Civic Judo: Gypsy integration in reality

This program of TV NOVA, "Civic Judo" about the gypsy questions, was aired in May 2008. English transcript, my fast translation:

0:00 Narrator: Our reporter, Ms Bohunka Frankova, recorded a program for you that we titled in a simple way: Roma minority.

0:05 Narrator: It's being discussed a lot. Many people are criticized for their racist statements. But no one really knows what to imagine under the term "the Roma question". Emotions are sometimes appropriate and sometimes they are not. Across our country, however, there are towns and villages where people are not philosophizing about the question whether the integration of the Roma people with other citizens will help. Instead, they are already living in the integration. However, the life is much harder than what is being negotiated, learned, or taught. After all, you can have a look.

0:33 Reporter: May I ask you how do you like living here? In this neighborhood?

0:37 Old woman: Words can't describe it.

Reporter: Why?

Old woman: When you look at my yard, what a pile of trash do I have there.

Reporter: And who is doing that?

Old woman: Well, the gypsies. They can do everything and we [can do] nothing.

0:52 In the city of Ostrava, Marianske Hory (neighborhood), there is a place called Bedřiška, composed out of 20 Finnish (?) double houses. The houses are owned by the city and are mostly occupied by the Roma people. Other renters are complaining about their behavior and that it's impossible to live there, in between of them.

1:08 Old man: They were throwing bricks at me and I had to escape because I could have been hit, for example, in my head. They burned my bee hive. They have destroyed my, uhm, garage. Anything you can think about.

1:23 Ms Liana Janáčková, a senator, a mayor, and an architect: They're attacking not only verbally but also physically. The old settlers who are living here - enjoying the last years of their life - must often feel very pathetic. I can understand that.

1:39 Man with hat (a local citizen): Whatever is made out of metal and is not securely attached to something else will be taken away.

1:43 Another man: They know where things can be found. So they send children over there. And what do the children do? They take it because they know nothing will happen to them.

1:51 Ms Liana: Police and firemen are coming here pretty much every day.

1:56 A woman: Concerning the adults, it's sometimes OK but it just terrible with the kids. Horrible.

2:03 Reporter: So you're throwing nothing anywhere, are you?

Kids: Yes, we're throwing trash around.

Reporter: I see, so you do. Don't you have dustbins around? [No.] Oh, there aren't any, I see. And who will collect the trash here? [We.] I see, so you pick it again. [Yes.] Well, I think you will find a dustbin, after all. [What are you doing?] And who is doing the mess?

2:27 Adult gypsy: We, the Romacks. And one of us won't tell to the eyes of another one who did it. Someone will simply bring some mess or trash, throw it somewhere, and it's everywhere.

2:34 Mr Petr Krones, a gypsy association: It is no longer true that a gypsy won't steal from another gypsy. It's a part of the history.

Reporter: So they're fighting with one another, right? We've heard one group of gypsies blaming the other one for this and that.

Krones: Of course, this is how it is.

2:45 Reporter: Here you can see a stolen roof over here, right?

2:49 Woman: Yes, of course, it's been completely peeled off. You can only see the black material, right?

2:55 Reporter: Is it normal here? The roof was there and suddenly it's gone, right?

Woman: No one has seen anything.

3:00 Adult gypsy: They're burning houses, everything here. Mess. It's normal.

3:06 Ms Liana: it's hard to know what's going on. One group of gypsies comes and says, we're the nice ones. It's the other group that is making the mess. And then I get the other group and says that we're the nice ones, please don't mix us with the bad ones.

3:22 Reporter: We've had a similar experience. Some people from Bedřiška told us that a favorite game of the Roma children is to prevent the cars from moving.

Adult gypsy: The car can't go. The driver must get out and tell the children to go away, otherwise the car will go anyway.

3:35 Reporter: when the same thing happened to us one day later and we couldn't go away, the gypsies told us that it was out fault because we encouraged the kids to do that or, maybe, we even instructed the kids to behave in this way.

3:43 Reporter: We wanted to go.

Gypsy woman: No, you are not moving.

Reporter: We were at rest because we couldn't go.

Gypsy woman: You were just sitting there, and the small guy was just climbing your car!

3:53 Reporter: And is it normal?

Gypsy woman: No, it's not. But you shouldn't let him to do these things!

Reporter: I see, we shouldn't let him climb. But what could have we done against it?

Reporter: We didn't get an answer to this one. We therefore couldn't get rid of the feeling that everything that happens in Bedřiška is always the other people's fault.

4:10 Old man: They only have rights but no duties. And they know their rights perfectly. But they have no responsibilities.

4:17 Man with hat: The government behaves towards them like in communism: they have everything for free which is why they have no respect to these things.

4:20 Reporter: Nevertheless, Ostrava started a program for the Roma people who have completed the basic school and are listed as unemployed in the Office to fight unemployment. Without any qualification, they can do some cleaning jobs and clean the sidewalks. These Roma people are paid from the European social fund. Their work is verified and photographed every day.

4:39 Ms Liana: Are you working here?

Gypsy: No but I want to work. Do you remember how I was working with [someone, unintelligible], when I proposed them to [unintelligible]?

