" to every single guy with a breathtakingly bad judgment who gets stuck in his kayak in the Arctic. That's not the path for our civilization to learn and for the natural selection to proceed.

And that's the memo.

The Founding Fathers on redistribution of wealth

“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816

“A wise and frugal government… shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” — Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” — Thomas Jefferson

“Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.” — Thomas Jefferson

Commercial break: Steve Sailer: Half-Blood Prince (PDF), an online book to be sold in paperback soon

“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.” — John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 1787

“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” — James Madison in a letter to James Robertson

In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying:

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” — James Madison, 4 Annals of Congress 179, 1794

“[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” — James Madison

“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.” — James Madison

“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions.” James Madison, “Letter to Edmund Pendleton,” — James Madison, January 21, 1792, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14, Robert A Rutland et. al., ed (Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia, 1984).

“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 58, February 20, 1788

“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” — James Madison, speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” — Benjamin Franklin

“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” — Benjamin Franklin

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety.” — Benjamin Franklin

“The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.” — Benjamin Franklin

Via Sweetness & light, Conservative Colloquium, and other sources. See also Walter Williams' collected quotes about the government.

These quotes and others make it clear that those who promote "redistribution of wealth" as a task for the government run against the very basic principles underlying the United States of America. This is no detail.

What is really surprising is that many of the champions of socialism live in prosperity because of capitalism and because of the fruits of other people's work and the strength of the ideals of the Founding Fathers and their counterparts in other lucky places. Nevertheless, they are not repelled by using their own prosperity as an argument against freedom and capitalism.

But these left-wing people's wealth is not a manifestation of socialism. Quite on the contrary: it is a manifestation of the creative power of capitalism combined with their character of parasites. To get a more realistic picture for what kind of a societal arrangement they stand for, you should look into North Korea or Cuba, countries that were transformed according to the ideas of their own soulmates.

Are the principles of America guaranteed to exist forever, even if the people and the circumstances are against them? Let me end up with two not quite optimistic quotes:

“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” — John Adams

“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” — John Adams

Czechoslovakia: 90th anniversary

Ninety years ago, on October 28th, 1918, the Czechoslovak National Council in Prague proclaimed the independence of Czechoslovakia.

The old Austrian-Hungarian monarchy was lethally weakened by the World War and it was time for a more modern setup - a democratic republic built upon similar principles as the Western democracies including the U.S.



Prof Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first Czechoslovak president, had convinced his allies - including Woodrow Wilson - that Czechoslovakia would be a problem-free single-national entity because the Czechoslovak nation was dominant.

And he was almost right - at least for 20 years. The country was an island of happiness, freedom, and prosperity in the middle of a sea of anxiety, totalitarian plans, and crises. Things worked fine until the late 1930s when 90% of the German minority in the Sudetenland - 30% of the population - decided that they had always wanted to be a part of the Third Reich. Most Slovaks suddenly decided that they were a separate nation, too.

Nazism was defeated, Czechoslovakia was restored (except for Ruthenia that was foolish enough to join the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in a referendum) and Stalin enjoyed a lot of credit for this defeat. That allowed him to create friendly regimes across the Central and Eastern Europe: Czechoslovakia unfortunately became an example. But this point is usually heavily misunderstood in America and elsewhere.

It was not the Russian nation who should be blamed for the arrival of full-fledged communism in 1948. We had our own communists who had these plans for decades and they simply won the 1946 elections. Czechoslovakia was always a sovereign country after 1945 and Moscow has arguably never controlled the life in Czechia and Slovakia as directly as Brussels does today.

At any rate, the country built communism and a substantial prosperity gap began to emerge in the 1960s. At that time, the atmosphere became more free, after the decade (1950s) of the executions. This evolution escalated by the Prague Spring in 1968. It was defeated by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 and two more decades of communist stagnation followed.

They were interrupted by the Velvet Revolution in November 1989. The Velvet Divorce valid since January 1st, 1993 and the EU, NATO membership etc. belong to the modern history. See a related posting from 2006.

Parade

After 23 years, Prague has seen a military parade: video. As the top boss of the military, President Klaus, explained, the purpose of these thousands of marching soldiers and hundreds of pieces of diverse military equipment was not a demonstration of power. Nevertheless, it is sometimes better to demonstrate it in advance. :-) Because of the terrible rainy weather, people could only hear, but not see, the Gripens.

Global warming caused by solar panels

This finding is kind of cute.



Alexander Ač has pointed out that a greenhouse gas emitted during the production of solar panels and HDTVs, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) that is used for cleaning some parts of the gadgets, is about 17,000 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Google News, UC San Diego press release, Geophysics Research Letters (search for trifluoride)

The concentration of NF3 in the atmosphere was artificially increased by a factor of 20 during the last two decades. The measurements of the concentration surpassed the previous estimates by a factor of five.

The present 5,400 tons in the atmosphere - that will stay there for 700+ years - creates the equivalent warming of all Finland's CO2 emissions (I can't tell you how much it is, because of the unknown feedbacks, but the comparisons are pretty reliable).

Given the fact that the solar panels produce about the same percentage of the global energy as Finland, it is reasonable to guess that the state-of-the-art solar panels that would replace fossil fuels would cause a comparable amount of warming per Joule as fossil fuels. ;-)

Obama on redistribution of wealth

The most discussed YouTube video today has terrified me, too. And I am not even an American. What did Obama reveal about the ideas hiding behind his moderate face?

The courts succeeded in giving blacks human rights but they failed to break the tight constraints drawn by the founding fathers and to reinterpret the constitution so that it is used to redistribute wealth and to achieve "economic justice". The civil right movement hasn't been radical enough. Because it was focusing on courts, redistribution of wealth couldn't be achieved. We still suffer of this "tragedy". In another audio, he calls the failure of the Constitution to redestribute wealth to be a fundamental flaw of this country and an enormous blind spot of this culture. Wow.



Instead of courts, it is better to rely on a coalition of power on the ground in order to bring [socialism to America]. Wow.

One detail. The interview took place in 2001. But that's not such a long time ago. Would it be reasonable to think that Obama has changed his mind in these fundamental matters? Or has he just optimized his strategy to achieve his monstrous goals? He was already a Senator at that time.

Let me tell you. Certain election and other victories of this kind can change countries for 40 or 70 years. The founding fathers had very good reasons for having written what they wrote and for not having written what they didn't write. The American success is largely a success of the specific rules that they introduced.

Redistribution of wealth by the Supreme Court is surely not a principle of the U.S. Constitution. Quite on the contrary. Also, the founding fathers were very wise in protecting America against the fast inflow and strengthening of people from abroad who could distort the basic principles of America within years.

I am not saying that everything they thought or wrote has to be viewed as the Holy Scripture. But certain things are clearly more important than others. The idea to redistribute wealth is even more carcinogenic in the present situation because the real problem we face is that the wealthy people - the primary drivers and organizers of the economy, starting with Joe the Plumber and ending with CEOs of huge corporations - are getting poorer and less certain about their future.

Czech entomologist freed himself in India

Six weeks ago or so, we mentioned the

lawsuit against two Czech entomologists in India.

They were collecting beetles in India. After very confusing legal proceedings, the more famous scientist, Dr Petr Švácha (left - a typical pure scientist, isn't he?), was ordered to pay a fine and released while his amateur assistant, Mr Emil Kučera (right - a practically oriented man, right?), was sentenced to three years of prison as well as to pay a fine.



Švácha publishes a lot while Kučera doesn't. Nevertheless, about 30 species are even named after Kučera.

Happily enough, Švácha should be released soon while Kučera is already back to Czechia. Mr Emil Kučera has used the general chaos in India and before a new wave of legal proceedings (he appealed, of course), he escaped from the legally unpredictable district: see DPA. Congratulations!

If you want to know more details, here are some comments from a recent interview.

He has contacted his girlfriend in Czechia and asked her for contacts in India, a credit card, plus his second legally held passport. ;-) After four kilometers in a Jeep, he spent two hours by getting into Nepal. Again a Jeep, and a bus, and a fine in Nepal for being there without visas. :-) Finally, he legally received the Nepali visas, after some discussions and 2,000 rupees (= USD 40) in bribes (an online interview with readers), and bought an air ticket to Bangkok, Frankfurt, and Prague from a travel agency. That's what I call transparency. :-)

Kučera says a lot of scary things - e.g. no one has come to some proceedings in the court at all. Later, they told him that even if he were freed, he would have to wait at least until February 2009 to get his passport etc. He couldn't accept that. On the other hand, the fellow prisoners etc. were nice to them. They genuinely violated the 2002 Biodiversity Act - banning any collection of some insect. They didn't know about this act. They argue that they haven't violated the Wildlife Act from the 1970s that protects the reservations - where they have never been at all.

He wrote the following letter:

Dear friends,

because it's been quite some time since I began to feel that Darjeeling District is not able to guarantee my right for a fair trial, I decided to solve the difficult situation by a graceful exit of mine. At this moment, I am already on the territory of the Czech Republic.

During the whole trial, beginning with my arrest and imprisonment and ending with the protractions by the Indian authorities, the situation has made me very psychologically tired, and that's why I chose this solution after Dr Petr Švácha left Darjeeling.

I know that all of you were watching the evolution of this absurd trial and I hope that you will understand the reasons behind my decision.

I apologize for the problems that my steps may bring to the Czech ministry of foreign affairs and the Czech Embassy in India. At the same moment, I am thankful to them for all the help that they have brought both to me and Dr Petr Švácha during this difficult period. Also, I thank to all of you who have supported us, either by the petition, or your presence at the rallies, or otherwise.

Emil Kučera

In India, the scientists had to accept that local legal standards, the local degree of fairness, and their characteristic speed of the courts. But once they're back in the Czech Republic, they will be treated according to ours. ;-)

Of course, India may still send a few nukes to the Czech territory in order to revenge for the research of the longhorn beetles. Good luck.

The Czech minister of foreign affairs, Karel Schwarzenberg, congratulated Kučera for being able to do something of the sort, too. ;-) When asked whether he was afraid that our relationships with India would be damaged, Schwarzenberg said that the most important thing for him is that Kučera is already doing fine.

What does the attorney do?

BBC informed about a rather extraordinary detail in the subsequent developments. Someone is going to appeal to the court that an arrest warrant is issued against Emil Kučera. That could sound like an ordinary story because Kučera clearly had to violate some laws when leaving India - except that the guy who is actively struggling for Kučera's arrest is his own "attorney", Mr Taranga Pandit. That's pretty strong a cup of coffee.

Haven't our Indian friends learned that attorneys should defend their clients instead of conspire with the prosecution? Kučera has been saying that something was seriously wrong about the attorney but I didn't expect his words to be proven so explicitly and so soon.

Charlie Rose & Stephen Hawking

Well, much like Hawking, I also thought that Rose's question - "What did you mean by the analogy between Mt Everest and a theory of everything?" - was a very stupid question. How can someone possibly misunderstand what this means? ;-)

Imagine how Stephen Hawking in particular must feel when people overwhelm him with similar dumb questions that take long minutes to be answered.

Hawking quickly gets to the threats facing mankind. Well, he is partly correct. I think that as technology gets better, we are getting safer against all kinds of threats (including comets and hurricanes). On the other hand, many new threats emerge from the increasing complexity of our world.

If you summarize these things, the life expectancy of our civilization in years could be pretty much constant but the percentage of the man-made, internal threats is surely increasing as we are getting better in resisting the natural, external threats. I just don't think that climate change is one of those man-made threats.

It would be great to occupy other celestial bodies, at some moment, and we should never quite abandon these plans. It's a different question whether it makes sense to try to realize them in this century. But some people are surely paid to try.

A funny bonus video: Stephen Hawking is already saving the mankind by personal interactions. ;-)

Gravitons and decoherence

A reader of Cosmic Variance asks the following question about gravity:

But gravity works - presumably, at some level - by massive objects constantly bombarding each other with gravitons, so we are also averaging over all the possible states of gravitons that we are not keeping track of, aren't we? That should cause decoherence too, shouldn't it?

The people at Cosmic Variance seem to be rather deeply confused and impressed by this question. Because I think that there is nothing confusing or impressive about it, let me tell you the correct answer. Of course, I will agree with Sean Carroll that photons, and not gravitons, are responsible for most of the observationally relevant decoherence but there are many other issues at stake here, too.

Electromagnetism and gravity

First of all, all the qualitative facts about gravity hold for electromagnetism, too. Both forces may be visualized as an exchange of intermediate, virtual particles - photons or gravitons. And both forces may be traced to a field in spacetime - the electromagnetic field or the spacetime geometry, respectively. These fields may be excited and the excitations behave as real particles - photons and gravitons. Large, coherent configurations of these particles behave as classical waves - electromagnetic waves or gravitational waves, respectively.

But in both cases, there is a difference between many real particles and many virtual particles.

Many real particles may carry a huge entropy S. This statement means that there exist many, N distinct microstates: S is approximately equal to ln(N) times Boltzmann's constant. The entropy carried by many particle never decreases macroscopically - that's the second law of thermodynamics that defines the thermodynamical arrow of time.

Analogously, as we are forgetting some unmeasurably fine (or distant) information, we are tracing over degrees of freedom that are not interesting for us. For example, every second, a lot of new infrared photons may be emitted by the Earth: every second, we may or we have to forget about all of their velocities. By doing so, the density matrix for the remaining, measurable degrees of freedom rapidly converges to a diagonal form: that's how decoherence works.

(See pages 13-16 of this file to learn the basics of decoherence; entanglement and interpretations of quantum mechanics are discussed there, too. See also some introductory comments about quantum computing and relativistic quantum mechanics.)

The decoherence always works in the same direction of time: we may be forgetting the past but we can't ever forget the future because we have never known it, anyway. This arrow of time is called the logical arrow of time and reflects the asymmetry between assumptions and deduced predictions in Bayesian inference (or any other framework for thinking).

The processes in the previous paragraphs, namely the increase of entropy (e.g. by friction) and decoherence, are closely related and the two arrows of time, thermodynamic and logical ones, are always and inevitably aligned.

A force between two objects

Consider a proton and an electron. They attract one another, by the electrostatic force. The force may be visualized as a "constant" exchange of photons. How many photons are we talking about here? Well, this is a useful question because it is a meaningless one ;-) and the reason of its meaninglessness is illuminating.

The reason why the question is meaningless is that the photons exchanged between the proton and the electron are not "real" particles that could carry new degrees of freedom (such as the direction of motion) or information or entropy. Instead, the character and the impact of the virtual particles on the charged particles is fully determined by their sources.

The virtual particles are really just internal lines (propagators) of Feynman diagrams: in this sense there is only "one virtual photon" responsible for the whole force and its information is log(1)=0. But even if you adopt a different counting, these photons are not real particles that could carry more information if the field becomes stronger.

Because there are no new "free" degrees of freedom carried by the virtual particles, the microstates are fully determined by the states of the proton and the electron. If you quantize this system in the old-fashioned non-relativistic quantum mechanical framework, you obtain the Hilbert space of the Hydrogen atom, including the ionized states. There is a very low number of its low-lying states.

But even if you decide to use the field configurations instead of the old-fashioned force to describe the states and their dynamics, the Hilbert space will remain essentially unchanged. The only difference is that each state - for example the 1s ground state of the Hydrogen atom - will be associated with a particular pure state of the electromagnetic field, too. But these states should be identified with the states in the non-relativistic theory without fields. Quantum field theory doesn't imply any new "infinite degeneracy" of these states of charged particles.

Because we are still effectively dealing with a very small number of pure states in the Hilbert space, there is no room here for the increase of entropy and no room for tracing over inconsequential degrees of freedom. There are simply no new degrees of freedom created with time here.

So if you start with a Hydrogen atom in its ground state, it won't decohere at all. It is a complete pure quantum system described by a pure state - a localized and stable object sitting somewhere in spacetime. Pure states evolve into pure states and there is nothing to trace about - unless you want to forget about the state of the atom completely. So there is no decoherence here.

The proton and electron also attract gravitationally although the force is roughly 10^{40} times weaker than the electric force. What these two particles exchange is really a specific linear combination (one combination!) of a photon and a graviton except that the photons are much more important in this mixture. If there were a decoherence of a single Hydrogen atom caused by the virtual particles, the photons would contribute much more to it than the gravitons. But there's no such decoherence.

Two celestial bodies

You may replace the proton and the electron by two macroscopic objects - e.g. the Sun and the Earth. But everything I said is still true. The Feynman diagram would have vertices (like Sun-Sun-graviton) and the coupling constant would be greater than it was before (because the Sun is heavier than the electron) but there would still be one Feynman diagram only. The state of the gravitational field is determined by the sources. If the sources - the celestial bodies - are found in a pure state, the fields they create are in a pure state, too. And this pure state will remain a pure state forever (even though it is clearly evolving).

Even for large celestial bodies, there are no macroscopic amounts of gravitons leaving to infinity (except for a detail discussed in one minute). By this comment, we mean that the orbiting celestial bodies are not losing energy. If they're not losing energy, they can't be emitting real particles. It means that there are no new degrees of freedom created that we could trace over (or forget). There is no decoherence.

The subtlety is, of course, that in general relativity, orbiting bodies emit gravitational waves and they do lose some energy. Once again, this case is fully analogous to the case of electromagnetism. An excited Hydrogen atom emits electromagnetic waves, too (and drops to lower energetic levels). But as long as the produced waves can be described by classical configurations or coherent states, their state is pretty much unique so it doesn't carry any macroscopic entropy and there is no "macroscopic excess" of newly created degrees of freedom that could be traced over. No decoherence.

So there is a quantitative difference here. A large number of excited Hydrogen atoms emit a large number of photons. They are pretty much chaotic, carry a macroscopic entropy, and can disappear to infinity (even if they disappear inside the Sun, you may already trace over them if you believe that they will never be important again). They make both the source as well as other objects they hit in the future decohere. But as long as the waves emitted by the objects are (almost) coherent - like the gravitational waves from a binary star - there is (almost) no decoherence here just like there is almost no entropy carried away by these gravitational waves: once again, the growth of total entropy and decoherence are closely related.

By the way, if you consider a piece of dust in outer space, it decoheres very quickly. Its interactions with the cosmic microwave background are actually enough to make its position behave classically within a tiny fraction of a second: a privileged "classical" basis of localized states emerges very quickly. On the other hand, the interactions with gravitons are much weaker. So even if the number of gravitons at a certain frequency per cubed meter were equal to the number of photons - and it is much smaller in reality - they would lead to much weaker decoherence simply because their interaction with the matter is much weaker.

A break for entertainment



Sheldon didn't get the driving license at age of 16, as everyone else, because he was examining perturbative amplitudes in N=4 supersymmetric theories leading to a re-examination of the ultraviolet properties of multi-loop N=8 supergravity using modern twistor theory. Their science advisor is simply superb! There has never been a soap opera as accurate as TBBT. ;-)

Does dark matter decohere?