Ms Liana: But can you work, can't you?

Gypsy: But where, Ms Janáčková? I will be grateful to you if you find...

Ms Liana: You can clean the sidewalks. [OK.] Fine.

4:51 Reporter: The task to incorporate the Roma people into the working process is the job of many agencies and organizations. Their results can be seen but their number is still negligible relatively to the total Roma population. On the other hand, one must start somewhere. And these agencies simply help only to those who are interested in such help. And so far, they're in the minority. Those who are not interested in any help won't be convinced to work by anyone. Many Roma people got used to live out of the social welfare. Up to very recently, they were even getting coal for free. Now, when they don't, they're burning any trash including coated windows.

5:26 Ms Liana: There is a boom to replace older windows by the new plastic windows around here. So we are finding the older windows right here. They're using the wood to burn it. The glass is being buried in their gardens or they just leave it freely on the roads.

5:40 Gypsy: Tell me what should I do when we no longer get even the coal for free? Tell me how can I buy the stuff to burn?

Reporter: But others are also buying the coal.

Gypsy: But who?

Reporter: How do you want to get it?

Gypsy: I don't need to get it. But tell me, who is buying it? Whatever wood I find, must be used.

5:55 Reporter: The officials from the Ostrava city hall have been asked to check the neighborhood whether they're burying the trash on their gardens and burning the windows.

Ms Liana to a male city official: We just take diggers or we do it ourselves, and all the glass and trash is simply there.

Reporter: We will see what their findings will be. We will be watching this community in the future, too. So we will also be interested in the results of your work.

6:20 Reporter: The Roma question is very complicated and virtually nothing can be solved on the spot. That's why we gave some time to the officials. Meanwhile, we learned about a project that could help to Bedřiška. The houses are in a bad condition and the project plans the construction of new houses for the co-existence of the white citizens and the Roma people who would personally participate in the construction.

Reporter: So how many houses would be built here? Would they be attached houses?

Official (or Ms Liana): They're the simple houses, 8 meters times 8 meters, with very basic equipment only, constructed out of material that can't be broken, stolen, or burned.

Reporter: There are two versions of the project, either with ground floor houses or double storied houses. The project includes a house for the police and an agency that would help the Roma people with education or job search.

7:10 Man with hat: I can imagine it would work. Almost certainly, better than this setup.

7:15 Reporter: It's been six week since we recorded the previous video in Ostrava. We wanted to wait and see whether the local officials who looked so uncertain to us did any actual work. Today, based on their written report, we can inform you that they have really discovered prohibited dumping grounds, illegal manipulation with car wreckages and other types of trash. The officials have already asked the Czech Environmental Inspection to re-investigate these offenses.

7:40 Reporter: Meanwhile, we also talked to the Czech minister for minorities and human rights. Could she help to the village? Before our interview, Ms minister left for Ostrava to learn about the place. She was just talking to a local woman whose head was just broken by the Roma kids. And she heard some parents encouraging their children to steal. Simply, a hard reality.

8:02 Ms Džamila Stehlíková, MD, the minister. There are a few families with a bad influence on children that help to create some kind of children's gangs. We should start to think whether the education of the youth is not threatened here. There are essentially three families that are creating an unbearable environment for the whole small village.

Reporter: They're creating unbearable environment and they're the people who don't pay the rent, too. You can move them out of the houses, right?

Ms Liana: The problem is where. I could buy tents and build them close to the Odra river, maybe.

Reporter: They're not paying the rent, after all. What is being done with such people? Some hostel or the street?

Ms Liana: I don't know. Yes, maybe the street.

8:46 Reporter: When the problematic families are moved out of the village, Ms Liana's project for a new Bedřiška could be successful. However, they don't have enough money for this "small village of co-existence".

9:00 Reporter: Don't tell me that our republic wants to solve the Roma problems and the budget doesn't give any money for that.

Ms minister: We simply can't grab the taxpayers money with the risk that after some time, the living standards will drop below the level where we started again.

9:18 Reporter: But some solution should be found. We simply can't leave the other citizens of Bedřiška who are not afraid to live in between the Roma people without any help. The European Commission considers the integration of the Roma people to be one of its priorities which is why Ms minister believes that this is where the money could be found.

Ms minister: I like the project a lot and I hope that Bedřiška will transform to something better at some moment.

Ms Liana: I am an optimist in essence who believes that it will work. But I can't tell you whether it will be in the year 2010 or 2020.

Reporter: Well, let's hope not. The village will have been collapsed by that time.

9:58 Ms Liana: OK, 2010.

AlJazeera's PC nonsense about Czech gypsy kids

AlJazeera is apparently the ultimate prototype of a TV station brainwashing its audiences with absurd PC propaganda. No surprise that it is a favorite station of the terrorists and the far left.

You know, I've spent my childhood in the neighborhood of Pilsen that was most densely populated by gypsies, Roudná. So I have quite some experience with these issues. My interactions with the gypsy kids were numerous and I even had a gypsy classmate in the first grade who made it into the normal school (yes, barely, but she wasn't an evil girl in any sense).

I assure you that generic gypsy children simply can't be in the same classroom with the generic white children unless your goal is to make the whole classroom dysfunctional and bring as much constant embarrassment and inferiority complex to the gypsy kids as you can.

Whether the ultimate reason behind the differences is just the pre-school education in the families or centuries of a different life imprinted in the genes, the gypsy IQ ends up at 80 or less - Rushton et al. only obtained about 70 - with the standard deviation only around 10; these numbers are just slightly above the numbers describing sub-Saharan Africa.



Completely off-topic, applied black holes: some people think that black holes are purely theoretical objects. But you can check that they can be used by tired greedy bureaucrats, too. Hat tip: Rae Ann

Note that the generic population has IQ around 100 with the standard deviation equal to 15.

These different numbers simply imply different outcomes in the classroom which is why something that looks very much like racial segregation is an inevitable consequence. Even with the optimistic "80" estimate, if you know the normal distribution, you may see that only 2.5% of the gypsies will have IQ above 100, i.e. above the general population's average (because it is plus two standard deviations) and only 0.003% (about 9 individuals in the Czech Republic) will exceed 120 - very decent university level.

It shouldn't shock you that 75% of gypsy kids end up in the special schools (and the unemployment rate will be around 70%, too).

You know, countries that have a few gypsies may pretend that there is no difference because only a few classrooms are affected and the teachers are effectively forced to be silent by the political correctness. But in the Czech Republic, gypsies make about 3% of the population which is enough for people to know something. Pretty much everyone has some experience with these issues; there is not much room for myths.

AlJazeera's proclamation that it's the white population who is responsible for the typical gypsy kids' inability to make it into normal schools in this real world is simply an ugly accusation. The Czech citizens are not responsible for the laws of Nature whether we or you like them or not.

As the program correctly says, most classrooms in the special schools are literally dominated by gypsy students (60-90 percent), especially the higher grades. So if these students were equally talented as the pupils in the average normal schools, these classrooms could inevitably reach the same level as the classrooms in normal schools. Be sure, they don't.

Whether the reasons are purely genetic or whether the education of very young gypsy kids in their families is to be blamed is pretty much inconsequential. What matters is that these are differences that simply cannot be changed abruptly by a wishful thinking.

AlJazeera's shallow report completely denies the complexity of these problems and looks at everything from a very naive black-and-white perspective (where black means the white). Only when they show me another nation with at least 300,000 ethnic gypsies whose average living standards, employment rate, and education matches the fully civilized world, I will be ready to listen to their thinking.

The differences escalate when the pupils become teenagers. The teachers and principals of the special schools routinely talk about a constant contact with police: they are not bored. Of course that these robberies and similar crimes partly occur because the kids come from poorer families and they would like to own certain things as well.

But the differences between normal and special schools are much greater than what can be explained by that and even very peaceful kids in these schools have big problems with simple things. Add heroin, vulgar speech beginning with fifth-graders. read e.g. this automatically translated article.

The teachers who teach there must be thanked for their effort that sometimes seems to lead to no fruits.

What I find surprising about this report is that they haven't even contacted anyone responsible for these issues in the Czech Republic - not even Ms Džamila Stehlíková, MD, the Czech minister for minorities and human rights (who was born in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, and who is an example of an excessively PC person in the Czech politics).

On the same day when AlJazeera was airing this piece, participants of a clash of two gypsy clans were sentenced. One of them abducted a 15-year-old gypsy girl, Miss Mercedes Lakatošová. What a name, by the way. On Monday, a 14-year-old girl was raped and murdered in Hungary. As it turned out that the murderer was almost certainly a member of a gypsy gang, a large anti-gypsy-violence demonstration occurred on Friday.

These gypsy issues are being constantly lied about in the Western media. For example, yesterday, the Czech Consul General in Toronto complained to The Star, a Canadian paper, for its untrue description of a demonstration involving gypsies.

Christian Doppler: 205th birthday

Christian Doppler was born to a stone-mason on November 29th, 1803, in Salzburg, Austria. However, he became my territorial countrymate as a scientist.

When he was 38, the Prague Polytechnic (now Czech Technical University, ČVUT, which just managed to become the 228th university in the world, topping the Charles University in the list) hired him as a professor of maths and physics. One year later, he published his famous paper on the Doppler effect: the color of stars depends on the relative velocity. A few years later, his prediction was verified. In Prague, he published about 50 papers.



What are you supposed to be, Sheldon? ;-)

His research was interrupted by the revolutionary year 1848 which was surely less frustrating than 1948 ;-) but the revolutionary revolt of the nationalistic working class was bad enough for Doppler to flee to Vienna. In Vienna, he helped another famous German-speaking scientist who was born on the territory of Czechia, Gregor Mendel, to become scientifically mature.

Doppler died of a pulmonary disease in Venice (also a part of the Austrian Empire at that time) in 1853.

Note that classically, the received frequency is

f = f_emitted / (1 + v_s,r / c)

where "c" is the speed of the waves in the medium and the v_{s,r} velocity is the radial part of the relative speed of the source and the received (negative if they're getting closer). In relativity, considering electromagnetic waves, the formula gets replaced by a more democratic

f = f_emitted sqrt[(1-v/c)/(1+v/c)].