That's another, more sophisticated question that Sean Carroll and Daniel Holz ask. The answer is, of course, Yes. But it is indeed true that the rate of decoherence may be substantially slower than the rate of decoherence that we know from the visible world. The decoherence rate increases with

• the number of environmental degrees of freedom that become "useless" every second
• the accuracy with which the microstates of these environmental degrees of freedom are orthogonal to each other
• the strength of the interactions between the environmental degrees of freedom and the relevant degrees of freedom whose states are decohering
• the alignment between the environmental degrees of freedom and the relevant - decohering - degrees of freedom of the "measured" system
  

If you imagine that dark matter particles only interact through gravity, all these factors are substantially reduced. As we indicated, the number of "chaotic gravitons" that massive particles emit is substantially smaller than the number of "chaotic photons" that thermally excited atoms emit in the visible world: that's because gravity is so much weaker. And whenever you find examples where the number of real gravitons emitted is very large, they typically arise from macroscopic gravitational waves that are almost uniquely determined - so the microstates of these gravitational waves fail to be exactly orthogonal to each other and "unpredictable".

The rate of decoherence is, of course, calculable. I would indeed expect that in some appropriate way of counting, the decoherence will be 10^{40} times slower than the decoherence that fundamentally boils down to electromagnetism. But it is likely that this slowdown won't have too easily measurable (by us) consequences, anyway. If you consider much bigger pieces of (dark) matter instead of the (visible) seed of dust above and you wait a little bit longer, the decoherence eventually occurs, anyway. And it is very hard to experimentally determine whether a piece of dark matter has already decohered because it interacts with us too weakly.

In this sense, the dark matter could be in macroscopic, Schrödinger-cat-like states,

"0.6 times dead plus 0.8i times alive",

that don't decohere quickly and that would look truly bizarre in the case of visible cats. But dark matter is not so easily visible so the scales and standards of decoherence are different and much slower.

No six-feet-large Erwin Schrödinger lives in the dark matter sector who could be impressed by these macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics. It's no surprise: all observers who are large and long-lived enough to be intelligent are pretty much guaranteed to observe a world around them that looks classical. For intelligence, you need a large amount of bits of information to be processed and forgotten during your thinking - which is qualitatively the same condition that guarantees that decoherence occurs quickly enough.

The character of the microstates that are picked as a "privileged" basis of the Hilbert space by decoherence is analogous for dark matter and visible matter. More concretely, the microstates that decohere from each other differ by the location of some of their building blocks and the privileged states (in whose basis the density matrix is erasing the off-diagonal entries) tend to be close to eigenstates of these locations. That's because the mechanism of imprinting of the system into the forgotten environmental degrees of freedom follows the local laws of physics, much like other processes in Nature (with a possible exception of phenomena related to the event horizons and discussed at the very bottom).

So it really doesn't matter whether we consider self-interaction of dark matter or the interaction between dark matter and visible matter as causes of decoherence. Clearly, if dark matter only interacts gravitationally, its interactions with the remaining dark matter are arguably more important - because most particulate matter in the Universe is dark - and it is probably true for the rate of decoherence, too.

On the other hand, if we calculate the decoherence of ordinary visible matter, its interactions with the dark matter are negligible in determining the rate of decoherence. It's because the interaction is weak (gravity) and the dark matter is in much more coherent state, anyway.

Cosmic horizons of the unknown

So I would like to argue that all these processes that take place in limited regions of the Universe are understood, at least in principle. The rate of decoherence - i.e. the place where the classical intuition becomes a legitimate approximation of quantum mechanics - is calculable. The more "useless" and "chaotic" information about the system we study is imprinted into the environment every second, the faster the decoherence proceeds. If there are no chaotic particles escaping from the system, there is no decoherence.

It is absolutely crucial that a simple Hydrogen atom in its ground state inside an isolated box - or the vacuum itself - don't decohere. They're absolutely pure, exact, and coherent - a trivial fact that seems to be too hard to swallow for the proponents of various "atomic" theories of space which are nothing else than new models of aether. If there were an aether composed out of chaotic aether atoms (or spin networks or causal dynamical triangulations or anything else of this sort), it would induce an abrupt decoherence of everything and quantum phenomena such as interference could have never been observed.

Most of these things are thus theoretically understood. But I would like to argue that once you add event horizons or cosmological horizons, things become different. Because the "local structure" of microstates of black holes is not understood well, I believe that no one can reliably calculate the decoherence rate of a black hole. If a black hole simply emits the Hawking radiation and we want to trace over it, is there a privileged basis of the black hole microstates in which the density matrix converges to a diagonal form? How quickly does it occur? Does this question make sense? Does it have a good or mathematically elegant answer?

Needless to say, this question only becomes meaningful once you know something about the actual microstates of the black hole (which we do mostly in the case of a few classes of supersymmetric black holes). You need to know at least some basis of their Hilbert space before you discuss which basis might be picked by decoherence. ;-) It is very plausible that these privileged states might have an easy interpretation in the language of fuzzballs. However, it is also plausible that the privileged states won't be eigenvectors of "position" operators as they are in the context of non-gravitational physics. And the decoherence rate may drop close to zero, too, because the outgoing particles of Hawking radiation are effectively unable to "measure anything" about the black hole.

The context of quantum cosmology is an even tougher variation of the same question because the cosmic horizon is a more complicated version of a black hole horizon and we don't have the luxury of the asymptotic region at infinity. For example, does the thermal radiation of de Sitter space make the space (and everything inside it) decohere? How quickly does this thing occur? Does the re-absorption of the thermal particles by the horizon change the picture? I can believe that someone can give us more complete answers than those that can be generated "on the spot" but I guess that they won't be complete answers.

Unlike the case of the black holes, we don't even have any framework to answer such questions because we don't have any complete quantum theory - including the full Hilbert space - of a de Sitter space. But once again, I believe that the case of atoms and celestial bodies has been theoretically settled.

Obama: a natural-born U.S. citizen?

I learned about this story two days ago, from a Czech online newspaper, The Invisible Dog. At the beginning, the idea that Barack Obama was not constitutionally eligible to become the U.S. president sounded completely insane to me. Hasn't anyone among 300 million people noticed for 4+ years?

However, I soon realized that people don't really want to find problems that are inconvenient for them and many others are afraid to find any problems because they could become politically incorrect or "racist" in the eyes of the first group. These are circumstances in which the classic Emperor's new clothes may emerge in megalomanic proportions.

Back to 1961

Ann Dunham, a U.S. citizen, and Barack Obama Sr, a citizen of Kenya, married in February 1961 when she determined that she was pregnant. They only divorced a few years later. Now, the rules for Acquisition of U.S. Citizenship By a Child Born Abroad say the following thing about the situation:

Birth Abroad to One Citizen and One Alien Parent in Wedlock: A child born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent and one alien parent acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under Section 301(g) INA provided the citizen parent was physically present in the U.S. for the time period required by the law applicable at the time of the child's birth. (For birth on or after November 14, 1986, a period of five years physical presence, two after the age of fourteen is required. For birth between December 24, 1952 and November 13, 1986, a period of ten years, five after the age of fourteen are required for physical presence in the U.S. to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child.)

Now, 1961 obviously fits to the 1952-1986 interval so the last sentence in the parentheses is relevant. Because Ann Dunham was less than 14+5=19 years old, she wouldn't satisfy the requirement if the birth took place in Kenya and Barack Obama Jr wouldn't be born as a U.S. citizen.

Where was he born?

Fine. So the question whether he was born in Hawaii or Kenya is constitutionally important. His black grandmother in Kenya and half-siblings apparently believe that they were physically present during the birth in Kenya. It seems that they have indirectly convinced most of Africa about this point. See e.g. these African newspapers that celebrate a Kenya-born U.S. president.

It is likely that both grandmothers, the black one in Kenya and the white one in Hawaii, know the correct answer.

Philip Berg's lawsuit

Philip Berg, a somewhat important Pennsylvanian Democratic lawyer, filed a lawsuit. See all 27 documents filed in this case so far. Replace "27" by any number between 1 and 27 (or higher, a hint for the future). Don't forget that none of these documents so far has been signed by the judge, Clinton apointee Robert Barclay Surrick, Pennsylvania's Don Quixote. Berg demands the court to eliminate Obama from the ballots. Obama's and DNC's lawyers want the lawsuit to be dismissed, claiming that Berg has no standing because he won't be personally injured by Obama's promotion.

Their belief that the judge will accept their interpretation of these technicalities was probably the only way how they can win because if the lawsuit were not dismissed, they would have already lost by default: by not replying for 30 days to the specific accusations, they legally admit that they are true.

Fresh update: Judge decided that Berg had no standing as his claims of a harm were too vague: the articles of the constitution cannot be enforced and slowly become a piece of joke in a banana-like republic; see the 34-page ruling; Berg is filing an appeal to the Supreme Court as soon as possible

Even though Philip Berg is a truther, he seems to be a very sophisticated lawyer and the exchanges between him and Obama's lawyers are clearly exchanges between peers. At any rate, this technical argument of a lack of standing is clearly unsustainable. If Obama becomes the president, he will influence the life of many people much less "vaguely" than Berg's life and the unlucky ones (e.g. the GOP people he will fire) will surely have standing to argue that their harm only occurred because the constitutional law will have been violated by his nomination.

In June, Obama has released a short-form birth certificate. There have been doubts about its veracity. For example, you can easily download a blank template for this form and people at DailyKos have been creating a lot of forgeries that are almost indistinguishable from Obama's proposed short form.

But I became kind of convinced that FactCheck.ORG is right and the short form is authentic. Note that this short form was printed a year ago or so: it is surely not the original historical document. Moreover, the races of the parents in this form, Caucasian and African, sound very bizarre. In the early 1960s, the correct names of the races were almost certainly White and Negro. Check any other birth certificate from the early 1960s. The postmodern, geographic, uncolorful, politically correct terminology exploded later, in the late 1960s.

However, there also exists a long form (and its copies) birth certificate which looks like this one and which has much more information in it. In his own book, "Dreams of My Father" (1995, page 26), Obama says that he used to entertain himself by reading his own birth certificate when he was a teenager. He refuses to publish it or even to show it to authorities. No one knows why because this would be a trivial way to stop this bubbling problem for his campaign.

And yes, I am also surprised by his recent visit to Hawaii that he delayed by several days even though it was justified by his grave-ill grandmother. It is bizarre. There are many important papers such as the birth certificate in Hawaii and his relatives probably know too many things about the circumstances of Obama's birth - and they don't know what Barack Obama wants them to say to the journalists and others.

Berg's scenario

Philip Berg claims that Ann Dunham visited Kenya in 1961 but in the late stages of pregnancy, she was no longer allowed to fly back to Hawaii - which sounds rather plausible to me. So she gave the birth in Kenya - a place she disliked for its sexism and racism. A few days later, the family could fly to Hawaii and register the baby over there. This sounds plausible to me, too, because there are clear advantages of being born as a U.S. citizen that pretty much all fresh cosmopolitan parents realize. (The baby was surely registered in Hawaii and local newspapers listed him, too. But that doesn't mean he was really born there.)

I vehemently disagree that it is an unlikely conspiracy theory to think that Ann Dunham tried to do her best to assure that Barack would be born as a U.S. citizen "on paper": she didn't even have to know that Barack would run for president in order to know that it is better for him to be a U.S. citizen. Millions of parents in a similar situation realize it, too.

The short-form certificate may only show some registration information about the birth. But there should still exist the full, long form that shows the actual birth place. I find it obvious that with a dozen of lawsuits about this topic, a responsible authority should check this long form that surely exists.

FactCheck.ORG claims that as a kid, Obama had both Kenyan and U.S. citizenship - and briefly became the U.K. citizen before Kenya gained independence. This subtlety is controversial by itself because the spirit of the U.S. constitution is that the president should feel no other affiliation or obligation to a foreign country. But there's no direct, sharp contradiction here.

Indonesia

After some time, Ann Dunhan married again. It seems plausible to me that the stepfather had to adopt Barack Obama (as Barry Soetoro) who therefore became an Indonesian citizen. At that time, U.S./Indonesian dual citizenship was not possible so Barack had to lose the U.S. citizenship even if he had one before.

Afterwards, he either had to go through INS and become a naturalized U.S. citizen or he would currently be an illegal alien in the U.S. Now, I am not quite sure whether the categories of "naturalized U.S. citizen" and "natural-born U.S. citizen" are mutually exclusive. If he were born in Honolulu, he could have become a natural-born U.S. citizen but the later naturalization could change him into a naturalized citizen. Not sure about the priority here. But I think he would still have to go through naturalization after his Indonesian adventures.

There seem to be no traces of this naturalization either. I suspect that when Ann Dunham - an apparent American - returned to the U.S., no one was even investigating the question whether she was a U.S. citizen. Of course she was, they thought. And the kid was automatically treated in the same way.

Even if you believe Obama's official explanations, there are still way too many questions that he hasn't even tried to address here and I suspect that he must have a damn good reason to avoid them. He also hides the documents from the college etc. Now, the population may be insufficiently mature to swallow some additional problematic things written in all these documents. But if there is nothing genuinely morally bad about them, Obama should realize that he is the person most vigorously protected by the media and others - in the history of America - and he should release all these documents, at least to some authorities.

For example, if the real father of Barack Obama is Frank Marshall Davis, a communist poet who was Barack Obama's spiritual father at the age of 10 or so, Obama shouldn't be afraid to publish this fact. Because of Davis' U.S. citizenship, it would also guarantee that Barack was natural-born regardless of the place of birth. And yes, I do think that Davis is more similar to Barack Obama Jr than Obama Sr. What do you think?

One more comment. I must tell you that I am pretty upset that after 10 years of constant harassment with the (four) U.S. visas I had to get during the time, each of which required half a year of uncertainty and insanely recurrent bureaucracy, no one seems to ask a top presidential candidate about his very place of birth - one of only three conditions dictated by the constitution - just because he became a kind of Führer, especially among the far-left people. This is about double standards of unprecedented proportions.

Gore effect comes to Harvard University

Special welcome to Drudgereport and Instapundit readers

A reader using the "trademark" of the Office of the President of Harvard University informed us about a hilarious event in Cambridge, MA, namely the Harvard Sustainability Celebration:

Green.harvard.edu: green is the new crimson

If they can change the color of the Harvard logo so easily, maybe their planet is also green, not blue, after all. The Harvard College Democrats ask why the "reduce reuse recycle rethink" posters are 4 times larger than the previous record holders.

But they are kind of obliged to be happy about the keynote speaker, Mr Al Gore, who is famous for his big house, jet, and the so-called Gore effect. Dictionaries explain the term as

The phenomenon that leads to unseasonably cold temperatures, driving rain, hail, or snow whenever Al Gore visits an area to discuss global warming. Hence, the Gore Effect.

It seems to be working again: see Weather Underground (no, it is not the leftist militant group that may have inspired Barack Obama: the name of the weather service is just a good joke).



Disclaimer: this picture is not real.

In Cambridge, the warmest October 22nd occurred in 1979 when the temperature climbed to 83 °F. Well, it doesn't look like what they see today. Even the average high temperature for this day is 60 °F which is still far too high. After the noon, the temperature in Cambridge is 44.5 °F. Tonight, it is predicted to drop to 34 °F, close to the record low of 28 °F measured in 1940.

(The weather in Pilsen seems almost identical now. Brrr.)



The forecast for Greater Boston from Sunday looked even more dramatic. Al Gore's speech was on Wednesday. Click the picture to see that on Sunday, they actually predicted snow for Wednesday. That didn't happen, after all, but nearby Vermont did receive its first snow this year today.

For Thursday night (the day after ... the speech), the temperature in Cambridge is forecast to drop below the freezing point to 28 °F which, if true, will beat the record low temperature set in 1883, which means exactly 125 years ago, when it was 29 °F. Not bad! (Sorry, during Thursday, the prediction of 28 °F for tonight was raised to 31 °F; not quite a record but still below freezing.)

Moreover, the phenomenon present in Cambridge in order to discuss global warming seems to be driving rain and hail, with the probability of rain indicated as 60%. ;-) At 1 p.m. local time, they report a cloudy weather with isolated showers.

(See a very lively web camera at the Science Center and Harvard Yard.)

The organizers were ready for the effect, as shown by the e-mail from the Office of the President, president@harvard.edu:

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

Although today's weather will hardly remind us of the serious problem that is global warming, today's event - the Harvard Sustainability Celebration, with a keynote address by former Vice President Al Gore - will go on, as scheduled, in Tercentenary Theatre with a program beginning at 4 p.m. We very much hope that you will attend and enjoy the festivities.

Starting at 3 p.m., we will be serving hot cider and soup to keep everyone warm; please dress for our changeable New England weather. Henry Longfellow, onetime Harvard professor and longtime Cantabrigian, once remarked, "The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain." We sincerely hope that, this afternoon, it won't rain. But even if it does, Harvard celebrates Sustainability with spirits undampened.

Sincerely,

The Sustainability Celebration Committee

Office of the President
http://www.green.harvard.edu/

Cute! The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain but the best thing one can do when it's warming by 0.6 °C per century is to fight the climate, to redesign the Harvard logo, to unravel the modern industrial civilization (if you allow me to exaggerate just a little bit), and to serve people hot soup and cider so that they won't freeze during the celebration of their heroic fight against warming. ;-)

I wonder whether the author of the e-mail above realizes the huge tension between her or his conventionally wise approach to rain and his or her fashionable attitude to a slightly warmer weather. As Gene has pointed out, one of the things that don't seem to be sustainable at Harvard in the medium term is rational thinking. Instead, Harvard will become an accelerator of its own commitments to sustainability - what a newspeak.



During the presentation of the Spanish edition of Czech President Václav Klaus's book,

Blue Planet in Green Shackles,

former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar (the man on the right side of the picture; Klaus is on the left) denounced climate change as a new, expensive religion created by the enemies of freedom (AFP). Hat tip: Philippe.

Click the picture for more details and a video of Aznar's speech (unfortunately in Spanish). If you enjoy reading similar news, you may try the climate category on this blog.

Gummi bear song: Czech version

Jsem pouze z gumy méďa,
a ne ten z plyše béďa.
Jsem pouze mňami ňami cumly cucy gumy méďa.
Jsem pouze z gumy méďa,
co ochočit se nedá!
Já jsem ten malej sladkej na spolknutí z gumy méďa.
Ojéé!

Gumy gumy gumy gumy gumy méďa,
gumy gumy gumy gumy gumy méďa.

Žvatlání 2x:

Bandrej ba důli bády, bandrej ba důli bády,
bandrej ba důli bády, báli ba.

Jsem pouze z gumy méďa,
a ne ten z plyše béďa.
Jsem pouze mňami ňami cumly cucy gumy méďa.
Jsem pouze z gumy méďa,
co ochočit se nedá!
Já jsem ten malej sladkej na spolknutí z gumy méďa.
Ojéé!

Brum brum by, duby duby jeje,
brum brum by, duby duby jeje,
brum brum by, duby duby jeje!
Dá se do mě hryznout.
Brum brum by, duby duby jeje,
brum brum by, duby duby jeje,
brum brum by, duby duby jeje!
Dá se do mě hryznout.

Gumy gumy gumy gumy gumy méďa,
gumy gumy gumy gumy gumy méďa.