One more change: relativity makes the "time reversal effect" - Doppler effect with the ratio of frequencies equal to (-1), when you can hear a symphony backwards - impossible.

Feynman's lectures at Cornell

This is probably one of the oldest videos with Feynman as a teacher:

Messenger Lecture 2: a playlist

He talks about the relationship between mathematics and physics. Recall that Feynman wasn't really happy at Cornell. But I think that the lecture is very charming, isn't it?

Update: I was an idiot. The Messenger Lecture was from 1964 when Feynman was already happy at Caltech - for more than a decade. ;-)

In the first ten minutes, he explains e.g. how the "1/R^2" scaling in Newton's law becomes less mysterious with Le Sage's theory of gravity (with the unbalanced inflow of particles from various directions). Except that he can also easily falsify the theory (because it predicts a new type of friction).

He emphasizes that it's impossible to understand the real meaning of the laws without the maths and talks about the laymen who search through a book after book, trying to find an explanation without any maths that even the best expositors were unable to previously offer. ;-)

Not much has changed since the late 1940s. It's like he was specifically designing these sentences for the typical dumb lay readers of math-phobic populists such as Lee Smolin who are eager to convince everyone that she doesn't need to master the maths well because the key things are about philosophy, anyway. Well, they're definitely not. The maths underlying physics is not just a language, he says: it is also a method to think.

Feynman is a bit sloppy about the infinitesimal vectors needed to prove that a central force keeps a constant area per time (angular momentum conservation). But with the analytic approach replacing the geometric one, one can afford to be more stupid. :-)

Feynman divides the schools of teaching to the Babylonian and the Greek attitude. The Babylonians would learn a lot of examples while the Greeks would build on a few axioms, an approach that modern mathematics follows. You can still start at different places; no axioms are at the "ultimate" bottom because of the interconnections. It's helpful to remember many results on par with the axioms, in the Babylonian way, he argues.

He also gets to a cool feature of physics: we often derive principles that are more important and universally valid than the derivations! Mathematics doesn't have that: theorems usually don't appear where they're not supposed to be. :-) For example, the angular momentum conservation law started from "wrong" Newton's laws but has survived all the subsequent revolutions.

Feynman shows that laws in physics often have qualitatively different yet equivalent descriptions: Newton's force acting at a distance vs a field-theoretical description with a gravitational potential vs the principle of the minimal action. In the cases when the different philosophies are inequivalent, we have to leave the decision to Nature because all of our experience proves that philosophy never works.

The state-of-the-art theories of his time combined the minimum action principle with a local description - he meant quantum field theory in a path integral approach. ;-) That's still true today except that many equivalent descriptions of systems, including quantum gravity, are also local in the world sheet, the boundary of spacetime, or other spaces.

Feynman was amazed (5/6, 4:00) that the laws of physics can always be expressed in so many ways. With the dualities in string theory, he would surely be much more stunned than ever before. Well, this clearly seems to be a feature of the mathematical structures that are relevant for Nature. They can be studied from many different angles.

Physics and mathematics help each other but differ: physics needs a connection of the concepts with objects in reality. A related fact is that physicists are interested in specific cases, not abstract things - for example, physicists want to talk about the gravitational force, not an arbitrary one. He ends 5/6 with a joke about 4 dimensions.

Extreme rigor or focus on axioms is not too useful in physics but there's no reason to criticize mathematicians because they're free. Finally, in the last part, Feynman revealed that he was troubled that even physics of finite regions needed an infinite number of degrees of freedom. Well, yes, in quantum gravity, it's guaranteed that the entropy is bounded by the area, so there is a sense in which the number of degrees of freedom must be finite. Feynman would prefer the philosophy about a checkerboard but he still realizes that one shouldn't have prejudices.

Feynman says something that we recently ran into (during a discussion of a review of McMahon's book): without the listeners who actually mastered the maths, any qualitative talk about the philosophy and intuition behind the laws of physics is talking to deaf ears.

See also: Mathematics and physics: boundaries and interactions

Dow Jones money: a stable future economy

I began to write this text in October when Ben Bernanke and his friends followed the laws of string theory (a Reuters blog) and cut the rates to fight against the self-feeding global panic. Note that to "push the strings" means to try to lower the rates in a situation where no one wants to lend or borrow, anyway. Economists agree with the physicists that such "pushing" is futile and unphysical due to the coordinate reparametrization invariance of the string.

To repay Bernanke's debt, I will look at the situation from an economist's viewpoint.

Unfortunately, I missed the 2008 Memorial Nobel Prize for Economics but this proposal should be early enough for the next one. :-) The goal of the text below is nothing less than to design a financial system for the future that will avoid the troubling cycles of bubbles and downturns and that will optimize the economies, leading the people to do things that are as useful as possible.

Useful and harmful degrees of freedom

If you quantize general relativity in the background of a Kaluza-Klein toroidal compactification, you will find out that different parameters describing the shape of the torus become scalar fields in four dimensions.

In every natural enough basis, virtually all of these scalars will have a normal kinetic term. But one scalar - the overall volume of the torus - will have a kinetic term with the opposite, ghostly sign.

I would like to present this simple physics exercise as an analogy to economics. It deals with a lot of time-dependent variables - various prices, interest rates, and indices. These degrees of freedom will be divided to two parts:

• useful degrees of freedom
• harmful degrees of freedom.

Most of the degrees of freedom are useful. This adjective means that the markets are naturally led to find the right equilibrium at which the creative power of the economy and the well-being of its participants is optimized. These degrees of freedom should be left to the invisible hand of the free markets who are most capable to find the right values.

This category includes the prices of various products etc. Investors need to understand the reality well in order to determine which of these prices are undervalued and which of them are overpriced. And the right price leads the producers to produce as much stuff of various types as they can sell, to the satisfaction of the consumers.

However, a small number of the degrees of freedom - especially one overall volume-like variable - are harmful. They are analogous to the conformal factor in the case of gravity. What do I mean? Well, these degrees of freedom tend to be repelled from any equilibrium value: they generate unstable directions in the moduli space. People often behave irrationally and think that these price ratios should go to zero or infinity. Expertise is not needed to determine the "right" sign of the trend. Moreover, the governments and central banks tend to play with these degrees of freedom, too. These game increase the unpredictability and usually end as in the overshot territory.

When the unstable, harmful degrees of freedom start to behave badly, many market participants start to buy something or sell something which leads to more buying or selling. Instead of oscillating around the equilibrium value, prices start to expand or drop exponentially; our present epoch (and hopefully, especially a few most recent months) is unfortunately described by the second description. The mood was (or is) getting bad which is why people sell which is why the mood gets even worse, and so on, until we approach a sufficiently strong cutoff effect that will stop the exponentially dropping insanity.



See also Dow Jones 1900-2003. Most of the wild wiggles in the graph are psychologically induced, objectively unjustified mood swings. Nevertheless, these oscillations have negatively influenced actual economies and real people.

In the periods of bubbles, everything works in the opposite way. The mood is getting good which is why people buy which is why their mood is getting even better, and so on, until the bubble bursts i.e. a stronger effect terminates the instability. These degrees of freedom harm the economy. It is clear that they're bad. They bring the depressions; unjustified profits to some people; undeserved losses for others; a degree of inevitable lottery to the system. They're based on emotions, herd mentality, and the work of speculators who focus on them brings nothing good to the mankind. Nations couldn't thrive if everyone were gambling in Las Vegas all the time.

When I am talking about useful and harmful degrees of freedom, it is obviously a matter of conventions which combinations of the degrees of freedom we pick. So what is the mathematical framework behind the choice of the "combinations" here? We take prices of all possible things and choose the symbol "p_i" for the (natural, by convention) logarithms of these prices in certain units: I chose the symbol to agree with our paper with Tom and Willy, Dualities vs Singularities, that discusses the same questions in the general relativistic context. ;-)

Now, the space of "p_i", the logarithms, is a linear vector space. The economy is described by a trajectory in this space. In the tangential space of this space, which is pretty similar to the original space spanned by "p_i", you may finely choose very specific directions that are considered "most harmful" and that tend to create instabilities. Because I am free market champion, I won't defend regulation of these harmful, "ghost" directions. I will advocate the opinion that these directions should be completely absent in the fully physical, functioning theory.

You might think that I am going to defend the gold standard or something of this sort. Well, you are not infinitely far from the truth. But gold is obsolete, arbitrary, and dangerous. Someone can find a lot of gold in the future and we don't want the world's economy die at that moment. Gold doesn't represent the overall economy - what people actually want to pay for - well. And if you think that all the commodities have fixed price ratios and only the "money" is fluctuating, note that the gold/silver price ratio has been oscillating frantically, by orders of magnitude in both directions. Pretty much everything can oscillate and does oscillate.

The gold standard brings some advantages but now we have a more comprehensive framework to adjust the advantages: we want to suppress the most unstable and harmful degrees of freedom by redefining the money. There is one more general advantage of the gold: you know what you own. With money, you own pieces of paper whose value can be manipulated by arbitrary decisions of the government. And an uncertainty about the value of things - their ill-definedness - is creating havoc. The only reason why prices expressed in the fiat money don't fluctuate wildly is that the other sellers don't know any definition of the money, either. ;-) So we want to peg the money to something more well-defined: to redefine them. What is it? It's the stocks.

Defining money: a fixed Dow Jones index

Fine. So what is the most harmful direction of the vector space? The prices of milk and millions of other things behave rationally, according to the rules of supply and demand. People have to buy and sell milk quickly which is why they know what the price should be: the buyers won't be able to get the milk for too cheap a price and sellers won't be able to sell it for too high a price. Consequently, the average inflation behaves in a predictable fashion. Because of the qualitatively stable milk production and milk consumption, the price never tends to go to zero or infinity.

However, more complex things to buy or sell, such as stocks or even derivatives, don't have such a well-defined price. No one really needs to drink them today. When people decide about the right price, they speculate about a distant future. Because such speculations are more or less physically unjustifiable, these speculations often switch to the mode of pure emotions and extrapolations of trends. That's a typical source of an unstable behavior.