Žvatlání 2x:

Bandrej ba důli bády, bandrej ba důli bády,
bandrej ba důli bády, báli ba.

3x

Jsem pouze z gumy méďa,
a ne ten z plyše béďa.
Jsem pouze mňami ňami cumly cucy gumy méďa.
Jsem pouze z gumy méďa,
co ochočit se nedá!
Já jsem ten malej sladkej na spolknutí z gumy méďa.

Ojéé, bády pa!
Bády pa.
Bády pa.

You may have been looking for videos from the cartoon about Gummi bears. They are Gumídci in Czech or Gumkáči in Slovak.

Your Lumídek

Predicting the spacetime dimensionality

In this text, I would like to expand Moshe Rozali's comments about string gas cosmology and clarify the difference between legitimate speculative work in physics and hopeless charlatanism. We will talk about the attempts to theoretically justify why the dimensionality of our spacetime is 3+1 and I will compare the following two papers:

Brandenberger & Vafa: Superstrings in the early Universe (1988)
Ambjorn, Jurkiewicz, Loll: Emergence of a 4D world from causal quantum gravity (2004)

The first program will be referred to as "string gas cosmology" (a modern term) while the second program will be referred to as "triangulation".

The problem

Most people can observe one dimension of time and three spatial dimensions. They seem to obey the laws of a smooth, quasi-Euclidean (or Minkowski) geometry, at least in some approximation. In particular, the three spatial dimensions seem to be nearly flat and smooth dimensions following the rules of the Euclidean geometry.

A theory that explains the origin of space and time must be compatible with this very basic observational fact - that 3+1 dimensions exist and behave as smooth Euclidean dimensions in a wide range of phenomena. More ambitiously, a complete theory of spacetime might even provide us with an explanation for this fact. It is not guaranteed that a 3+1-dimensional spacetime is the only one in which physicists may be asking similar questions but such a possibility is not ruled out, either.

There may exist semi-explanations why one dimension has the opposite signature than others: why there is one time. If there were no time, the Universe would be too boring and it would admit no evolution. Because we apparently need some time to ask a question, physicists couldn't ask such questions in a timeless Universe. ;-)

If there were at least two macroscopic temporal dimensions, including t1 and t2, there would exist closed time-like curves - for example, circles in the t1-t2 plane - which would allow you to return to the "past" along a smooth trajectory and to kill your grandmother before she touched your grandfather for the first time. The Universe would be inconsistent. Also, the Hilbert space would contain physical polarizations of spinning particles such as photons whose norm would be negative: probabilities wouldn't be positively definite. One gauge invariance is not enough to remove two sets of unphysical, ghostly time-like oscillators.

Fine. So imagine that the question why there is one time is settled. But the universes with a different number of spatial coordinates seem much more conceivable and realistic. Is there an explanation why we see three macroscopic spatial dimensions? There exist various anecdotes why the life would be rather hard outside 3+1 dimensions. For example, in 2+1 dimensions, a dog would be cut into two pieces by a bone it ate (assuming that the mouth differs from the opposite hole). In 4+1 dimensions (or higher), the electrostatic potential would increase as quickly as 1/r^2 at short distances (or faster). In such a strong field, the uncertainty principle wouldn't be enough to keep the electron at a finite distance and the electron would collapse to the nucleus as tightly as allowed, to reduce its energy. The non-relativistic chemistry as we know it wouldn't exist, to say the least.

But these are kind of "anthropic" arguments from the realm of entertainment. We may prefer a physical explanation that doesn't depend on the existence of life. The two basic programs mentioned at the beginning propose vastly different approaches how to find such an explanation.

String gas cosmology

The string gas cosmology postulates that there exists a new important era of early cosmology in which important processes decide about the number of dimensions that are allowed to expand to astronomical size.

The particular idea of Brandenberger and Vafa was to assume that at the beginning, strings were wound around cycles of our space and this winding generally prevented the dimensions from expanding because the wound strings would be getting very long and massive. The only way how this "confinement" can be overcome is to annihilate the strings with the oppositely wound strings: the resulting strings born in this "merger" have a vanishing winding number and they can be unwrapped continuously.

But if the space has too many dimensions, it is unlikely for a pair of strings to collide and annihilate. The maximum number of spatial dimensions in which the strings tend to collide at some moment is three: it's because each string in the pair has 1 dimension and one more spatial dimension is probed as time goes and the strings move.

More concretely, the first wound string may be assumed to be stretched in the x-direction, in z=0 plane. The second string is stretched in the y-direction, in z=u plane which is different. They don't intersect. But generically, the transverse distance u in between them changes with time so chances are at least 50% that after some time, they inevitably intersect and they can annihilate. If the number of spatial dimensions that macroscopically expanded exceeded three, the strings would be increasingly unlikely to meet, as the dimensions grow in size. The unwinding couldn't proceed, and the expansion would eventually stop.

So that is their rough speculative reason why three dimensions but not more dimensions were allowed to expand into macroscopic size. This explanation links the dimension of space with the dimension of strings: our observed dimension of space is one plus twice the dimension of a string. Incidentally, Lisa Randall suggested an opposite explanation (or mechanism) based on annihilating braneworlds in which the observed spacetime dimension (four) is one-half of the full spacetime dimensions (ten) minus one. ;-)

Triangulation

In the triangulation approach, the physicists construct a discrete model, simulate it with a computer, and define a number that could correspond to the Hausdorff dimension of the network of their discrete building blocks. They are excited that their particular number is 3.10.

Let me now describe the basic points about the nature and status of these two approaches. String gas cosmology

• is based on degrees of freedom and objects that are known to be important in quantum gravity, at least in some limit, namely strings (or branes)
  
• assumes the existence of special phenomena in the very early cosmology in which these fundamental objects were important - which is almost certainly the case, too
  
• calculates the dimension of space as a function of some other numbers - the dimension of strings in this case - whose value can be justified by independent physical arguments
• seems to be ruled out in its simplest incarnation; however, it leads to somewhat well-defined rules whose predictions can be more or less checked in more detailed stringy compactifications that include branes of other kinds and dimensionalities (brane gas cosmology)

On the other hand, the triangulation attempt

• is based on a toy model that can be shown to be non-local, non-unitary, non-smooth, incompatible with basic qualitative features of physics, i.e. generally inconsistent and unrelated to physics as we know it
  
• identifies the dimensionality of space with a number that seems to have no relationship with a smooth geometry
• calculates the Hausdorff dimension as a function of other parameters and assumptions that are arbitrary and have no other independent justification (garbage in, garbage out)
• leads to a wrong result, even if you ignore the problems above; the non-integral figure they obtain strongly indicates that smooth space doesn't emerge from the discrete model; moreover, this troubling fractional dimensionality seems to be a universal prediction of this whole class of models

Fine. Let me now discuss these four facts about the status of the two approaches one by one, for both approaches simultaneously.

Underlying theory

Our goal is to calculate the dimensionality of the space around us. Clearly, this can only be calculated from the right theory that actually describes the space around us. The further your theory is separated from the phenomena we actually observe, the less relevant your results will be for the reality.

Because the dimensionality of space is something that general relativity cares about, the theory you build upon should be particularly accurate as a description of the geometry of space. But in principle, you should also incorporate a correct description of all other particles and forces - or to show that their existence doesn't change your result.

Brandenberger and Vafa actually build on objects - strings - that have been shown to be the fundamental degrees of freedom of quantum gravity, at least in the weakly coupled "stringy" regimes of quantum gravity (regimes that incidentally include a significant portion of realistic compactifications). We know that certain massless closed string modes inevitably behave as gravitons, obeying the rules of general relativity at long distances. Strings can be shown to exist in all other consistent quantum gravity formalisms we know as of today, including the AdS/CFT and matrix (string) theory.

On the other hand, the simplices in the triangulation approach have not been shown relevant for physics (i.e. for gravity, other forces, or other known elementary particles) in any way - except for a wishful thinking. These theories share a lot of other universal pathological features. For example, they either violate locality and causality - hugely, macroscopically - or they violate unitarity and transitivity of time evolution - by equally unacceptable amounts.

Why? Because if you want to restore locality, at least approximately, you must prevent the simplices from interacting with very distant simplices. Typically, the non-local and/or acausal histories which lead to very non-trivial spacetime topologies (with a lot of wormholes between any pairs of points etc.) are removed by hand. But such a procedure leads to a violation of causality and unitarity by itself.

In Feynman's path integral approach to quantum mechanics, it is absolutely crucial that one sums over all histories, not just an ad hoc selection of them. Why? Because if you calculate the evolution amplitude from slice A to slice C, you get the result by summing over all histories between A and C. Why? Because you may divide the interval to A-B and B-C evolutions. The A-C evolution is the sum over all intermediate configurations B and over all histories in the A-B and B-C intervals. It is easy to see that any "global" or "topological" restriction on the histories in the A-C interval will destroy this transitivity property unless it can be formulated as a local constraint on some variables. (Requiring that the magnetic fluxes over cycles are integer-valued is about the most non-trivial "global" constraint you should ever impose and it is not really new: it automatically follows from a description in terms of a potential.)

For a simpler example, just imagine that you use Feynman's path integral to calculate the result of a complex double-slit experiment (with two double slits) but you remove the histories in which the particle goes through the left slits twice. Obviously, the amplitudes you calculate in this way won't be equivalent to the results of any Schrödinger's equation. The conservation of probability will fail, too. If you rescale the wave function ad hoc, to keep the sum of probabilities at one, you will violate locality because the amplitude of one outcome will depend even on the amplitudes of other outcomes that won't be realized. In fact, not only locality will be broken: it will no longer be true that the probability of "A or B" is the sum of "P(A)" and "P(B)" if A,B are mutually exclusive. Logic will break down, too.

All these things are inconsistent in quantum mechanics. The only problem is that many (or most) people don't understand the subtle character of quantum mechanics and the robustness of its postulates so they play with tons of models that are demonstrably wrong.

Where does the dimensionality emerge?

The approaches dramatically differ in the "location in spacetime" where the relevant phenomena decide about the spacetime dimensionality, too. In string gas cosmology, one has to study some details of cosmology that tell us which universes are "fit enough" to ever become "mature", assuming that they were born from a Big-Bang-like event. The "Big Bang" is where these decisions take place.

The triangulation paradigm seems to argue that space in quantum gravity cannot possibly have a different dimensionality than the number that they calculate from their randomly picked discrete model: the decision occurs everywhere in the Cosmos. This is, of course, known to be wrong. You may believe that none of the vacua of string theory describes our Universe perfectly accurately. But you can't really deny that they're consistent superselection sectors of a theory of quantum gravity. Many of them have dimensionalities that differ from 3+1, including the well-known AdS5 x S5 compactification with a known holographic description. The extra dimensions may be compactified but they may be, in principle, decompactified, too.

It is simply not true that other "pieces of space" with dimensionalities different from 3+1 cannot exist.

Even if you decided to pretend that these counterexamples don't exist and if you only focused on discrete models, it is simply not true that all of them lead to the same Hausdorff dimension. Depending on the shape of the simplices, the types of interactions in the action, and the additional criteria to a posteriori "censor" the path integral, you will obtain very different results.

In the triangulation approach, the space dimensionality is extracted as a Hausdorff dimension of a set. And they obtain something like 3.10. Does it mean that they have found evidence that there are three dimensions of space in such a discrete model? Well, not at all.



This fractal, the Sierpinski carpet, has Hausdorff dimension of log(8)/log(3) = 1.8928 or so. Does it mean that it is a two-dimensional Euclidean plane? No. The physics inside this carpet simply doesn't behave as physics in a two-dimensional Euclidean plane. This is a very serious problem.

How serious is it? Well it is equally serious as the problem with an alternative Christian theory of causal dynamical triangulation. A priest can calculate the dimensionality of space as the number of entities in the Holy Trinity. There are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, giving you the x,y,z dimensions of space.

I am not really exaggerating here. The three "objects" in the causal dynamical triangulation are equally disconnected from the three "objects" we want to obtain - coordinates in a theory that obeys the laws of three-dimensional geometry - as is the Holy Trinity. It's just a number. The priest at least got the right answer.

Wasn't the output inserted as input?

Even if you neglect the problem that one of the two approaches uses an inconsistent theory, invalid assumptions about the diversity of a priori allowed dimensionalities, and an incorrect identification of the spacetime dimensions with some numbers in the theory, there are other problems.

One of them is that the calculated dimensionality depends on certain numbers that you inserted. With different rules for the simplices, their interactions, and the censorship of their histories, you would obtain different results.

This problem actually exists in the string approach, too, although it is less serious here. Why? Because the dimensionality calculated by the simple argument due to Brandenberger and Vafa depends on the dimension of a string, one. This dimension looked like a canonical number in string theory. However, once branes were discovered in the mid 1990s to be new important ingredients of string theory, other possible dimensions of objects that may prevent the space from expanding have emerged, too. So the original calculation 1+1+1=3 seems to be just a kind of naive perturbative approximation.

I say that this problem is less serious in string theory because there still exist arguments that the strings continue to be more important than other objects in large regions of the parameter space. And even if they are not, they exist more refined calculations that lead to rather accurate results. These results depend on the particular model we choose (and its spectrum of branes).

In this sense, the string/brane gas cosmology approach still offers a link between the details of observable (!) physics on one side and the dimensionality of a well-behaved and desirable smooth space (!!) on the other side.

On the other hand, the calculated link in the triangulation approach is between unobservable (!) assumptions about the elementary simplices on one side and the Hausdorff dimensionality of an unphysical (!!) fractal on the other side.

Is the result correct when calculated more carefully and can it be fixed?

The result 3.10 for the dimension of the space in the triangulation approach is wrong. It is also true that when the Brandenberger-Vafa calculation is computed more accurately, with all the stringy and relativistic effects and with the additional branes in realistic stringy vacua, the final conclusion is typically altered, too. 3+1 is no longer the unique correct answer.

Such a falsification is surely bad news for those who would like to believe that the original Brandenberger-Vafa paper was the final word. On the other hand, falsification is the way how science makes progress.

The important thing is that there exist transparent criteria for what it means to make all these calculations more reliable. It means to pick a stringy vacuum that has more realistic physics than the previous ones and to incorporate all kinds of high-temperature, short-distance, strong-coupling effects that may be relevant but that were previously neglected. Also, more complete papers could calculate more than just the number of the dimensions - maybe something about the topology of the compact manifold, too. And finally, it could be connected with more diverse observational data, for example with some subtle properties of the cosmic microwave background (or other data and facts from cosmology).

We don't know for sure whether this approach will ever be completely well-established and accepted - which is why it remains speculative - but we know that there exists a meaningful program whose success may be judged by scientific criteria. On the other hand, such a program doesn't exist in the case of triangulations because we don't know of any "refinable" links between the observable physics and the detailed assumptions (or outcomes) of the triangulated calculations which is why these calculations will almost certainly remain balderdash in all of their future reincarnations.

And that's the memo.

Northern Greenland: less ice 6,000-7,000 years ago

If you look at the recent pictures, you will notice that the northern beaches of Greenland are surrounded by ice throughout the year.

However, Norwegian (Astrid Lyså and Eiliv Larsen) and Danish researchers recently investigated raised beach ridges on the north coast of the island and determined the origin of the shores. Because pack ice and wave activity influence their formation differently, they could see that there has been a lot of waves over there. Also, dating techniques showed that these beaches molded by open water were born 6,000-7,000 years ago.

Science Daily (click)

It follows that in the middle of the hypsithermal, there was much less ice in the Arctic than today. In particular, the North Pole had to be periodically ice free for a long time.



Figure 1: Cold weather returned to the area 4,000 years ago and ruined the Independence 0 Culture. The stones are from a later Independence I Culture.

Now, you may ask what does it have to do with global warming. Had their findings been "convenient", you would surely read a lot of links with the current climate, gloomy predictions, and concerned calls to deliberately cripple the industrial civilization.

However, because their findings go in the opposite direction, you read a completely different interpretation:

However, the scientists are very careful about drawing parallels with the present-day trend in the Arctic Ocean where the cover of sea ice seems to be decreasing.

"Changes that took place 6,000-7,000 years ago were controlled by other climatic forces than those which seem to dominate today,” Astrid Lyså believes.

Well, they are apparently careful not to become deniers and to lick every single piece of buttocks that their crazy alarmist preachers - who effectively control everything that is consequential about climate science - expose.

Now, Astrid Lyså's belief is very cute. Whenever the Christian fundamentalists say something about the special events that should have taken place 6,000 years ago, they are immediately (and arguably rightfully) dismissed are unscientific religious bigots.

But when a fully analogous interpretation of the observations is applied to similar phenomena that occurred 6,000 years ago by AGW believers, everything is fine, isn't it? She can't possibly be a religious crank, can she? Now, what is exactly "different" about the climatic factors today and 6,000 years ago? Could the madam please clarify what she means by her extraordinarily bizarre statement? Or are the readers of Science Daily supposed to buy this manifest nonsense without a glimpse of an argument?

From any geological perspective, 6,000 years is simply nothing; it is one part per million of Earth's history. The Independence I Culture as well as the previous way of settlers experienced the same physical laws and the same holocene we experience today. Not only human beings were alive but many of them were already as white as most Europeans are today - their SLC24A5 was already mutated. So what's exactly different?

Now, if you tell me that the only major difference is the industrial production of CO2 that was non-existent, it is easy to see that this difference is irrelevant. If it were important or even "dominant", the Northern Greenland would have to be warmer than it was 6,000 years ago. But it is cooler.

Please: it is the same physical and climatic phenomena - just in a slightly different mixture and phase - that were deciding about the Arctic ice 6,000 years ago as those phenomena that decide about it today. Whoever thinks otherwise is a religious bigot, after all.

And that's the memo.

Hat tip: Tom Weidig

PDO and temperature trends

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) was switching into cool and/or warm modes almost exactly when cooling/warming trends began in the 20th century.

This observation has been known to Joe D'Aleo and others for years. Roy Spencer is now completing a paper for Geophysical Research Letters in which he quantifies these relationships:

Weather Questions, Anthony Watts's blog

Spencer assumes that the cloud cover is affected by the PDO index - which is almost certainly the case, the only question is "how much". These variations influence the deeper ocean where the heat may be stored and mixed for many decades or a century. Finally, he puts these things together to optimally match the thermometer data.



You can see that the PDO-only model describes the temperature pretty well at the qualitative level, including the slight cooling between the 1940s and late 1970s. However, the fit gets improved if you add a term proportional to the CO2 concentration. However, such an addition only adds 0.2 °C to the temperature or so - close to the expected effect of CO2 throughout the 20th century. It shouldn't be shocking that the resulting CO2-induced warming for the 21st century is well below 1 °C, too.



Incidentally, the highly asymmetric (red) IPCC range indicates that what dominates their calculations of the sensitivity is not a full-fledged model of reality but a set of priors. If they had a full model, the 90% confidence level range would be pretty much symmetrically distributed around the most likely central value.

In fact, it's known that the upper bound of the confidence interval depends almost exclusively on priors - how much you are willing to admit a crazily high sensitivity in the first place. Because the amount of non-trivial data (inferences) they apply to refine the estimate is low, the prior prejudices are not affected too much. A typical example of a prejudice-dominated science.

Spencer and Braswell ended up with a 0.6 °C warming for the 21st century only but I guess that Lindzen would still beat them by a little bit.

Ernest Rutherford: an anniversary

Ernest Rutherford died on October 19th, 1937, i.e. 71 years ago. Why? Because he needed an umbilical hernia repair. Since he was a baron (Baron Rutherford of Nelson), the feudal rules dictated that he had to be operated by a titled doctor. The delay killed him.

The message is that you should refuse to be knighted if you are at risk of needing this type of surgery. ;-)

But we should start at the beginning. Ernest was born as "Earnest" (because the hospital employees were illiterate) on August 30th, 1871, in New Zealand into a family of a farmer who immigrated from Britain. He studied at some local schools, presided over the local "debating society", and went to the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge, U.K. to get a PhD. He briefly became the world champion in the distance beyond which electromagnetic waves had been detected.

Ernest focused on radioactivity pretty soon. He invented the names "alpha, beta" for the types of radioactivity. Whenever things look mysterious, people use Greek letters or M to label them. ;-) In 1898, he became the boss of physics at McGill in Montreal. He demonstrated that the radioactive decay influences the bulk of the matter and the half-time is thus universal for each radioactive substance. That allowed the people to use the radioactive decay to measure time, proving that the Earth was older than previously thought, among other things.

Bizarrely enough, these discoveries earned him the 1908 Nobel prize in chemistry. At that time, people didn't realize that radioactivity was no chemistry. Why didn't they realize that it was no chemistry in 1908? Because they didn't know about the atomic nuclei yet. Atomic nuclei were famously discovered one year later, in the 1909 "Geiger-Marsden" experiment supervised by Rutherford himself. In this way, Rutherford has proved that his prize 1 year earlier was a mistake. ;-)

In this experiment, helium nuclei - alpha particles - are reflected from a thin gold foil into a zinc sulfide sheet that lights up when hit by an alpha particle. Because they could clearly see that the alpha particles are sometimes reflected exactly in the opposite direction, backwards, it proved that the atoms were not made out of "plum pudding" (the plums were the light electrons in this model while the positive matter, dominating the mass, was uniform!).

Instead, they had to have a very heavy object inside - with a mass comparable to the alpha particles (which electrons clearly don't have). The plum pudding model was killed and the atomic nucleus was born: in some sense, the newer picture of the atom is the exact opposite of the old plum pudding model because the negative matter is "diluted" - in the electron clouds - while the positively charged matter is concentrated.

A similar history repeated itself later when the quarks - heavy nuclei inside hadrons - were discovered in Bjorken's "deep inelastic scattering" experiments. The Rutherford experiment was the moral beginning of high-energy physics - the strategy to learn about the short-distance architecture of matter by making high-energy collisions: Rutherford was the forefather of all particle accelerators. This comment is not just a philosophical game: Rutherford's technologies were essential for the Manhattan project, too.



Funny. Brian Cox said independently the same thing about Rutherford and high-energy physics.

In 1919, Rutherford was also able to transmute the elements (nitrogen to oxygen) as the first person in the world. But Rutherford wasn't just an experimenter: he was an amateur theorist, too. When Niels Bohr was working on the atomic orbits around 1921, they sometimes talked to one another. Rutherford proposed a new particle, a neutron, that holds the protons together. Neutrons were found in 1932 by Rutherford's associate, James Chadwick.

Now, Rutherford was right that something had to beat the repulsive electric force between the protons in the nucleus. And he was right that there were neutrons in the nucleus (except for the light Hydrogen 1). But his link between these two facts wasn't quite correct because protons inside the nucleus attract each other by the strong force, too. The particles contributing the attractive force are not neutrons but rather pions or gluons (depending on the scale of your effective field theory). But the main point of his guess was right, anyway.

Many things including rutherfordium (Z=104) are named after this rapper.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: a birthday

Padma Vibhushan Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, FRS, was born on October 19th, 1902, in Panjab Lahore (British India, today: Pakistan) into a Tamil brahmin family. The name, Chandrasekhar, is one of Shiva's appellations: it means "holder of the moon" in Sanskrit.

Quite a good name for a guy who calculated the force keeping solid celestial bodies from collapsing.

His father was an achieved musician while his mother was a translator. He was their first kid but because they wanted him to be a perfect kid - like a dimension in critical superstring theory - they had 10 kids in total. ;-) Chandra's uncle, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, was a physics Nobel prize winner, too (for the Raman effect, inelastic scattering of photons off vibrational modes of molecules).

Chandra studied various local schools, the Presidency College, and was sent to Cambridge, U.K. with an Indian government scholarship. He was admitted to Trinity College: Ralph Fowler became his adviser. Paul Dirac told them it was a good idea for Chandra to meet Niels Bohr so Chandra spent a year in Copenhagen, too.

In 1933, he got his PhD and began to talk to Arthur Eddington and Edward Milne. Three years later, he married a one-year younger classmate Lalitha whose support was a "central fact of his life". In 1937, he moved to Chicago - because of reasons to be explained below - where he stayed. During the war, he worked on ballistics.

In physics, he meticulously divided his life into epochs. In each of them, he focused on one problem:

• 1929-1939: stellar structure and white dwarfs

His book about the subject has 1,500 citations.

• 1939-1943: stellar dynamics

His book about stellar dynamics has 600+ citations.

• 1943-1950: hydrogen ion and radiative transfer

His book about radiative transfer has 4,000 citations.

• 1950-1961: hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability

His book about the subject has 5,500 citations. Chandrasekhar number is a dimensionless ratio of the Lorentz force to the viscosity.

• 1961-1971: GR & equilibrium figures

His book about the subject has 1,000 citations.

• 1971-1983: black holes

His book about black holes has 1,500 citations.

• 1983-1995: collisions of gravitational waves

See 100+ papers.

He was an organized guy, wasn't he? ;-) Physicists don't usually work in this way which is another reason to call him an applied mathematician. His 1983 Nobel prize was given to him for the first two epochs, especially for the Chandrasekhar limit from the first epoch (independently derived by Landau). He was angry that the rest of his life was ignored but he kindly accepted the award, anyway. ;-)

The Chandrasekhar limit is the upper bound on the mass of a white dwarf: if a star is heavier than 1.44 solar masses or so, it must become a neutron star or a black hole. Recall that white dwarfs are made out of electron-degenerate matter.

It means that there is some positive charge everywhere but the main obstacle preventing you from squeezing the star further is the "degeneracy" pressure from the electrons - from the Pauli exclusion principle. When you require this pressure to act against gravity, you will find out that its strength becomes insufficient if the mass exceeds the limit.

While the epochs above may indicate that Chandrasekhar was a mainstream "craftsman", it doesn't mean that his relativistic calculation was immediately accepted. Quite on the contrary. It was hysterically opposed by Arthur Eddington. Recall that Eddington has organized the over-hyped 1919 solar eclipse measurement and became a crackpot in the 1930s who had lots of "friends" among the journalists, much like Lee Smolin has today.

Although Chandrasekhar's relativistic calculation was clearly perfect, he didn't find any significant supporters among the established European physicists which was a source of immense frustration and one of his reasons to move to Chicago. That's yet another example of a stinky "consensus science". The only universal thing that "consensus" means in science is that people are cowards who are shitting into their pants.

Nothing has qualitatively changed since those times. Today, hundreds of string theorists are also shitting into their pants, being scared that the journalists (or crackpot Lee Smolin) will attack them in the media if they say what they actually know about physics. We still don't live in a scientific society. Our society is still led by fear, superstitions, charlatans, and crackpots.

At least in 2008, we don't have to be scared if we defend Chandrasekhar's calculations. The Chandra X-ray observatory is named after him, too. And when I say that Chandrasekhar was one of the best general relativists of the 20th century, I no longer have to be afraid of anything. ;-)

Pascual Jordan: a birthday

Pascual Jordan was born on October 18th, 1902, in Hanover, Germany, into an old noble Spanish family where all first-born sons were named Pascual Jordan.

The oldest one served in the British cavalry in the wars against Napoleon. These are quite conservative family roots that surely explain a significant portion of his later political inclinations.

When Pascual was 12, his main project was to rewrite science so that it would be literally compatible with the Bible. ;-) But his moderate mentors of religion pushed him in a more conventional scientific direction. At Hanover University, he studied maths, physics, but also zoology since 1921. After two years, he switched to Göttingen which was a really powerful place at that time. He became an assistant to mathematician Richard Courant and later to physicist Max Born. To make you sure, both of them were Jews.

Jordan has worked with many Jews and they usually maintained mutual respect throughout their lives. Many of his colleagues were kind of compatible with him politically: for example, von Neumann and Wigner shared his staunch anti-communism.

He wrote the most famous papers of the mid 1920s together with Max Born and Werner Heisenberg. On a sunny day in June 1925, Heisenberg escaped hay fever to an island (Heligoland) in the North Sea. He was memorizing Goethe's poems and mountain climbing during the days. But at 3 a.m. he realized that non-commuting observables may make sense out of the spectral puzzles. He couldn't sleep so he left his house and waited for the sunrise at the top of a rock.

His ideas at that time were probably very vague. Born and Jordan helped to put these visions on a mathematically firm ground: see one of their papers. Later, all these three Gentlemen wrote the most important papers about matrix mechanics. In this context, matrix mechanics means the Heisenberg picture (with time-dependent operators) of ordinary quantum mechanics for particles where the operators such as X,P are usually written in the basis of energy eigenstates.

For reasons that are known to be irrational today, people preferred Schrödinger's easy-to-imagine (and easy-to-misinterpret) description of quantum mechanics with explicit wave functions. Dirac later showed the equivalence of the two pictures.

Quantum field theory

Now, we often celebrate the fathers of quantum mechanics, such as Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Born, but have you ever asked the question who has actually discovered quantum field theory? I mean the second quantization, the emergence of particles from fields, and the right commutation relations for fields etc.

I think it is fair to say that Oskar Klein and Pascual Jordan are the fathers of quantum field theory. Pascual Jordan realized a lot about algebras - the different types of products.

He also invented Jordan algebras. They are typically obtained from associative algebras by defining a new product,

a*b = (ab + ba) / 2

This new product is manifestly commutative but it is not associative. Instead, it satisfies a similar condition

(x*y)*(x*x) = x*(y*(x*x)),

the Jordan identity, that one may declare (together with the commutativity) to be a defining property of abstract Jordan algebras, in analogy with the Jacobi identity satisfied by Lie algebras. (Unlike the case of Lie algebras and antisymmetrized products, not every Jordan algebra can be represented as a subalgebra of an algebra of symmetrized matrix products.)

Such symmetrized products can occur at various places - for example, for 3x3 "Hermitean" matrices of octonions with this product, you obtain an algebra whose automorphism group is F_4. If you realize that the real trace is invariant under the transformations, you should be able to see why F_4 has a 26-dimensional (fundamental) representation. But I don't really understand why one would ever use this Jordan algebra approach to observables in quantum mechanics. But it may be just because we're not used to it. In mathematics, von Neumann algebras usually play the role of Jordan algebras these days although Jordan algebras have been used in projective geometry and number theory.

However, what I understand very well are the anticommutation relations for fermionic fields - a precious discovery by Jordan. Note that an anticommutator is nothing else than the "symmetrized product" discussed above (times two) so these two insights are closely related. But in the case of quantum field theory, we usually want the "basic" anticommutators to be c-numbers which leads us to a very special case of Jordan algebras. I don't know how you reacted when you started to understand their meaning and importance for the first time but I became thrilled very quickly.

Establishing a small commutator XP-PX was a nontrivial step but realizing that certain things should anticommute rather than commute may have been an even more nontrivial step, in some sense, because it is not a "small deformation" of the previous rules (except for the written form in which the minus sign is a pretty small change). The Pauli exclusion principle was put on a much more logical and more fundamental mathematical basis. Pascual Jordan was actually the first person who discovered the Fermi-Dirac statistics, too. Jordan was too modest to fight for credit so, together with Wigner and others, he used the term Pauli statistics.

Politics

Pascual Jordan joined NSDAP in May 1933, SA (Sturmabteilung, brownshirt storm troopers) in November 1933, and enlisted in Luftwaffe (the German air force) in 1939. He was proposing a lot of improvements of weapons but they didn't trust him because of his numerous Jewish collaborators (and yes, also because he was just too smart for those typical dumb Nazi scumbags). Jordan has never benefited from his nationalistic beliefs and Nazism made him pretty isolated.

On the other hand, because of his political inclinations, he didn't share the 1954 Nobel prize with Max Born - which he otherwise would have.

However, Jordan wanted to remain active in politics after the war - despite Pauli's recommendations of political abstinence - so he went mainstream after he was formally rehabilitated (but, of course, not morally rehabilitated among his colleagues). In CDU, he promoted tactical nuclear weapons for the West German military, among other things. Needless to say, virtually all other physicists were disgusted all the time.

What do I think?

I am surely not excited about Jordan's politics but people have clearly been applying double standards here. Because of reasons that seem partly comprehensible, Jordan was close to these far-right programs and he became politically organized. David Bohm was organized in completely analogous far-left, communist organizations. Nevertheless, Jordan is usually treated as trash while Bohm is routinely celebrated as a saint hero. And by the way, Jordan was much better a physicist than Bohm.

Because Nazism and communism were two comparably big evils - and Stalin has actually killed more people than Hitler - I find this asymmetry in the treatment of these two guys a worrisome testimony of the pro-communist bias in the Academia. A membership in NSDAP or SA was not an "ultimately selective" crime. By 1945, there were 8.5 million NSDAP members so it should not be shocking that something like 10 percent of German physicists would be members, too. In 1934, there were 3 million members of SA.

I think that the political bias in science - and even in Nobel prizes - is wrong in all directions. But I am afraid that Jordan will remain an "unsung hero" of quantum mechanics for quite some time if not forever.

Cuba adds 1% to world's oil reserves

This is a natural continuation to our discussions about peak oil.



BBC and others report that Cuba claims to have 20 billion barrels of offshore oil. This amount is twice as large as previously indicated. If true, Cuba's reserves will actually match all of the United States. Lucky commie bastards. ;-) The United States should surely try to add the post-Fidel Cuba into the Union.

Recall that the proven world's oil reserves are 1,240 billion barrels so the discovery - or a better geological analysis - increases the reserves by 1%. Because the proven reserves are enough for nearly 50 years of consumption, assuming current consumption, the discovery amounts to 6 months of global consumption.

Another obvious point is that if such an increase of proven reserves by 10+ billion barrels occurs every 6 months in average, the "expected" end of oil reserves will always be more than 40 years in the future. ;-) That's certainly not a far-fetched estimate. Half a year ago, Venezuela added 30 billion barrels to its estimates and Iraq increased them, too.

We are clearly extremely far from the point when we could be reasonably certain that the oil production has "peaked". The people who want the whole national economies bet on "peak oil" are insane gamblers trying to inflate an absolutely crazy bubble.

The economic impact of the discovery on Cuba is also cute. At USD 70 per barrel, 20 billion barrels is USD 1.4 trillion which is nominally something like 30 years of their GDP. Not bad.

Off-topic: elections

For the first time since 1996, I actually voted today. When I was in the U.S., it would have been silly to make all these difficult exercises and try to vote from a distance because it would have been costly (a trip to NYC?) while an equivalent vote of one gipsy was bought by the social democrats for USD 5 or so. ;-)

The Senate choice was a no-brainer. The gynecologist - oops, the spell-checker says that the word doesn't exist: I mean a vagina physician - was an independent on the Civic Democratic ticket that I would normally support. A typical achieved person who should be sitting in the Czech Senate, I think.

For the regional bodies, I also voted for the Civic Democratic ticket led by the mayor of Pilsen. At the end, I abandoned my intent to give preferential votes to individuals because these issues, while somewhat important to me, are infinitesimal in comparison with the fact that most of the people in my district probably vote for the social democrats if not communists.

There were other candidates whom I could potentially vote for. For example, the funny guys from the Czech Crown who want to restore constitutional monarchy. But such options sometimes look like jokes so I went mainstream.

LHC: 29 magnets broken

Pat and Mat (Czechoslovakia) were clearly hired by CERN.

A closer scrutiny has revealed that the "spilled helium" incident has mechanically damaged 24 dipole magnets (out of 1,232) and 5 quadrupole magnets (out of 392).

CERN report (click)

Forget about collisions in 2008: some sources even say that the LHC will be down through the end of May 2009. It's a lot of lost material: a dipole magnet (left on the picture below) is 15 meters long and weighs 35 tons. The quadrupole magnets (right on the picture below) are smaller, meant to focus the beams.



...

Thank God that the incident didn't blow up the detectors. ;-) The inauguration takes place on next Tuesday, anyway.

Hat tip: John Conway

Third presidential debate

I was satisfied with McCain's performance, it was nice. Obama is an OK speaker but a lot of things he says are deep misunderstandings. If politics learns as much from experience as Obama does, people are pretty much bound to repeat all of their mistakes all over again.

The example of taxes is typical. In this tough economic atmosphere, it is very obvious that it is mainly the companies and the rich who are in trouble (and loss) from the beginning. The trouble may spread as they become less able to support an active economy. A regressive tax policy would be clearly much better an option for job creation and job preservation.

In plain English, typical employers have to have a lot of money to pay for salaries while the typical employers have to be thirsty to get them. That's the setup that keeps the motors running. The inverse setup would slow the machine down: the 2.8% month-on-month drop in manufacturing could be just a modest beginning. One of the easiest-to-see bad symptoms of the recent mortgage bubble was that wealth - the real estate - was distributed directly to the poorer people, instead of being trickled-down from the top. It can't work like that because no actual big wealth is directly created at the bottom.

Obama's left-wing populist remarks about the advantages for the middle class are completely off the mark. Egalitarianism itself won't help the societies to survive these periods. Let me just mention that Iceland was the fourth most egalitarian country in the world, with CIA Gini index at 25 in 2005.

By the way, this is the worst period for the U.S. dollar to be strong. With the weak local consumers, the U.S. producers will have to rely on exports but at this level, most of the products are unexportable. Much like in all such early recessions, the troubled countries should naturally try to talk their currency down. It's crazy that no one in the U.S. is doing so these days.

Also, both McCain and Obama are completely wrong if they want to simplify cashing of 401(k)'s for the people to "meet short-term obligations" (by canceling fees). For most people, 401(k) is the only resource negatively affected by the recent turmoil and it doesn't influence life now - so which obligations are threatened?

Such cancellations would lead to escalating panic, dropping equity prices, locked-in losses for the people who do it, and generally dark future. Quite on the contrary, the policymakers should do everything they can to encourage investment and to return the parameters - such as the general equity prices - closer to where they were when the economy looked more healthy. I don't say that this should be achieved directly by some social engineering. But the atmosphere must be such that it will happen naturally.

You have surely more relevant observations about the whole debate and I want to hear them.

Oil price

Meanwhile, oil price dropped below USD 68 for a while, increasing the loss from the July peak above 50% - a factor of 2+ decrease. The eighth newest posting on Alexander Ač's blog has the following title:

Dr Robert Hirsch: Oil may cost USD 500 per barrel?!