While the average price of milk and similar products changes by a number close to 0.2% a month - which is moreover pretty constant - the price of the (weighted) average stock - such as the Dow Jones Industrial Index - easily changes by 7% a day, for reasons that are arguably irrational (fear and panic). Such irrational changes support themselves and negatively influence all sectors of the economy.

Everyone is inevitably a player in a gigantic lottery where he loses or profits, depending on his exposure to stocks and related objects - exposure that is largely a matter of coincidences. These random losses and profits cripple the otherwise tight and pretty accurate relationship between wealth and useful work which is why they reduce the efficiency of the whole economy. And the depressions can lead to even worse outcomes.

Moreover, the investors' bets on the "stocks" in general or "cash" in general are not opinions about the objective conditions in the markets: they are rather bets on the future government policies. For example, if the Fed prefer to fight inflation (and raise the interest rates whenever it will be remotely needed), it is better to hold cash. If the Fed prefers to fight any future slowdown (and to reduce the interest rates to stimulate growth), it is better to own stocks. It means that it is largely up to the government to decide which of these two main groups of investors will profit more than the other. The winning group should be grateful to the authorities while the losing group may blame them for the losses. This is not a part of an authentic free market. It is a so far inevitable lottery created by the government that the government forces everyone to play.

Fine. So what can be done about that? The rough answer is clear. Something should be done so that the price of the average stocks - let's say, the Dow Jones Industrial Index - becomes essentially constant in time. The harmful degree of freedom would be eliminated. Now, the identity of the index is not too important here and is open to a more detailed analysis. Maybe, another index - S&P 500 or one that also includes some commodities - would be better. Instead, the goal is to eliminate some of the wildest fluctuations in "all" equity/commodity prices.

Today, wealthy people - even those in the U.S. - tend to hold (at least) two types of local "currency": the dollars and the U.S. stocks. And they're massively migrating from one to the other depending on the overall mood. This degree of freedom is only backed by mass hysteria and is harmful. The average price of stocks in the U.S. dollar is pretty much close to the most harmful directions in the logarithmic price space and the "double currency" should be eliminated.

How the stock prices are kept to have the right average

Now you hopefully agree that it looks like an excellent idea. Dow Jones Industrial Index could be 10,000 forever - which would be, by the way, an improvement from the current state. Dow returned to levels seen as early as in 1998 which is very painful.

It is also very obvious that you must essentially peg the currency to the Dow. Your currency will be the Dow. In the case of the U.S. that I chose to be my experimental country ;-), the U.S. dollar (USD) has to be replaced by the U.S. Dow Jones currency (USJ). All your payments and savings will be expressed as a multiple of the (weighted) average Dow Jones company.

What does it change about the system? It should be clear that if USJ banknotes are printed and coins are minted, nothing changes about the way you buy the Big Mac. USJ are money, after all. However, what must change is the way how stocks are bought and sold. It must be guaranteed that the weighted average of the stock prices expressed in USJ will give you 10,000.

How do you achieve that? Well, you might think that the easiest solution would be for the government to buy or sell the Dow Jones mixture of stocks whenever the index jumps out of the 9,950 - 10,050 territory. If the index drops below 9,950, the government may cheaply buy these stocks. If it jumps above 10,050, it can sell them. If the price stays in this interval, the government would always profit. However, this is no good for several reasons:

• the government is not ready (and not talented) to control the company if it buys too much
• when the prices jump at the beginning, the government actually doesn't have enough stock to sell.

Another solution would be to force all traders to short a corresponding negative number of other stocks so that they keep the trajectory on the surface perpendicular to the harmful direction of the configuration space.

However, the previous sentence may sound too contrived. So let us choose a comprehensible alternative: taxes. There are servers that know who owns a stock every day or every hour. Taxes for holding stocks (or taxes for even shorter time intervals) can be redefined every hour - they can be positive or negative - to stimulate buyers or sellers and to keep the Dow Jones index near 10,000. These taxes (of either sign) would be a small percentage of the spot value of the stocks multiplied by the immediate deviation of the Dow Jones index from 10,000, with the coefficient determined by a (computerized) government "trader" whose task would be to play with the number in such a way that the Dow Jones index stays constant.

I would like to argue that the extra tax collected or returned for this stabilization of the Dow Jones index wouldn't have to be a subject of balanced budgets: the government could just print (or burn) this money instead of emitting bonds and borrowing because the stability of the money would be guaranteed by the peg with the stocks, not by the government's promise not to print the money.

For example, in the recent months when there was a pressure to sell stocks, the government would be paying the stockholders in the USJ system. These extra payments would play a similar role as the trillions that the U.S. government is pouring to the system in the USD system by other means. On the other hand, the remaining government budget deficits would have to be paid by the money that the government borrows; the government can't print companies, after all.

You may think of other alternatives how to keep the index constant. Some readers might object: but this is just another kind of inverventionism whose effect can be emulated by many policies that the government is doing these days, anyway. Yes, except that in my setup, it is a universal, eternal, and predictable rule: a part of the definition of the money. When the government is pouring trillions of loans into the economy, it is probably igniting new waves of instability (and overheated economy and inflation) in the future. With a fixed Dow Jones index, these mood swings would never repeat again.