No, he hasn't posted any correction. Instead, he switched to other questions that can also be contaminated by complete stupidities. Environmentalists always do so whenever it is proven that their brains are made out of recycled garbage. The main problem is that the society is unable to see that certain garbage is unusable for certain purposes - e.g. answering policy questions - not even after the recycling.

EU climate plans close to death

A good long-term consequence of the turmoil is that it helps the crazy plans to "fight climate change" to die. See Times Online. Italy, Poland, together with Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Latvia, and Lithuania, oppose the deal. Welcome to New Europe, Silvio, ciao! ;-)

These countries' leaders are inventing various bizarre procedural tricks to explain why they don't have to follow their countries' previous positions. (The Czech Republic would probably benefit from the deal - because the goals talk about a 20% decrease below the 1990 levels which we have more than done around 1991 - which is probably the reason why our guys don't openly oppose it. See the tables of CO2 output per capita in countries.)

Nicolas Sarkozy who has emerged as an important European mujahideen against climate change begins to panic because he wants these crazy regulations to be approved before the Czech Republic takes over the EU in January. We are likely to scale back the centralized demands on the member states. I guess that Sarkozy will lose but the battle is not yet over.

Plants have rights to CO2 at 2,000 ppm

Chimpanzees are going to get human rights in Europe. They won't be real humans so far, just persons who must get their lawyers who can use anti-discrimination laws to protect their clients and who can bring their guardians new tax breaks. But John Christy is ahead of them:

Follow the logic. If flowers, trees, etc. have rights, then they should have the right to their original food supply (CO2) in quantities as it was when they evolved (about five times today's value).

Another follow the logic: If it is legal to commit the crime of vandalism on power plants to reduce CO2, then it should be legal to run stop signs and red lights because you reduce CO2 as a result. John C.

Indeed, half a billion years ago, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was about 2,000 ppm. That's when the plants began to evolve. They have the right to get their optimum atmosphere that has been catastrophically stolen from them. ;-)

Anyone who prevents the CO2 from returning to 2,000 ppm should be arrested for damaging the basic human rights of billions of Tree Americans, Potato Americans, and other groups that have been discriminated against so far. :-)

And even if someone is a racist and an anti-plants bigot :-) and prefers CO2 to drop, she should allow cars to run red lights because it reduces CO2 emissions, either because the car doesn't have to accelerate again or - even more efficiently - because some nasty CO2-emitting humans will be killed.

Now, both John Christy and your humble correspondent are joking: in reality, the "justifications" of the proposed policies are irrelevant in comparison with the important bad consequences that they would have.

But the problem with all the jokes in this context is that we are surrounded by thousands of nutcases who are constantly proposing very similar regulations and they seem to be serious about them.

Mind power & artificial nerves

BBC informs about a research done at University of Washington (Chet Moritz et al.) that allowed monkeys to send brain signals to muscles through artificial electric wires.

Nature: a popular review

It could be used for people to directly control machines by their mind power. It turns out that it is much harder to send signals back from the machines to the brain.

Oskar Klein & Murray Gell-Mann: birthdays

One month ago, we celebrated the birthdays of two great physicists. The timing is not that important: it's the content that matters here. :-) Oskar Klein belongs to the history textbooks but Murray Gell-Mann is happily with us. Congratulations!

Oskar Klein

Oskar Benjamin Klein was born near Stockholm to a rabbi's family on September 15th, 1894. You shouldn't confuse him with Felix Christian Klein, a Prussian mathematician who lived half a century earlier.

Oskar Klein was a student of Svante Arrhenius, the guy who found out that the greenhouse effect was logarithmic. Oskar worked at the Nobel Institute and wrote papers about chemistry as a high school student.

In 1914, he wanted to do research in Paris but as the number indicates, he was drafted to the world war. After a couple of years, his service ended so he returned to Arrhenius. But he also met Hendrik Kramers who was a student of Niels Bohr. In 1918, he began to visit Copenhagen with a fellowship. He fixed some bugs in Bohr's work on molecular collisions and wrote a thesis on molecular motion, extending the Brownian motion to ions, in 1921.

When he got his PhD, he began to write semi-popular, blog-style texts on physics. One of them explained why Swedish philosophers who opposed relativity were wrong. In 1923, Klein married Gerda Koch and with Bohr's help, he got a job in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In Michigan, he quickly understood the anomalous Zeeman effect: the splitting of spectral lines is proportional not just to "L" but to "L+2S" where S is the spin. Klein continued with the angular momentum of molecules and, while teaching the effects of electromagnetism and gravity at the same moment, he was getting ready to tackle the unified field theory in 1924.

Klein and compact dimensions

If you read the 1919 paper by Kaluza, it seems pretty clear that Kaluza knew how the classical equations of GR and electromagnetism in four dimensions can be obtained from GR in five dimensions. But he really didn't know that the extra dimension should be compact. What he did was a dimensional reduction, not a real compactification.

It just happened that Oskar Klein came to the idea of a fifth dimension independently: he was thinking about massless particles in five dimensions: the mass seen in four dimensions is simply the fifth component of the momentum.

Back in 1921, Einstein allowed Kaluza's original paper to be published. Badly enough for Klein but happily for science, Klein contracted hepatitis in Copenhagen in 1925. That allowed him to return to serious work. Wolfgang Pauli told him about Kaluza's results and Klein "tried to rescue what he could from the shipwreck".

At that time, it was realized in the quantum community that the momentum is discrete if the dimension is compactified. Klein was able to use this result in the context of Kaluza's theory. That's great. So he realized that the dimension had to be compact and identified its isometry with the electromagnetic U(1).

Klein also found it natural for the radius of the dimension to be close to the Planck length, a fact that would soon lead to the falsification of the simplest Kaluza-Klein theory, because of the unbearable lightness of being of the electron. (By the way, no, I don't know whether Milan Kundera was really an informer.)

At that time, Nature was publishing top research in theoretical physics. His article appeared there in 1926 and intrigued people like Fock, Rosenfeld, de Broglie, and Struck. However, people at that time had to understand a lot of other, more elementary and down-to-Earth ("testable") physical phenomena so the interest in his unified field theory unfortunately faded away at that time. Dirac thought that Klein was trying to solve too many problems at the same time.

In 1926, Klein became the closest collaborator of Bohr and arguably contributed to complementarity, correspondence, as well as the uncertainty principle. Heisenberg later admitted that Klein knew why the uncertainty relations and complementarity were morally the same thing.

Still in his great year of 1926, while recovering from hepatitis, Klein wrote their famous Klein-Gordon equation. Schrödinger did so earlier, as a relativistic mutation of his normal equation, but didn't publish it because he realized that the fine structure of the Hydrogen atom comes out incorrectly. See also an article about Vladimir Fock, the Soviet co-discoverer.

Around 1927, as Lars Brink reported, Klein was recommended to focus on teaching. Nevertheless, he continued with his research, together with Pascual Jordan: second quantization was one of his topics. He clearly became the world's #1 in these matters, as we will emphasize later. Yes, as you can see, Jordan had no trouble to work with Jewish physicists such as Klein.

Klein and Jordan found the link between the quantum statistics and quantum fields, while second-quantizing Schrödinger's equation. Jordan-Klein matrices are named after them. Klein and Yoshio Nishina worked on Compton scattering and Klein clarified some misunderstandings about the nature of positrons ("Klein paradox").

In 1930, Klein returned to Stockholm. In the decade that followed, he helped some physicists-refugees including Walter Gordon (from their equation). Since the 1930s through 1960s, Klein attended many conferences and the most fascinating one was the 1938 Warsaw Conference. We will look at his picture of the world in 1938 more closely.

Warsaw 1938

If you know what "Klein" means in German, you may figure out which physicist has both the linguistic authority and expertise to write captivating things about Oskar Klein and other physicists as seen in 1938. Yes, see:

Gross about Klein (PDF)

Yes, I definitely recommend you this article because it is one of the cutest analyses of the history of physics as made by a true professional.

David Gross shows that all the big shots, including Heisenberg (who wasn't present physically), Bohr, de Broglie, Eddington (who was already a full-fledged crackpot at that time), Gamow, Fowler, and others were immensely confused about some very basic matters. They generally and unreasonably believed that quantum mechanics would or should break right behind the corner. Moreover, they had no understanding that the particle/field duality applied both to fermions as well as bosons (i.e. the electromagnetic field). In fact, you can see that the very concept of a "photon" was still controversial in 1938.

On the other hand, what Oskar Klein presented in 1938 was arguably on the same conceptual level as the Standard Model. He was just so damn close! He fully understood that there are bosonic and fermionic fundamental fields that should be second-quantized and that generate particles. He knew that the exchange of bosons is responsible for forces.

Moreover, he sorted the elementary fermionic particles of his era - electrons and neutrinos; protons and neutrons - into SU(2) doublets (realizing that they have anti-particles, too). And he supplemented the U(1) electromagnetic field with a whole 2x2 matrix of other bosonic fields that are responsible for other forces. More concretely, he would identify the off-diagonal elements with Yukawa's pions (rather than the W-bosons: the different types of nuclear interactions were not really understood well).

All this reasoning was obtained by a careful conceptual analysis of the Kaluza-Klein theory. There were many subtle technical bugs - he didn't realize that the SU(2) symmetry was there at the fundamental level (only U(1) was his organizing principle) but conceptually speaking, his theory was in the same universality class as the electroweak theory. Nothing essential for the construction was missing.

With his ideas currently viewed as basic tools of string theory, Oskar Klein was 30 years ahead of his time. If you see how relatively clear his picture of the world was before the war began, you may share my feelings that many of the later developments in physics - when Yang-Mills symmetries etc. had to be re-discovered - were just far too slow: pathetically inefficient.

From the modern perspective, it seems so obvious that Oskar Klein knew what he was talking about much more so than any of the "more famous" guys. I wonder whether there was any way to "prove them that they should listen" and "force them to listen" to Klein. That could have sped up physics by 25 years or so.

Later years

Klein later worked on cosmology, with Hannes Alfven, and wrote popular books and books about religion and science. Nevertheless, his amazing visions in 1926 and 1938 make him one of the finest theoretical physicists of the 20th century. He died in 1977.

Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann is an amazing scientist. I met him at Sidneyfest in 2005. So of course, I asked him about his cute commercial for Enron (Keep Asking Why) ;-) as well as about Feynman's opposition to teeth brushing: yes, Feynman really believed it was a superstition. But let us start at the beginning.

Murray Gell-Mann was born into a family of Jewish immigrants on New York's Lower East side on September 15th, 1929. The surname is an idiosyncratic way to translate a Russian Jewish last name, Gel'man.

He has been a child prodigy from the start. When he was 15, he graduated valedictorian and entered the Harvard for dummies, as Yale is called in Cambridge. ;-) He earned a Bc in physics when he was 19- and a PhD from MIT when he was 22-. After a postdoc job, he became a professor in Chicago and Caltech 3 years later.

We're already in the 1950s. A lot of cosmic ray particles were observed: see Brian Cox's video for the context. He introduced a new quantum number, the strangeness, that would also later lead him to a classification scheme of the particles based on the SU(3) flavor symmetry. Independently of George Zweig in 1964, Gell-Mann postulated the existence of quarks.

There were many things that led him to the quarks, including the 1955 Gell-Mann-Nishijima formula,

Q = I_z + (B+S)/2.

Because his term "the eightfold way" - also a title of a book with Yuval Ne'eman - originated in Buddhism, it shouldn't be shocking that the term "quark" was imported from James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake". Zweig called quarks "aces" - a term that became as popular as "screwing string theory" for "matrix string theory".

Gell-Mann, together with Harald Fritzsch, improved the ideas of Nambu and Han about the quarks' colors and wrote down the theory of quantum chromodynamics, without realizing that it was asymptotically free. Anyway, the key role that Gell-Mann played in the understanding of the strong force seems unquestionable, especially once I also mention his discovery of current algebras and nonlinear sigma models for pions, so let me move on.

Together with his colleague and rival, Richard Feynman, Gell-Mann has found essential things about the weak interactions, too. Independently of Sudarshan and Marshak, they realized that the weak interactions were of the V-A type (vector - axial vector: this combination was appreciated as a candidate since the Yang-Lee discovery of the parity violation), i.e. that the gamma matrices you have to insert in between the Dirac spinors, to create a current (whose square enters the four-fermion interaction sketched by Fermi), have an odd number of indices.

You may remember Feynman's stories about the experimenters who claimed that the interaction was of the S-T type (scalar - tensor) but the experimenters were proven wrong because they were only building on inferior minds and experiments while Feynman and Gell-Mann were building on superior minds and a robust theory. More precisely, the experimenters' conclusion relied on the last point in their graph which should never be trusted. ;-)

In the 1970s, Gell-Mann's authority was essential to keep string theory alive at Caltech, one of the centers at that time. Nevertheless, Murray couldn't protect John Schwarz from Feynman's jokes in the elevator - e.g. "How many dimensions do you live in today, John?" :-)

Since the 1990s, he studied complexity and has been associated with the Santa Fe Institute. Many people love to say many fashionable things about emergent phenomena but you can check that Gell-Mann thinks, just like I do, that all these emergent phenomena are derived from a more fundamental theory: "you don't need something more to get something more". :-)

Gell-Mann is a keen bird-watcher and linguist who is even able to teach Chinese colleagues how their own names should be properly pronounced. :-) He is thrilled by the question whether all the languages have a common ancestor. There are lots of articles on this blog related to Gell-Mann but let me remind you about two videos:

Google talk: On Creative Ideas
TED talk: On Beauty and Truth in Physics

Congratulations!

Stringy H-field alternative to dark matter?

Yeuk-Kwan Edna Cheung & Feng Xu (Edna is the lady below Stephon Alexander and on the left side from Nadiya Tkachuk on this TASI 99 picture - in the bottom row, she is the second from the left, not from right) propose a radical alternative to the theory of dark matter.

The most important evidence for dark matter are the galaxy rotation curves: the most crucial part of the mainstream explanation is the profile of the density of dark matter. The two physicists propose a completely different and simpler model:

mv² / r = qHv + m F_grav

Here, the new term "qHv" replaces the gravitational force of dark matter. In the absence of other forces, a constant "H" makes strings rotate with a constant frequency around a point. But if I understand the indices here well, such a rotating string would have to be radially stretched from the point to infinity.

But ignore my doubts. The proportionality of their force to the velocity "v" is what is needed to change the r-dependence of the velocities similar to the Solar System to the observed LP-record-like dependence with a constant angular velocity. By adjusting one new parameter, "Omega = qH/2m", they can describe the galaxy rotation more or less equally well as a dark matter model which has 2 more parameters. I don't even have to tell you which graph is which because they look equally fine (click to zoom):



Edna and Feng present the new force as a stringy effect. They say it is the Lorentz-like (velocity-proportional) force from "H_{txy}" (xy is the galactic plane) universally acting on strings. Yes, they mean the 3-form field strength of the 2-form NS-NS B-field. I don't quite see what "m" and "q" could universally be and what unnaturally tiny value "H" has but it is surely an interesting fit.

Note that you may Hodge-dualize "H_{txy}" to "A_z" which means that the universal axion is changing in the direction transverse to the plane of the Milky Way, being different "above the galaxy" and "below the galaxy". Well, the model surely looks very strange but I don't see an immediate full proof that it is wrong (except of the vague doubts hinted above and difficulties to explain other evidence for dark matter) so I am going to look. You are invited to do the same thing.

Will Russia save Iceland?

There are only 313,000 people living on Iceland - Pilsen times two - but there have been many Icelandic people whom I ran into, including Gunnar Pálsson, a physicist and our housing manager at Rutgers, a boyfriend of a friend of mine, and others (Larus Thorlacius will represent Icelandic string theorists here).

Because the Icelandic financial troubles began to influence our lives, I looked what's going on. It's rather unusual.

The most developed country of 2007, according to the United Nations' human-development index, with USD 66,000 GDP per capita, is on the brink of national bankruptcy.

The national banks' debt was rather high so the government nationalized all of them. Payments were frozen and Britain got very upset about its savings.

I am amazed how eager everyone in the world is to let the most developed country of the world to sink next to Zimbabwe. Their currency became worthless, dropping to 20% of the value a year ago. The stock market re-opened today and dropped by 77%.

Where are all the people who are so eager to help? The only serious offer of help came from Russia. Before the war, comrade Stalin offered his hand to Czechoslovakia against comrade Hitler - when the Western allies didn't move their finger - so I don't find it that shocking.

Needless to say, Russia's motivations are probably not entirely idealistic. As Time magazine argues, the Icelandic herring popular in Russia is not the key reason.

What's probably more important is the access to the Arctic and its minerals and fossil fuels that may soon become relevant. A friendly Iceland would probably improve Russia's position a little bit. And Russia cares about this piece of the planet. Iceland is exactly on the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, a concept used to define the rights to access the Arctic.

As the 313,000 Icelanders are threatened by hunger, their president thinks that the most important thing is to fight climate change. Obviously, certain bureaucratic assholes in convenient enough offices are only threatened by 0.6 °C of warming per century. With these "sensible" priorities, his meat should quickly be sold as pork to repay a part of his country's debt.

At any rate, I think it would be crazy for Iceland to become a third-world country. Too bad that others haven't helped Iceland under more acceptable conditions but I would still vote for bailout. If other nations allow Iceland to collapse because of a crisis created elsewhere, others could follow the suit: New Zealand, 12 others, or Switzerland, Norway, ...

Well, more precisely, the second country to follow Iceland is probably Hungary. They have a notorious public debt, too. The responsible nations of savers are going to pay for the irresponsible behavior of others but I still think it is a better option than new third-world chaotic countries randomly distributed across Europe.

As a percentage of the GDP, the Czech budget deficit is only 1/2 of the Hungarian one which is why the Czech government can afford some tough comments about the need to follow the EU fiscal rules. But in this particular situation, I am not certain whether it is the government spending or the European budget regulations that are the more counterproductive rules to reduce freedom and prosperity.

Update

Iceland has officially asked the International Monetary Fund for help.

Open Office 3.0.0 released

Yesterday, Sun released Open Office 3.0.0:

Download (click)

If their main server is overloaded, use the official Czech mirror that only offers the English versions of the software. I recommend you the full version for your operating system "wJRE".

Especially those readers who don't have Microsoft Office installed on their computer should download the 142-MB file and install this free alternative. Their names for the alternatives of Microsoft and similar products are:

• Writer (Word)
• Impress (PowerPoint)
• Calc (Excel)
• Math (Microsoft Equation Editor)
• Base (Microsoft Access)
• Draw (Corel Draw)
  

The picture above - click to zoom in - is an example showing that PowerPoint files are compatible with OOO 3.0.0. Excel and Word seem to work well, too (up to some layout issues with very big fonts).

Economics Nobel Memorial Prize: Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman won the

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

"for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity".