Do you actually own the companies?

At this moment, it should be clear that by owning USJ, you don't actually own the companies. You don't get any dividends for owning USJ. You can't vote. In fact, you may have noticed that the USJ setup presented above can be realized with the normal USD banknotes so I can omit the section about "transition from USD to USJ". ;-)

If you throw away all the auxiliary stuff from my thought experiment above, you can see what the U.S. government could actually do in the time of a downturn: it should pay you money (tax credit for your 2008 tax return) for every day of owning stocks. Enough money so that the Dow Jones index will be essentially constant. People will simply forget about the need to watch the stock markets in order to buy or sell. This useless part of their life will disappear.

Isn't it a contradiction that the price ratio of consumer products and companies is kept fixed?

Average P/E ratio may indeed be changing in the USJ economy. But is it a problem? Not really: there is no other P/E in the economy to "easily" compare with. Note that the relative prices of stocks in different industries may change with time and this degree of freedom is pretty much "useful". The price ratios are changing in such a way that the ratios of the P/E ratios in different industries remain pretty much constant. Note that different industries tend to have different P/E ratios because the companies are believed to have different "durability".

However, the P/E ratios are also different because of different profit margins that are expected in the different industries. Aren't these differences harmful degrees of freedom, too? Well, to some extent, they are: you might imagine that the prices should be such that the profit margins in different industries will be aligned which sounds "fair". However, there are reasons why it's normal for the ratios to be higher in certain industries: if the companies in the industry would easily risk to go bankrupt, because of the inherent fluctuations etc., they (and their competitors) will typically evolve into demanding a higher profit margin.

More generally, I think it is a good idea to adopt the classification of the degrees of freedom and to think which price ratios or their combinations are useful and which of them are harmful.

In my system, you might be afraid that if the P/E ratios of all stocks become very small, people will tend to sell the real stocks, anyway. And my system will collapse. Well, assuming the tax system, you may see this not to be the case. The regulator that keeps Dow Jones at 10,000 is actually giving more money (tax breaks, negative taxes, see above) to all the stock holders whenever they tend to sell. These become a part of the stockholders' profits which increases the net profit per stock and reduces the P/E ratio. This procedure would become a routine law, an obvious event, and it would make similar kinds of collapses impossible.

Long-term behavior of savings etc.

In the long run, you expect many of the wild trends seen in contemporary Dow Jones charts etc. to be eliminated. You should notice that the Dow Jones money would be inherently less inflationary than the normal money. With a fixed amount of money, you would own a fixed fraction of the companies. Because the companies get more valuable in the real terms, you would be getting richer, too.

Does it mean that the butter would be getting cheaper in USJ? In the long run, it does. The same butter company would be able to produce more butter. Assuming a qualitatively fixed P/E ratio of this company, the butter is clearly getting cheaper. Does this "deflation" lead to a dangerous downward spiral? No, it doesn't because it is a universal part of the economy and the people's expectations. There are no new mechanisms to accelerate the dropping butter prices in this framework.

What we have done in essence is to unify two currencies existing on one territory, USD and the average stocks. That makes the long-term behavior of investors' savings more universal and stable, and not a matter of lottery. Because the new USJ currency is naturally strengthening, the expected interest rates in the banks would be smaller than today, and they could go negative (the fees would be for the protection of the money and other services).

Note that stocks tend to grow by 8% in nominal terms but with a 3% inflation in average, the real growth of the companies' value is of order 5% a year. That could actually define the strengthening of USJ per year and the deflation (the trend of price of butter in USJ). For aesthetic reasons, you could keep this rate at zero by redefining the Dow Jones index not to be at 10,000 but rather 10,000 times 1.05 to the power of time since 2009 (in years). The generalization of the system above is self-evident.

Can the advantages of the Dow Jones money be emulated?

I have already discussed this point but once again. You might think that whatever positive is brought by the unification of the currency and the average stocks can be emulated by other interventions that the U.S. government is doing these days (and other days). Yes, it can. But because the government has so much freedom to do these interventions - much more hawkish or dovish than people expect - these interventions create new waves of instability in the future.

On the other hand, the regime with USJ money is fixed and determined: there is no room for the government to create unexpected waves in the system. In essence, the policy is about the unification of the money and average stocks, an alternative currency, and this unification would increase stability and efficiency to the system. It's like merging two huge fuel tanks into one. If your car had to gigantic fuel tanks, it would cause all kinds of problems. One of them could get empty or overfilled, the pressure in between them could break the barrier or create explosions. With one fuel tank, you will be doing much better.

Now, it's time for discussions, hopefully decent ones. ;-)

David McMahon: String theory demystified

The following review was posted to amazon.com, too.

I actually love the book, its format, and its focus. Imagine that your task is to take Polchinski's textbook on String Theory and compress both volumes to 320 light pages or so.

You have to include some basics of GR, QFT, abstract classical mechanics but also the CFTs, bosonic strings, light cone gauge, T-duality, symmetries, RNS superstring, heterotic strings, D-branes, AdS/CFT, black holes. But you also add some material that was not yet fully covered in Polchinski's book such as tachyon condensation on D-branes and the speculative field of string cosmology, among others.