Well, I have no idea what are the important insights that Krugman is supposed to have discovered - I guess the work is going to be a pseudoscientific defense of protectionism - and I don't exactly count Krugman among the brightest and rational people on the planet but I realize that his work has been cited by many others, he is a well-known person, and I find his name to be a natural extrapolation of the recent trends. Unlike Gore and peace, Krugman at least clearly has something to do with economics, regardless of his being the same leftist as Gore.

So in my counting, the economics prize remains somewhere in between the three serious science prizes and the two prizes - peace and literature - that have become jokes attributed predominantly to clowns for political reasons and that I no longer care about.

Because Krugman is known to be a TRF reader - although far from being the first laureate in this category - let me say: congratulations. You may hear the same word from Arnold Kling, an American libertarian economist, even though his description of Krugman's "pioneering" achievements seems somewhat confusing not only for the Europeans as you can read over there.

As Rae Ann has jokingly pointed out, Krugman's award was good news for the stock market. Dow Jones jumped 936.42 points i.e. 11.08%, by far the biggest daily change ever - in the absolute sense (the previous absolute record jump was only 499 points from 2000, the end of the dotcom bubble; however, in 1987, a drop was over 22% while a jump above 11% occurred in 1969).

NASDAQ and S&P 500 jumped 11.81% and 11.58%, respectively. Not bad but 5 more days like that are needed for the stockholders to recover the recent 3-month losses. ;-)

Incidentally, Václav Klaus introduced the Polish translation of The Blue Planet in Green Shackles. Temperature graphs drawn by the Czech president are included.

The boundary state from open string fields

The best hep-th paper today is the first one, about string field theory.

Michael Kiermaier, Yuji Okawa, Barton Zwiebach (PDF)

The authors construct the boundary state - a description of a generalized state of D-branes in terms of a closed string state - from any solution of an open string field theory.

If you think that those 85 pages are too long, the main resulting formulae are (3.18) on page 18 with (3.14) on page 17 that you need to know:


In the second line, the combination of L_R and the graded commutator of Psi with B_R is very natural. In a ("background-independent") purely cubic string field theory, these two terms would come from Psi only: the purely cubic Psi i.e. "Q+Psi" generalizes Q to any background.

The path-ordered exponential, the exponential prefactor with "L_0" in it, and the choice of contours are things that, I believe, no person with IQ below 250 could guess without lengthy calculations. :-) Nevertheless, let me sketch why there are the two integrals. The closed string state is composed out of different points on the closed string - the closed contour integral - and each of these point contributions is able to link the point to any other point on the closed string - the open contour integral in P. The linking is given by open string evolution (the path-ordered exponential).

Amazingly enough, they show that in the Schnabl gauge, these formulae can be computed in analytic form and the resulting boundary states agree with the states you would expect for several known string field theory solutions.

At any rate, the paper improves the people's ability to directly translate between different descriptions of configurations of D-branes and their generalizations. They also increase our understanding of closed strings in open string field theory. These direct dictionaries are very important because they reduce the mystery why there are so many ways - choices of degrees of freedom - that describe the same stringy physics. Once you know the "field redefinition", the two descriptions cease to be "genuinely different".

All their formulae are "tangible" i.e. more than formal: they can be expanded in terms of string oscillators and all the coefficients are finite, unlike the case of some old misleading heuristic Ansätze.

Second paper

I would also say that the second best paper today is the second paper ;-) by Rolf Schimmrigk, "Applied String Theory", although it is far less technical (perhaps atypically for this mirror symmetry expert). He says that there is nothing new or bad about string theory's having many solutions: it's been known for decades and a good theory must describe all possible universes, not just ours.

Much like in previous cases of physics, experimental data are helpful to choose the correct vacuum and he explicitly mentions cosmological, gravitational, and other experimental constraints and future observations that will help to locate the right vacuum (or their class).

Setting the right priorities means to forget the global warming

Václav Klaus's talk in Switzerland (click)

Google chrome: resolving host: fix

The new version 0.3.154.3 or newer seems to fix this problem with long delays while opening certain websites:

Download it here (click)

Imploding markets

Well, the Dow Jones index is back at the 1997 levels - slightly above 8,000 points - and many people seem very anxious.



This is a thread for your opinions about the reasons of the chaos in the financial world; ideas what should be done and what shouldn't be done; predictions for the future.

If you want to see how hundreds of Americans react, see e.g. Housing Panic.

Even Lakshmi Mittal lost about USD 35 billion and may soon die of hunger, assuming that the remaining USD 20 billion are not enough to buy food. ;-)

Incidentally, this is a cute piece of history: on June 28th, 2008, we voted in a TRF poll what is the most serious threat to the world economy. Two percent of the respondents answered that it was the housing slump - which is how we called the current problem at that time. Well, it would probably be somewhat more today. Three months can make a lot of difference.



Three years can make some difference, too. Look at the November 2005 video above in which Ben Bernanke explains Paul Sarbanes (a skeptical Senator) how derivatives and hedge funds are sophisticated, safe, and creative. I suspect that his confidence would be somewhat lower today.

Observables in quantum gravity

Moshe Rozali has kindly initiated a blog discussion about this important topic. Let us join, too.

Observables

The goal of every quantum-mechanical theory is to predict the probabilities that particular physical quantities - "observables" - will take one value or another value after some evolution of the system, assuming certain initial conditions.

For example, we are using Schrödinger's equation to predict the probabilities that a particle appears at a certain point of the screen in a double-slit experiment. Alternatively, we are predicting the probability that the (decay products of a) Higgs boson and/or superpartners will appear inside a pixel of the LHC detector, and so forth.

Mathematics of quantum mechanics makes it inevitable that observables have to be identified with linear operators on the Hilbert space of allowed states. The allowed values of observables are the eigenvalues of the corresponding operators and the probabilities are squared absolute values of the appropriate complex amplitudes.

In the case of mechanics, the "fundamental" observables are usually x,p - position and momentum - but one may construct more complicated ones such as the angular momentum J (the generator of rotations) or the Hamiltonian (the generator of time evolution). Each particle typically carries its own x,p,J, terms contributing to H, and so forth.

In quantum field theory, the natural observables "look" different. While quantum field theory still implies the existence of particles with their momenta and (usually not quite localized) positions, every quantum field theory is a quantized version of a field theory, after all.

So the natural observables are fields such as phi(x,y,z,t) or E(x,y,z,t) - the latter is the electric field at a given point of spacetime. (Let's neglect additional dimensions of space.) More precisely, these objects are "operator-distributions" rather than operators and you should integrate them over some regions (with test functions) to get genuine operators whose commutators are functions rather than distributions.

But that's not a conceptually difficult technicality: every physicist who knows how to manipulate with distributions (such as the delta-function) may deal with the operator distributions, too. She can continue to call them "operators".

The operators phi(x,y,z,t) tell us something about the state of the system - the field phi - at a given point. So this operator has nothing to do with points in space that are separated: in fact, the (graded) commutator of phi(x,y,z,t) with an operator at a point separated by a space-like interval must vanish. That's why we call the operator "local". Special relativity implies that spatially separated regions can't influence each others so it is not surprising that such local operators exist.

Quantum field theory is naturally rewritten in terms of these local operators. The Hamiltonian is typically an integral over space. Other operators that can be measured may also be constructed as integrals of functions of the local operators (and their derivatives) over space. Even if we add Yang-Mills gauge invariance, it is still possible to construct local operators associated with a point in space that are gauge-invariant and whose eigenvalues are thus fully measurable.

(Gauge-non-invariant operators depend on the gauge i.e. on a convention: they cannot be directly measured. For example, the magnetic field strength in electromagnetism is gauge-invariant but the vector potential itself is not.)

Adding gravity

What happens if we add the metric tensor and gravity? Well, something does. In general relativity, we must also add the diffeomorphism group into the full package of gauge symmetries. Only gauge-invariant operators are independent of conventions. Only gauge-invariant operators can be directly measured.

Some laymen at Moshe's blog are deeply confused about the very basic questions here. Special relativity is not invariant under diffeomorphisms - unless we express the special-relativistic theory with additional, completely redundant, unphysical degrees of freedom (a metric tensor whose curvature must vanish and which is therefore "non-dynamical" in this case).

Without this useless extension, special relativity only allows the invariance under Poincaré transformations and puts inertial frames (but not other frames) on equal footing. States are not required to be annihilated by any generators of transformations of spacetime. The fact that the commenter named "iphigenia" is not able to see that the metric tensor is non-dynamical in special relativity and it (or diffeomorphisms) cannot therefore cause any dynamical problems in special relativity (unlike GR) doesn't mean that people with 60 IQ points above "iphigenia" are also unable to throw the unphysical degree of freedom out.

On the other hand, general relativity is invariant under diffeomorphisms. Both the metric tensor at each point and the diffeomorphism symmetry are necessary in every description of general relativity that keeps the important symmetries manifest. Because the spacetime is generically curved, there exists no natural subset of "inertial frames" and all coordinate systems are equally good to express the equations of general relativity.

This diffeomorphism symmetry turns out to be an important problem in general relativity where it cannot be thrown away. Before we added gravity, the quadruple of numbers (x,y,z,t) in phi(x,y,z,t) described a very physical point in spacetime. In a different reference frame, you would associate the point with a different quadruple of coordinates. But once you pick your coordinates, there is a one-to-one map between the quadruples of coordinates and the "objective" points in spacetime: this map is independent on the state of the system.

The previous sentences fail to hold once you add gravity. Why? Because the numbers (x,y,z,t) are just coordinates that can be reparameterized in an arbitrary way, without changing the physics. So by saying what (x,y,z,t) are, you don't really identify any "objective" point in space. So you don't know which operator phi(x,y,z,t) you can possibly mean. The freedom to reparameterize the coordinate is large enough for (x,y,z,t) to mean anything you want or anything you don't want.

You might say that we faced the same problem in special relativity, too. There were also different acceptable coordinate systems over there. However, what's important is that we could agree upon a few conventions about our coordinates and then all quadruples (x,y,z,t) meant something specific. It's not the case in general relativity because you would need to reveal an infinite amount of information to determine what point is associated with any (x,y,z,t).

This infinite difference is a reason why the reparameterizations in special relativity are "global symmetries" while those in general relativity are "local symmetries". States can't be required to be invariant under global symmetries - because the energy etc. would have to be zero all the time - but they should be required to be invariant under local symmetries - e.g. because you wouldn't know how they evolve with time (the local, gauge transformations can always depend on time).

Moreover, the choices of coordinates in general relativity cannot be "canonical". In special relativity, the spacetime is flat so if you determine the coordinates of a few points, you may just assume that the coordinates are extrapolated linearly across the spacetime that is linear, too.

However, the spacetime is curved in general relativity: for general states (and their gravitational fields), the coordinates have to be "inherently non-linear". Moreover, the precise curvature of the spacetime does depend on the state of the physical system. For example, if an atom is found at one place, it has a different gravitational field - different profile of spacetime curvature - than if it is localized at another point. Dead and alive cats have different gravitational fields, too.

So the fact that you can't choose any "canonical" coordinates - and therefore "objective" gauge-invariant observables similar to phi(x,y,z,t) - depends on two complications:

1. the physical observables must be gauge-invariant i.e. independent of diffeomorphisms; that means that they can't depend on arbitrary coordinates
   
2. there are no "simple" non-arbitrary coordinates because the spacetime is curved according to the matter inside.

At Moshe Rozali's blog, various people have asked which of these circumstances actually explains that you can't define any simple gauge-invariant local observables in quantum gravity: in reality, it is only the union of both of them that makes things hard.

Now, I feel the urge to say that you could imagine that you can define some "objective" coordinates in a curved spacetime of general relativity, too. For example, choose a reference point P that is very far from all matter (somewhere near infinity). And then you can parameterize points in spacetime by specifying

1. in which direction Omega (angular coordinates) from the point P the point is sitting (a small region around P is flat so Omega behaves just like in non-gravitational physics)
2. what is the proper distance or proper time (the length of the shortest geodesic) from P to the point you want to describe

However, this particular convention is difficult to realize because geodesics in spacetime are complicated, especially for generic mass distributions. Moreover, the coordinates won't be unique in general: recall that in the case of gravitational lensing, two different light rays can get from a galaxy to your eye (along two different geodesics). Moreover, the definition assumes that the metric tensor is a good-behaving, nearly "classical" tensor that exists everywhere in space. In reality, the metric tensor is wildly fluctuating, especially at very short distances. If you wanted to follow the geodesics accurately, it would be much more messy than the classical ideas indicate.

For these reasons, attempts to define privileged coordinates in spacetime based on geodesics, proper distances, and extrapolations are not very well-defined, reliable, convergent, or convenient.

Incidentally, string theory gives us a better way to define privileged coordinates, the light cone gauge. In the light cone gauge, all fields or string fields are naturally interpreted as functions of a "light-cone time", x^+. The remaining coordinates, x^- and the transverse x^i coordinates, could a priori be redefined as well. But the Hamiltonian in the light cone gauge - the generator of translations in x^+ - automatically gives you a preferred value of all these coordinates.

The light-cone gauge coordinates are working well for the superselection sector of the flat space - all states that converge to a flat spacetime at infinity. You may talk about the evolution in the "bulk" or the evolution after "finite time". But let us assume that the reader doesn't like any gauge-fixed description of the physics because it obscures the "natural symmetries" and it could become problematic if the density of matter is high (and the fields are strong). Let's imagine that the reader wants the democracy between all the coordinates (and the Lorentz symmetry) to remain manifest.

Scattering and holography

Well, if this is her dream, the situation changes dramatically. In quantum field theory without gravity, we had the operators phi(x,y,z,t) and we could have computed their correlators - expectation values of their products in the vacuum state - for arbitrary values of (x,y,z,t) for each operator. By Fourier transform, these became the Green's functions of the external momenta and the external momenta (p_x,p_y,p_z,p_t) could have been any off-shell momenta.

In gravity, we are forced to talk about the on-shell amplitudes only - those that are relevant for scattering. Why is it so? It is because the general correlators are hard because the nature of the operators phi(x,y,z,t) etc. is ill-defined. However, things simplify if you study scattering.

The initial and final states in the scattering process correspond to safely, spatially separated particles such as gravitons. Because they are so separated, the gravitational field around them is very weak and, in fact, universal. So it actually makes a perfect sense to define the initial or final state with a graviton that has a certain momentum (determined up to the accuracy of 1/X where X is an arbitrarily huge distance that separates the gravitons): the spacetime at infinity - where the incoming particles arrive or the outgoing particles leave - behaves just like in special relativity: you may forget about diffeomorphism and curvature over there. You can rightfully assume that there exist coordinates in which the space at infinity is flat. In these coordinates, things are as clear as in special relativity.

The graviton might still have a gravitational field around it, even when it is at infinity, but you don't need to know any details about it to define the external states. It is enough to say what the on-shell momenta are. By locality, which is a feature of the theory, you may also argue that there must exist multi-particle states in which the individual particles have independent momenta and are still safely separated. The further the particles are, the better approximation yours is.

For this reason, every meaningful quantum theory of gravity must be able to calculate the scattering amplitudes of gravitons (and perhaps other particles that are present) arbitrarily accurately if they scatter from infinity, assuming that the theory admits spaces where particles can flee to infinity.

The case of AdS/CFT is very clear in this respect. Let's talk about an AdS5/CFT4 pair, to be very specific. There is also a compact five-manifold (a sphere etc.) but let us neglect these extra dimensions because they're compact: all fields may be expanded into Kaluza-Klein spherical harmonics, anyway.

So the quantum gravitational theory must be able to compute the scattering of gravitons whose 5-momenta are on-shell i.e. light-like. With this constraint, there are only 4 independent parameters for each such momentum. It turns out that by the AdS/CFT dictionary, the scattering amplitudes are fully encoded in correlators of (off-shell) local operators (for gravitons, it's the stress-energy tensors) on the boundary.

Note that each such an operator on the boundary depends on four coordinates, e.g. (x,y,z,t), which is exactly the right number to parameterize light-like momenta of gravitons in five dimensions. The gravitational theory has five large dimensions but only four of them are accessible for the computation of exact correlators: that's why one dimension is effectively lost. In other words, it is a manifestation of holography.

On the other hand, the boundary theory allows you to access all Green's functions so it is not holographic. It is the very presence of gravity - and diffeomorphisms and/or black holes - that makes certain theories holographic. Recall that holography implies that the number of degrees of freedom (entropy) can't exceed the surface area in Planck units. But the Planck area is proportional to Newton's constant, "G", so if you turn off gravity, it goes to zero and the inequality becomes vacuous: "the entropy should be less than infinity".

Holography manifests itself in many other ways: the black hole is the final stage of a gravitational collapse of any localized system. Its entropy is only proportional to the area of its event horizon but by the second law of thermodynamics, it can't be lower than the entropy of any system that led to the birth of the black hole. It follows that all localized states in the given volume must have entropy lower than the area: the area in the Planck units tells you how many degrees of freedom you need to describe anything in the region. Whatever happens there is encoded in a "hologram" on the surface.

Holography: does it depend on string theory?

Holography emerges at many places of string theory. When you try to compute the amplitudes for strings, you can see that the results are only meaningful - conformally invariant on the worldsheet - if the external particles are on-shell (the dimension of the vertex operators must be (1,1) to keep them marginal and integrable over the worldsheet). The AdS/CFT is another manifestation of the holographic nature of string theory: whatever happens in the bulk (with gravity) may be described by a non-gravitational theory on the boundary.

So is it OK to say that holography only holds in string theory? I think it would be an incorrect conclusion. String theory is a very "specific", well-defined theory of quantum gravity where similar aspects appear to be crisp and clear. However, I think it is obvious that many arguments supporting holography have nothing to do with "strings" per se. Holography is a property of any consistent theory of quantum gravity (which is probably a term equivalent to "string theory" anyway, but even if it is not, the first part of this sentence should be valid).

So which observables do we have?

As we have suggested, in the flat Minkowski space or the AdS space, the scattering amplitudes at infinity are the observables to be studied. And they can be computed by stringy methods - from the worldsheet correlators or the boundary correlators. Does it mean that string theory (or any theory of quantum gravity) can't say anything about finite regions of the bulk?

Well, it depends on the accuracy you want. If you want completely well-defined results and you are not ready to accept a huge set of conventions that define your privileged coordinates, such as the light-cone gauge or worse, it is only the scattering "from infinity" that is completely well-defined. However, if particles scatter from distances comparable to 10^{-18} meters, like those on the LHC, you should realize that this distance, while small for humans, is still gigantic in comparison with the string scale or the Planck scale.

It means that all collisions at the LHC may be viewed as on-shell collisions from infinity. Yes, there is also physics that can't be reduced to collisions, such as the analysis of the spectrum of hadrons. But for this physics, four-dimensional gravity is pretty irrelevant, up to a very tiny error. So the on-shell limitations of quantum gravity won't cripple your ability to "practically" calculate any realistic situation.

The higher energy scale you choose and the closer you approach the Planck scale, the more important the scattering experiments become for your observational tests. Near the Planck scale, the curvature of space and the fluctuations of the spatial geometry may become important but the scattering will become the only doable method to probe this physical regime. Even the tiniest microscopic black holes must be studied by scattering. (And the big ones are described well by classical general relativity, with the rest of the matter living on this curved classical background.)

I should emphasize that there are many more ways to determine non-scattering physics out of the full theory. For example, you may always derive a low-energy approximation of your theory and treat it classically or semiclassically. This can tell you a lot of things about "local" physics that doesn't obviously reduce to scattering. But in some sense, all of this physics is encoded in the scattering amplitudes.

De Sitter space

Another problem is that not all spaces have a region at infinity where it is easy to define the identity of particles with a certain momentum. For example, the energy density of our space seems to be dominated by the cosmological constant. Assuming that the cosmological constant is the right explanation of the observed "dark energy", this emptiness will get even worse and our Universe will be increasingly similar to de Sitter space. The spatial slices of this space look like sphere and your particles can never escape "quite" to infinity even though 13.7 light years is pretty far relatively to the Planck length.

Nevertheless, if you academically insist that your theory should calculate some quantities that are absolutely exact and, in principle, testable with an arbitrary accuracy, de Sitter space will show that you are far too immodest. A certain degree of uncertainty - such as the random thermal radiation coming from the cosmological horizon - seems to be an innate feature of de Sitter space. This uncertainty (and the thermal radiation) is too weak to matter for any conceivable experiment we can do today or in any foreseeable future but it seems to be there.

Once again, I must admit that the comments above are not a proof of a no-go theorem. There can exist a very specific Hilbert space with very well-defined observables whose evolution makes complete sense in de Sitter space. But because it seems clear that we can never measure things absolutely accurately in a de Sitter space anyway, it is questionable whether we really want and need a theory that can predict things absolutely accurately. Maybe we don't. If we don't want it, it still remains puzzling what it means to have a full theory that inherently predicts all probabilities inaccurately.

Preon degrees of freedom in the bulk

Some people could propose that the metric tensor is composed out of other objects or fields that are defined in the same "bulk". It can be a composite of gauge fields, superconducting stuff, preons, or any other buzzword of the same type. Well, I doubt it is the case. But more importantly, I don't think that any of these assumptions would solve the basic problem with the gravitational degrees of freedom, as explained at the beginning. When you try to define the observables like g_{mn}(x,y,z,t) in quantum gravity, the main problem is not the g_{mn} part but the (x,y,z,t) part.

Also, I find any idea that tries to present the metric tensor as a privileged degree of freedom to be misguided and obsolete. The metric tensor is clearly just a low-energy effective degree of freedom arising from a theory that contains and must contain much more stuff. In perturbative string theory, closed strings can carry infinitely many "Hagedorn" excitations that are in principle equally important as the graviton mode. The only way to make "graviton" look special is to go to long distances.

Beyond the perturbative series, there are always many black hole microstates. A pole (or branch cut) in a scattering amplitude corresponding to an intermediate black hole is as important as a pole arising from an intermediate graviton. At some level, when you think out of the box of low-energy approximations, black hole microstates must be equally important as excited string modes or the graviton mode itself. Well, black holes look like "composites" of gravitons (and their fields) but I feel that this proposition only holds - as a form of tautology - if you assume that the gravitational field is fundamental while the "black hole microstate fields" are not.

String field theory

What about some kind of string field theory? String field theory is a way to rewrite string theory that is as similar to an ordinary quantum field theory as you can get. However, it must contain infinitely many elementary fields, corresponding to all excited states of the string, and a correspondingly enhanced gauge symmetry principle. Some people like to say that string field theory is as "background-independent" (in the stringy sense) as general relativity in the first place.

There are problems with this assertion. First, when we talk about the background, we should allow all fields - including the scalar fields - to take any values they can take, without making the description much less appropriate. The dilaton is perhaps the most important scalar field in string theory that is special in the perturbative series. But string field theory is so heavily based on "strings" that it is only good for a weak coupling (the dilaton goes to minus infinity). It even seems likely that string field theory doesn't tell us anything new about nonperturbative physics of string theory than other perturbative approaches. For example, attempts to write type IIA string theory as string field theory don't seem to imply that the strong-coupling limit has the 11-dimensional Lorentz invariance.

That's bad and the "special role" of the weak string coupling certainly shows that string field theory is not "quite" background-independent. Even if you solved the difficult technical problems of closed string field theory, the background independence wouldn't quite hold.

Matrix theory or matrix string theory are radically opposite in this sense: they are equally well-defined for any value of the string coupling, including the infinite value (in type IIA, you get back to M-theory captured by the original BFSS model). In this sense, it is "background-independent" because it deals equally well with any value of the coupling. On the other hand, you need a different model for each value and only models for superselection sectors that are asymptotically flat (or some pp-waves) are known: that cripples the "normal", geometric part of the background independence.

But both AdS/CFT and Matrix theory show that space and positions in space are not fundamental concepts. They're emergent. Systems that don't look anything like AdS5 or the 11-dimensional Minkowski space M11 end up behaving exactly as AdS5 or M11. That's really amazing. The people outside string theory who like to talk about emergent space or background independence or any of these nice words usually end up with one of these two outcomes:

• they have a model that already has an underlying space where objects are "localized": whenever it is so, they can't really say anything about the question "what are the diffeomorphism, gauge-invariant operators"
• they have a model in which no space exists at the beginning but they cannot show that a smooth space emerges, either: well, it's probably because it doesn't emerge in which case they have thrown the baby with the bath water

Which of these two problems occurs sometimes depends on what you are still ready to call "space". At any rate, if you end up with one of the results above, your theory is useless for the conceptual questions of quantum gravity. It is only interesting to describe a theory of emergent space if the space is (apparently) not there at the beginning but if it is (demonstrably) there at the end. ;-)

When you look at the successful descriptions of quantum gravity - and all of those that are known as of today were written by string theorists - they roughly fall into two groups:

• descriptions that make unitarity manifest and allow you to calculate exact amplitudes in principle for any values of moduli etc.
  
• descriptions that make the geometrical interpretation (and Lorentz symmetries) manifest but that suffer from various limitations (e.g. assumptions of weak coupling or low energies).

There seems to be a trade-off going on here. The more manifest the geometrical interpretation of your description is, the more limited the description is in its ability to deal with situations with high energy, strong coupling, high density, or rapid time dependence. That shouldn't be surprising because a geometrical interpretation of a spacetime is often known to emerge. But it often emerges at low energies and (for compact dimensions) in decompactification corners of the moduli space only.

You shouldn't be shocked that if you try to study more extreme situations, simple, geometrically manifest descriptions disappear. Well, they really disappear: it is not a bug of your description but rather a true fact about Nature. The "local" degrees of freedom associated with a large manifold only occur if you can show that the size of the manifold is large in string/Planck/brane units and if all physical quantities are changing much more slowly than by 100% per Planck length.

If you want to find a description - a choice of degrees of freedom - that are equally good in every situation of quantum gravity, it must be an amazing meta-geometric description that secretly knows about all the dualities and about all the ways how degrees of freedom can emerge from the interactions of others and how some of them can become light in various limits.

Frankly speaking, I am convinced that such a description, if it exists, cannot be based on any "predetermined set of degrees of freedom" that just happen to exhibit a rich variety of different behaviors. I think that the very composition and organization of the degrees of freedom that you should start with must be a solution to a set of consistency criteria. I am convinced that people should spend much more time by trying to understand which consistency criteria actually imply that things must go in one way and not another. At some moment, they will have to get back to the bootstrap program.

And yes, I am convinced that the best, most universal description of the degrees of freedom in quantum gravity will have no space - and probably no time - to start with. But because space - and especially time - is so essential to design any system of physics that qualitatively resembles what we know, we will learn some rules that allow you to define what you mean by space and especially time in the pre-geometric structure.

There is no guarantee that such a structure exists or will be found in five years or fifty years. But people simply have to keep on trying because such a setup would become an extremely robust pillar of any research of quantum gravity in particular and theoretical physics in general.

And that's the memo.

Chemistry Nobel prize: green fluorescent protein

The 2008 chemistry Nobel prize was awarded for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP to

Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, Roger Y. Tsien.

All of them are Americans and will receive 1/3 of the prize. The green fluorescent protein may be found e.g. in sea pansy. It is used e.g. in fluorescent microscopy - you observe green light directly created by a (marked) cell out of the incoming blue light rather than reflected light.



This video explains GFP well. Thomson Reuters (TRF) had fluorescent proteins among its candidates but it expected one winner only, Tsien.

Physics Nobel Prize: Nambu, Kobayashi, Maskawa!

After a 30-minute delay, the 2008 physics Nobel prize was awarded to

Yoichiro Nambu (1/2), Makoto Kobayashi (1/4), Toshihide Maskawa (1/4).

Yoichiro Nambu joins a long sequence of string theorists who have won the prestigious award: the average string theorist's chance to win the award exceeds 0.1%. For co-founders of heterotic strings, it jumps to 25% and it is over 33% for fathers of string theory, as we will see. ;-)

David Gross is one of his colleagues in this elite group. And I am not even mentioning many Nobel-prize-winning strong supporters of string theory such as Gell-Mann, Weinberg, or Smoot.



Nambu: string theory, color, and broken symmetry

Nambu, a Japanese-born American, is often described as one of the "fathers of string theory": the other two are Susskind and Nielsen. (Veneziano had the right formula but could see no strings.) Together with Goto, Nambu understood that the action of the string is proportional to the proper area of the worldsheet, analogously with the proper time of a particle's worldline.

I find it stunning that not a single media outlet or a blog besides TRF mentions who Nambu actually is. It's like if the word "relativity" were not mentioned in 1921 when Einstein picked his prize for the photoelectric effect. Well, newspapers and blogs are mostly piles of sh*t (except for Scientific American that happens to reprint a nice detailed 1995 story about the seer Nambu: and Nambu was the kind of seer whom sub-par craftsmen like Lee Smolin could not even see as a seer: a real one).

But because of Alfred Nobel's limited respect for pure theorists (recall his wife's lover but don't forget that Nobel never married), the Nobel prize is formally given to Nambu for a comparably famous discovery that is less often associated with his name, namely for his explanation of the importance of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the subatomic world. See e.g. the Nambu's and Jona Lasinio's paper (which has 2,500 citations). Well, Jona Lasinio is also alive but he is not a co-father of string theory.

I am subtly kidding, of course. There are also other reasons. What are they?

Nambu is, equally importantly, a co-author of the Nambu-Goldstone bosons of which the paper mentioned above is a particular example. For every spontaneously broken continuous [approximate] symmetry, you find one species of a [nearly] massless scalar. This massless scalar is analogous to the "phase of the collective wave function" known from superconductivity. One can prove that this is what happens in field theory. The Nambu-Goldstone bosons can also be "eaten up" by gauge bosons in spontaneously broken gauge theories, to bring the third (longitudinal) polarization of the massive gauge bosons: that's the Higgs mechanism but the 2008 prize is not going here.

In the context of QCD, the relevant nearly massless scalars are the mesons (such as pions) that arise from the chiral symmetry breaking.

Besides strings and spontaneous symmetry breaking, Nambu is also the forefather of "color" as a new kind of charge in strong interactions whose dynamics dominate QCD. His stringy work was mostly focusing on the interpretation of the theory in the context of strong interactions, see e.g. this paper, which is why his relativistic picture of the string (or a fluxtube based on the Nielsen-Olsen vortex) is also our standard qualitative explanation of confinement in QCD.

Recently, it was his namesake who was working on cosmology (hat tip: anonymous). ;-) Needless to say, he clearly deserves the award.

The CKM matrix

Kobayashi and Maskawa, who are both Japanese, receive the Nobel prize for the CKM matrix governing the quark masses, especially for the realization that a broken CP-symmetry in the quark sector requires at least three generations (but they're enough). By the way, their paper is the third most cited particle physics paper as of today.

Recall that "C" in "CKM" stands for "Cabibbo", after Nicola Cabibbo who wrote down the analogous matrix for two generations that is determined by a single angle, the Cabibbo angle. The general unitary matrix in U(3) - the case of three generations - that maps lower-quark mass eigenstates to the isospin partners of the upper-quark mass eigenstates has 9 parameters. However, 6-1 = 5 of them are phases that can be absorbed to the normalization of the six eigenvectors (one overall change of all six phases doesn't change the CKM matrix).

You're still left with 9-5 = 4 nontrivial parameters of the CKM matrix which is more than 3 parameters of an SO(3) matrix: in general, the CKM matrix must be allowed to be complex and the additional phase not included in O(3) is breaking the CP-symmetry because the mass terms in the Lagrangian are "inherently" complex while the CP-symmetry is linked to complex conjugation.

Yes, if you wrote the three previous paragraphs before they did, with a few obvious formulae around, you could probably be half a million bucks richer today. ;-) But it was hard to use the SU(3) matrices in this way because, as the Nobel committee correctly mentions, the relationships between maths and physics were lousy in the 1970s. You know, what's revolutionary here is not the mathematical exercise itself but the correct sequence of physical arguments that use these non-quite-trivial yet not-quite-hard mathematical insights to explain an aspect of the Universe.

The breaking of the CP-symmetry by the phase in the CKM matrix is the only experimentally confirmed breaking of the CP-symmetry which is a potential paradox because we know another possible source of the breaking - the QCD theta-angle (the coefficient of the trace of F wedge F in QCD). The question why the latter is small is referred to as the strong CP-problem.

Helpfully enough, the CP-violation (by the CKM matrix) is advertised by nobelprize.org as the source of matter-antimatter symmetry of the early Universe (well, there should be some stronger additional source because the CKM matrix doesn't seem enough - but it is the only known/established proof of the concept as of today). We wouldn't be here without that breaking. That's clearly one of the reasons why the Japanese contributions are more important than Cabibbo's original 2x2 matrix according to the committee. Obviously, Cabibbo's work was important (to lead people to study different eigenvectors etc. in the flavor space) but the committee has to decide in some way and none of them can be perfect for everyone.

Summary

It's a good pick! Needless to say, all three names were debated as possible candidates in the particle physics circles. I think that Lars Brink, a string theorist in the committee, may be given credit for the good choice.

Incidentally, Kobayashi said he was surprised but Maskawa said that he predicted that he would win this year because he found a pattern. ;-) However, he's not too happy about that - too much noise. However, it's great that Nambu won. (Hat tip: Willie Soon!)

RSS, UAH: September was 0.1 °C warmer

Update: GISTEMP indicates that September 2008 - with the anomaly of 0.49 °C - was 0.01 °C cooler than August 2008. HadCRUT3 says the same thing: September 2008 was the coldest September in this century so far.

RSS MSU and UAH MSU have released their September data about the temperature.

Off-topic: In the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory, The Barbarian Sublimation, Penny revealed some sad aspects of her life to Sheldon who transformed Penny into a multi-user online game addict (Age of Conan). ;-) Incidentally, the two actors (Penny and Sheldon) are rumored to date in the real life: Kaley Cuoco prefers a copy over the original haha.

According to RSS, the month with its 0.211 °C anomaly was 0.07 °C warmer than the previous month. UAH, with a 0.16 °C anomaly, makes it 0.17 °C warmer. Let's focus on RSS. Despite the month-on-month warming, September 2008 was the coolest September in this century so far. The running average of the last 12 months, 0.047 °C according to UAH, was also the coolest one for all months in this century so far.

Many places such as Ireland have witnessed the coldest September in 14 years.

Incidentally, the Sun still seems pretty inactive which is why NASA has shifted the beginning of Solar Cycle 24 into the future again.

ENSO-neutral conditions persist in the Pacific Ocean although the circulation patterns are still closer to a La Nina, according to the weakly status.

A weak tropical storm, Marco, sits above the Eastern coast of Mexico and will evaporate very soon. The Arctic sea ice area is 2 million sq. km below the normal for this season which is still 0.5 million sq. km more than a year ago. The Antarctic sea ice area is at 14.5 million sq. km, near the normal figure of 15 million sq. km for early October but less than a year ago when the anomaly was highly positive.

See the satellite reports for August 2008, a month ago.

Václav Klaus: Notes from American Northwest

Update: Now there are parts I-V, including the final portion about the Grand Canyon and the approved bailout.

Well, I obviously disagree with some comments of the Czech president about the financial crisis (as well as about the purpose of education, the future of IT, and the importance of elegance in clothing) but I still think it's interesting enough a collection of essays to quickly translate for you - and many readers will surely agree with all his points.

Notes I (Sept 29th)

On Monday noon we arrived to Portland, the major city of the state of Oregon: the flight from Prague took almost 14 hours. It's a nice summer weather over here, about 81 degrees, and from our Hilton Hotel we can see Mount Hood (11,249 feet) near the horizon. It's something in between Ararat and Popocatepetl: simply beautiful.



Portland is a city with half a million people. It has arguably too much industry, a river, hills around it, bridges, European-style villas, and Czech streetcars produced by Škoda and imported by Inekon. It is a city of the Democrats, more precisely the champions of the Democratic Party. It is said to be a "City of Roses" but I haven't seen any. Finally, it's the greenest U.S. city (in the ideological sense) that wants to produce 100% of electricity from renewable sources. It is also a city of microbreweries. It has its own "soul" that a European visitor can feel: it's not the emptiness of the cities of the middle America. The downtown is alive and pleasant. Much like in Boston or Philadelphia, one can walk here: in other words, it's not a city of cars and huge distances.

In the microbrewery Bridgeport that was recommended to us as a must-visit by Mr Láďa Jakl, a beer superexpert, you can get eight small glasses with specimens of beer on a plate and you should choose one. All of them were good. The idea about our (Czech) beer exclusivity is mistaken as I've known for some time.

In the afternoon, we have seen the local waterfalls (second largest in the U.S.), the Columbia river, and the beautiful local forests and hills. The landscape is non-dramatic (unlike Arizona or California) but lovely and friendly. The people near the water falls unbelievably ignore the importance of appropriate and elegant clothes - to an extent that is impossible in the rest of the world. My previous trip ended in Tokyo and the difference between the quality and attention paid to clothing in these two places can't be overstated.

The evening debate with the organizers of my trip was difficult because our day was 9 hours longer than theirs and it was difficult to keep the eyelids open. The Americans are bothered by low chances to elect a high-quality president much like the government's attempts for a bailout of Wall Street and its bankers and financiers. But they're proud that the Congress has rejected Bush's bailout plan. They understood it as a proof that the lawmakers listen to their constituents who don't want anything like that.

The most amazing experience of the day was the wind. In the afternoon, we took our cars and went to see the panorama above the river to experience something that we can't know from Central Europe. The reason is that our climate is too ordinary. However, in the huge valley of the river, there is a permanent wind blowing somewhere from Canada towards the Pacific Ocean. They told us that the wind is the same every day but it was difficult to stand and take photographs because the wind was moving with us all the time. I was worried that my glasses and cell phone would fly away: a completely unknown feeling.

Notes II (Oct 1st)

The first night following a 9-hour shift in the time zones is always tough because a person of my kind first wakes up around the midnight. After 3 a.m., it is impossible to sleep at all. Moreover, the "warmed-up" America usually prevents one from opening the windows and their not-quite-newest air-conditioning systems are making a lot of noise.



In the morning, when the city was still almost empty, I made a small walk through the city. But in the peaceful Portland, almost nothing is going on. And in fact, I didn't see too many interesting things here.

America talks about the Congress' courage to say "No" to Bush's bailout plan. The newspapers are full of details about the votes of individual lawmakers. The arguments of the opponents - that it is a bad plan and it is impossible to give a USD 700 billion bianco cheque to the government - are completely correct. However, my understanding is that even the lawmakers want to distribute USD 700 billion but to the places they prefer: less money to the banks and more money to the real economy. Let's see what they'll invent.

I am going to meet a Czech American who is one of the descendants of John Amos Comenius, the Czech teacher of nations. But he's no scholar: he is a real estate agent. A press conference will follow. It will be mostly dedicated to my book about global warming but also to the opinions how to solve the U.S. crisis. I don't want them to teach us which is why I wouldn't dare to tell them what to do, either. The only thing I remind them of is that after 50 years of communism, we had some bad loans, too. And all of our American advisers used to be so surprised to hear it.

Afterwords, I give a speech at the lunch organized by Cascade Policy Institute. It is titled "Panic about global warming is unacceptable and it must be confronted." Almost 300 people in the room mostly agree with my opinions. Dr Haber who acts like my assistant is surprised that the audience gave me standing ovations after I spoke.

After a "live" interview on radio, I meet the editors of "The Oregonian" to discuss the same topics as during the morning press conference.

A fast transfer to the airport follows. The flight to Seattle, a coastal city close to the Canadian borders, only takes 40 minutes. In this context, the word "nearby" means something like 100 miles. Seattle is the most rainy city in the U.S. if not in the world. According to statistics, it only has 58 sunny days a year in average.

I was intrigued by the information that Seattle is the most educated U.S. city - 52% has a college or university degree, usually Bc, and 93% have completed a high school. This sounds pretty absurd because the structure of employment surely can't match these numbers. People are "overeducated" relatively to the real demands in the job market. If that is so, isn't it just a game about formal education? Is the education real? I don't believe it. Education is not an abstract notion: it must be functional. Our (Czech) minister of education unfortunately doesn't know it, either.

At the airport, my luggage was the only one that was opened by the cautious inspectors. Their gadgets were indicating a suspicious chemical compound. It turned out that this compound was included in a book with photographs about the Oregon state. A juicy detail is that I received the book from the governor of this state.

Notes III (Oct 2nd)

Seattle, with more than half a million people, is the largest city of the Washington state. It is another strongly Democratic state of the union - in the last five presidential elections, they always voted for the Democratic ticket. Seattle is a beautiful coastal city near the Pacific beaches that is almost as picturesque as San Francisco or nearby Vancouver. The city is a surprise for me - it is a modern, alive (as opposed to provincial) city even though it is the most distant one from the East Coast U.S. metropolitan areas.



We begin with a very business-oriented breakfast with the local World Affairs Council who want me to tell them something about Europe and our presidency in H1 of 2009. They incorrectly assume that it is an opportunity to do something essential. I explain them it's not.

The program continues with a very pleasant item. In America, people like me have always suffered when they had to drink the American coffee (which is a beverage similar to coffee but it is not real coffee from our viewpoint) - up to the point when the Starbucks chain was born. I didn't even know that this company has headquarters exactly in Seattle and that I would be invited to meet their president and founder, H. Schultz. It's interesting to notice the strong correlation between the U.S. GDP growth and Starbucks' profits - which is why the company goes through hard times right now. If I didn't see it, I wouldn't believe that the Americans (and Britons) react so sensitively.

After the lunch, another pride of Seattle is on the program: Microsoft. I am no computer or internet fanatic but I couldn't miss this opportunity. When they were showing us their future IT home, I was scared that I could live to see this thing in reality. But let's hope that we will defend ourselves against this development. I was thinking how their modern IT and software kingdom compares to Infosys in Bangalore, India that I have also visited: I couldn't see much difference.

In the evening we have the main event why I am here: the Columbia Award presented to me during a dinner organized by the Washington Policy Center. My talk is titled "Freedom and Free Market Principles Are As Important to Fight For Now as in the Past, Maybe More" and my book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, will be presented there. The organizers tell me that it was the most visited event of this kind in their history, with 1,100 guests. So I had to sign a few hundred of copies of my book and pose for hundreds of pictures with the participants. The price for the dinner was between USD 300 and USD 15,000. Only those who paid a figure with at least three zeroes could have had a picture with me and one additional zero was needed for my signature.

Because we're discussing various proposed tax reforms back at home, we should know that the Washington state (almost 6 million people) has a regressive tax system - richer people pay a lower rate than the poorer ones. And because it is a state governed by Democrats, our Social Democrats should think about it.

P.S. USA Today announces that 74 faculties of law in the U.S. already teach a course about "animal rights". A decade ago, it was only 12 schools. It seems that the people have finally lost their minds.

Notes IV (Oct 3rd)

We're leaving a very nice and friendly Seattle where a pretty sunny day is followed by a - supposedly standard and ordinary - rainy weather. From the vicinity of Canada, we are suddenly getting closer to the borders of Mexico: even the pilot speaks both English and Spanish to the passengers. We're flying to Arizona's Phoenix and getting ready for a temperature shock. In Seattle we had about 63 degrees (around 17 °C) while it is 102 degrees (39 °C) in Phoenix. The difference is incredible 39 degrees (22 °C). Nevertheless, I intend to survive this massive warming even though some alarmists consider the increase of the global mean temperature by 0.74 °C per century to be a catastrophic event.



Yesterday I forgot to write that the laudacio - e.g. the speech defending the choice of the Columbia Award winner (myself) - was given by Charles Simonyi who is a Hungarian who fled communist Hungary in the 1960s to quickly become one of the closest collaborators of Microsoft's Bill Gates. He was even one of the main engineers behind Word and Excel. He earned quite a lot of money so in February 2007 he was able to be one of the first private citizens to pay for a space trip as a tourist. He described the experience to me very colorfully and he especially emphasized that he planned his second space trip from Baikonur in April 2009.

Not only because of its Nature, but also because of its politics, Arizona is completely different than Oregon or Washington. It is a bastion of the Republican Party. John McCain has been its Senator for more than 20 years. He replaced famous Barry Goldwater in 1987. Arizona is a dry desert with multicolored sand, palms, and very large cacti. And, of course, the Grand Canyon. And the heat. It is the hottest state of the Union. When we debated options for further privatization in the U.S., they told me that only 15% of Arizona's territory is privately owned - the rest are public forests, parks, and natural reservations. It proves that despite dozens of visits, there are still important things about America that I don't know.

In Phoenix with its 1.5 million people (which has Prague as one of its twin cities), the temperature is around 35 °C throughout most of the year (during days). I have been here twice and it was always suffocating. The swimming in the hotel swimming pool is nice if you realize that October is beginning. Around this big city, there are brown rocks that could be used in a Western movie.

During a generously visited evening event, I am collecting the Barry Goldwater Award for Liberty [Klaus's speech is here]. Goldwater was, as a presidential candidate in 1964 (losing against Lyndon Johnson) famous for his sharp anticommunist rhetoric and his staunch defense of the free markets.

The financial crisis continues. Radio and TV pundits inform, in a serious voice, that the stocks have fell again - by more than 400 points.

Notes V (Oct 4th)

Let me return to yesterday's evening. While I was giving my talk in Phoenix, the two vice-presidential candidates were debating. Naturally, I thought that no one would arrive to listen to me. But the hall was full and the organizers promised to replay my recorded speech right after it was over, using two huge TV screens. The VP debate was truly "American": the Democrats wanted to see the more experienced Biden to brutally win over the inexperienced Palin. The Republicans were afraid that Palin's performance could turn into a catastrophe. It didn't. In the morning, Arizona's newspapers wrote very accurately: "Biden wins, Palin passes." In plain Czech [or English], Biden was better but Palin did just fine. However, the polls won't be affected by this fact, not even slightly. But it was the Republicans who were more worried - I spoke to many of them right after the debate - and their relief was obvious.



After 39 years, I visited the Grand Canyon again. It hasn't changed. It is still equally beautiful, equally bizarre, equally undescribable, equally majestic. Four decades ago, I was there as a student who was "just" walking on the Southern side of the Canyon. This time, the organizers placed us into a small aircraft that was flying above the Canyon for quite some time. My impression was equally spectacular. Those few hours in the air taught me several new insights:

• The Grand Canyon is amazing but there are many more smaller, equally beautiful canyons in the area
• Arizona is dry, scorched, un-green. The only green areas in the state - whose territory is four times larger than the Czech Republic - are the golf courses. So that's something unnatural, something that violates Nature's equilibrium. Shouldn't Al Gore protest? Doesn't it change the temperature? Doesn't it waste energy? Our Czech counterparts of Al Gore don't even want us to protect the Bohemian Forest against the bark beetle.
• My neighbor in the airplane, the ex-president of the Barry Goldwater Institute and a former local Arizona state Senator, was showing me extensive complexes of luxurious villas that belong to the Sun City system. My eyes betrayed a misunderstanding what's going on so he explained that these are "villages" for people above 55 years of age who want luxury, recreational activities, opportunities for sports, bars, and dancing places and, most importantly, who don't want to be interrupted by their children. The children may visit them but not too often. Well, people apparently "couldn't live" without such an arrangement. Or is it an expression of the young seniors' desire to live freely once again, without being limited by anyone? In the same way that the youth could live so far?

The U.S. Congress has approved the bailout of the financial system. It was too fast and, as I have said several times, it will act as a reduction of the painful consequences of the financial crisis by taking pills against pain, not as a surgical intervention to the system. But USD 700 billion is a large amount. I looked at some statistics. To put the figure into its context, let us mention that

• the total U.S. federal budget for 2008 is 2.9 trillion dollars
• welfare programs cost 608 billion dollars a year
• the Pentagon receives 481 billion dollars a year (plus direct funding of Iraq and Afghanistan wars)
• the budget deficit is estimated to be 400 billion dollars
• last year, the U.S. GDP was 13.8 trillion dollars.

I think that the numbers make it clear that USD 700 billion is not a small amount.

The sunset proceeds very quickly and allows us the very last glances at the mysterious strings of mountains that surround Phoenix. We enter an aircraft of British Airways and fly to London and then to Prague. Our trip is over.

Medicine Nobel Prize: cervical cancer, AIDS

Viruses that lead to important diseases have brought their discoverers the 2008 Medicine Nobel Prize.



Mr Harald zur Hausen (Heidelberg, Germany; left) gets 1/2 of the prize for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer.

The other 1/2 of the award is shared by Ms Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (middle) and Mr Luc Montagnier (both Paris, France; right) for their 1983 discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Surprisingly, Thomson Reuters didn't think of that. None of their guesses had anything to do with cancer or AIDS.

English pronunciation

Steven Pinker and John Conway write about the pronouncation in U.S. English, with an emphasis on Sarah Palin's idiosyncrasies.

Well, they may be baffled by Sarah Palin but I guess that most people in Central Europe are baffled by all Americans because the pronunciation rules in U.S. English seem completely fuzzy if not non-existent. You know, these things are particularly baffling for Czechs because we have a phonetic, WYSIWYH, system of pronunciation: what you see is what you hear.

Each letter corresponds exactly to one sound and there are about five completely general exceptions. For example, "ě" patalizes the previous consonant whenever possible (or otherwise is pronounced as "ye"); consonants lose their sound at the end of a syllable; and roughly three more rules. After an hour of training, you can completely master the rules how to correctly read written Czech text. In fact, this knowledge will also allow you to correctly and uniquely write words that you hear, up to a few notoriously difficult subtleties (not only) for kids, including the "i/y" dichotomy.

(In Czech words, there are "hard" consonants - h, ch, k, r, d, t, n - that are always followed by "y", others - ž, š, č, ř, c, j, ď, ť, ň - that are always followed by "i", and mixed ones - b, f, l, m, p, s, v, z - that are followed by "i" except for exceptional words and their derivatives where they are followed by "y": kids have to memorize the exceptional words, roughly a dozen of words for each mixed consonant. For verbs, "i/y" often distinguishes masculine/feminime forms at the end.)

If you want to be perfect in Czech spelling, it's a couple of rules to learn but you can master this discipline completely.

On the other hand, it seems that in English, you have to remember both the written form of every word much like its sonic counterpart. If you care about the details, they seem to be largely unrelated. Americans should adopt a normal phonetic way of spelling and comb their pronunciation, too. For example, John's first paragraph would be written in the following form:

Evry tajm Aj hýr it, it's lajk fingrnejlz on ej blekbórd: "ňukjulr" instéd of "ňuklír". It's báefling wér dzet lokjůšn kams from. Aj em efrejd it ríly daz bring dze spíkr daun ej noč in maj estimejšn, on dzí intelidžence skejl, dzou aj em jůžualy ejbl tů get pást it. Ívn in maj fílt, wér wí jůz dze wérd ej lot, jů hýr dzí okejšnl "ňukjulr".

Well, if a Czech kid would read it, it wouldn't sound identical to the Americans but the question is whose fault it is! Maybe it's the Yankee's fault. ;-) What's important is that all Czech kids would read it identically. One might design a more natural and less revolutionary system of spelling but it would be great if it followed some universal rules.

During the years in the U.S., I learned to imitate the native speakers' pronunciation more faithfully than I did before but I simply can't imagine that the last differences could ever be eliminated. It simply seems to me that the native speakers are often deliberately swallowing, suppressing, and permuting consonants and even vowels.

Even if you forget about people whose pronunciation is sloppy and look at the official rules, I find the prescription for some situations incredibly ambiguous. Although I was kind of interested in these questions, I have never learned an authoritative answer to the question how to pronounce:

• a thing: "@ thing" or "ej thing"? ;-) By "@", I mean what's often written as "uh" or "eh" or whatever
  
• antimatter (or anti-anything): "enty-medr" or "entaj-medr"? ;-)
• either: "eether" or "eye-ther"?
• kilometer: "ki-LÁ-medr" or "kilo-MÍ-dr"? Let's omit "kaj-lou-MÍ-tr" etc. that would be a priori natural options, too
  
• research: "REE-search" or "re-SEARCH"?

and there are hundreds of additional examples of words that have to be used all the time. I have never received a sharp explanation which of the choices is more acceptable, which of them is official, which of them is colloquial and why it was introduced by whom. All the possible ways to pronounce the words sound equally bizarre to me, anyway, because the Latin/Czech way to pronounce the words is completely different.

These differences go very far. For example, all Czech textbooks of physics for kids want to be very smart so they authoritatively tell you how to properly pronounce "Joule", the unit of work: "džaul". Every Czech kid and adult knows that which is why they're surprised that in English-speaking countries, it's actually pronounced as "džúl". And "džaul" was meant to be the global pronounciation: the Czech one would be "yow-leh".

The case of vowels is particularly shocking for us because vowels are completely well-defined in Czech and similarly constructed languages: it's about a/e/i/o/u/y - all of them are different and well-defined (except for i/y that sound the same in Czech). With some approximation, the vowels in English seem to carry almost no information because all of their pairs are linked by ambiguities. "A" can be pronounced as "@", "a", "á", "ej", "E" can be pronounced as "e", "í", "ej", "I" is pronounced as "y" or "aj", "o" is pronounced as "@", "a", "o", "ou", "ů", and so on.

Moreover, despite these radical ambiguities about the very rough vowel that should appear in a particular context, the native speakers seem to hide some information in minute variations and interpolations between the basic vowels and their detailed duration. These things are mostly beyond me. I can't possibly understand how someone may distinguish a "70% a, 30% e" from "80% a, 20% e" if he or she doesn't care about the difference between "a", "e" in the first place! ;-)

One likely hypothesis I learned is that if I replace all vowels by the neutral sound, "@", the speech becomes more comprehensible for many Americans. ;-)

Especially in the case of vowels, all these things are very unusual. In Czech and other languages, we are very conservative about these matters. The only widespread ambiguity in pronunciation of Czech vowels I can think of is the ending of masculine, feminime, and neutral adjectives. For example, "far" is "daleký, daleká, daleké" in the official Czech but it is often pronounced (and, if necessary, spelled) as "dalekej, daleká, daleký" in colloquial Czech. But everyone knows that the latter choices are incorrect.

But the English consonants seem to be messy, too. For example, non-English speakers must be taught that Britons and Americans believe that it is impossible to pronounce the initial consonant in words like "psychology" or "knot". Well, this English opinion is clearly bunk as we can easily prove experimentally. ;-) It is very easy to pronounce "ps" or "kn" and we're doing so all the time. But these two particular examples are at least taught in schools. There are others that are not.

When you combine several oversimplifications of this kind, you can find some truly stunning examples of American pronunciation (and I guess that it will be similar with the Imperial English, too). In Massachusetts, there is a town called Worcester. It surely looks like "Vorčestr", a sauce that we add to food, anyway. Now, whenever an American called it "Vastr" and I knew what s/he meant, I always had a tendency to call a physician because by losing 1/2 of the word, s/he may have lost 1/2 of her brain, too. It just looks scary if someone reads "Worcester" as "Vastr". It's hard to believe that I would fully accept such a mispronunciation even if I were brainwashed since the childhood. Frankly speaking, I would probably still think that all the people around me are morons. ;-) But it's the local consensus, too.

Besides vowels and consonants, there is a huge question about the real "accent": I mean the rhythm and which syllables are louder than others. Again, this question is fully answered in Czech. The first syllable has the main accent and the odd ones have a secondary accent. The syllables have a rather regular rhythm, anyway. Needless to say, corresponding universal rules don't exist in English. To make things worse, it is often the second syllable that has the main accent: a very non-Czech choice, indeed. This influences the rhythm and intonation, too. Be sure that it was hard for me to learn the LHC rap (and it's still different from Alpinekat):



Much tinier subtleties have led to intellectual civil wars in Czechia. For example, take the word "president". It comes from "presedere" in Latin (or at least, this word exists in Italian). And the "s" should be pronounced as "s", indeed. The etymology makes "s" the only historically acceptable consonant in this case. But because it may look simpler to pronounce it as "z" in front of the following vowel, "i", many nations, including Russians (and partly Czechs), began to pronounce it as "prezident". A few decades ago, this alternative spelling was ultimately allowed as an official one in Czech, too, in order to keep the WYSIWYH character of the Czech spelling.

Some intellectuals - whose point I kind of understood - argued that it should be written as "president" while "prezident" may be viewed as a degenerative, vulgar influence of the Soviet Union. And in fact, it should be even pronounced in this way, with "s", even though almost everyone says "prezident". A decade ago, when we wrote a textbook about linear algebra, we deliberately used "s" even in many words where "z" seemed uncontroversial, such as "fyzika" (we wrote "fysika", because of etymological reasons). The textbook had a nice conservative, archaic flavor to it. ;-) Of course, unlike the intellectuals above, we didn't really care. It was just fun: the debate is just about language which is no rocket science (or any science, for that matter).

But you can see that these subtle changes - sufficient to lead to confrontations between intellectuals in the Czech context - are much tinier than the actual uncertainties and fluctuations in the pronunciation of the U.S. English. I wonder, is there an official institute that is tasked to regulate the rules of U.S. English? It may help. ;-)