I think that if you realize your task well, you will end up with a book very similar to McMahon's book. As a kid or undergrad, I would actually love the playful format of the book, the icons and big headlines. In fact, I like it even now. It's the format that succeeds to attract the reader's attention and give him or her the (semi-realistic) feeling that the knowledge needed to fully master string theory is of encyclopedic character and "learnable" in a finite time.

Although the brevity of many explanations will clearly make it insufficient for all readers to understand the true origin of all results and steps, this is a book focusing on real, solid scientific arguments.

This is a simplified but technical, not popular, book that won't overwhelm you with postmodern philosophical babbling, trying to convince you that it can replace the calculations and lead you instantly to "big" conclusions without any hard work. It is a book that shows the actual correct calculations and derivations, albeit in a simplified form. Most importantly, the answers are pretty much universally correct, as far as I could check, and they uniformly cover the basic topics that are important for actual researchers in modern high-energy theoretical physics.

If you're a college student, high school student, or a mathematically skilled "semi-outsider" who is bright enough to learn advanced theoretical physics, please ignore the other reviewers who clearly have no idea what theoretical physics actually is, and buy this book. You may like it, too.

The White Asparagus Triangulation

Episode 2x09 of The Big Bang Theory:

Watch at Megavideo (fullscreen)

NYT about Václav Klaus

The New York Times printed an article about Czech president Václav Klaus:

Dan Bilefsky: A fiery Czech is poised to be the face of Europe

It's a fun reading, mostly because the article is so similar to the official communist propaganda articles about Václav Havel and other famous dissidents.



Václav Klaus considers golf to be "too feudal" but he is very good in tennis and skiing, enjoys hiking, and has been a member of the Czechoslovak junior basketball national team. Snowboarding, floorball, and other newer mutations of traditional sports are leftist sports. ;-)

First of all, I must clarify a potentially important technicality (because the title seems to be misleading and e.g. Marc Morano who informed us about the article seems to misunderstand it). The boss of the European Union since January 1st, 2009 won't be the Czech president but rather the Czech prime minister, currently Mr Mirek Topolánek. Klaus believes that the EU presidency is mostly an inconsequential formality.

Now, let me summarize and interpret the article. Dan Bilefsky begins with his opinion that he completely agrees with StB - the communist secret agency. Those Czech counterparts of KGB used to be monitoring the current president and noticed that Klaus realized that he was bright - a fact that they found threatening. ;-) The agents, much like Dan Bilefsky, reacted in the way that the lesser minds and jealous intellectual dwarfs always do.

Bilefsky continues with a list of Klaus's "heresies", clearly assuming that it will make all the "concerned" and politically correct readers of The New York Times denounce the Czech president: Bilefsky lambasts the natural character of climate change, the free markets, and the independence of EU nations.

He explains that Klaus considers people like Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatchers as his role models, credits him not only for the Czechoslovak voucher privatization but even for the Russian voucher privatization that emulated ours, and gives a highly distorted explanation of Klaus's current very high approval rate oscillating around 60-70% or so. Despite this high figure, Bilefsky dedicates one sentence to the opinions of Klaus's supporters and about 20 sentences to explicit and de facto attacks on the Czech president.

At any rate, it is a kind of informative article (for the U.S. readers) but the biased spirit penetrating through most of its paragraphs squarely puts the article to the propaganda category. Dear comrades in The New York Times, welcome to the club of Der Stürmer and Rudé právo.

By the way, Klaus will communicate his testimony about the Lisbon Treaty in front of the Czech Constitutional Court. He believes that the two documents contradict one another. There exist early hints that the court will agree with him even though it would be the first time when the court confirmed Klaus's concerns.

Klaus has also revealed that he will only sign the Lisbon Treaty after the Irish ratify it. On the other hand, he will not become the only decisive person in Europe who would veto all the other people's happiness.



This Nobleman, Mr František Oldřich Kinský (the picture shows him in his gardens in Buenos Aires), could receive his USD 2 billion assets if the Treaty of Lisbon were approved because the treaty could threaten the validity of the Beneš decrees, post-war bills that confiscated the assets of German and other Nazis and near-Nazis in Czechoslovakia.

To make his case stronger and independent of the Beneš decrees, Kinský claims that in 1945, it was him, a 9-year-old boy, and not his Nazi father, who owned all the assets. :-)

Lawyers don't agree whether the treaty could operate retroactively. Nevertheless, the disagreement of the Czech population with giving these assets, including the Kinsky Palace on Prague's Old Town Square, back to this guy may be estimated to top 90%. But the Lisbon Treaty is not quite the same question and only about 55% of Czechs oppose it.

Update

I watched the proceedings. Klaus's speech was precious and clever. Vondra's speech, on behalf of the government, wasn't irritating in any way but it was fog. Recall that the Czech government backs the treaty because, in the words of prime minister Topolánek, it is much better to have sex with Angela Merkel than with Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian bear. ;-) Klaus was not 100% respectful towards the judges but he was not expected to be, anyway. ;-) It's not his job.

See Václav Klaus's testimony

Klaus's main new weapon was that he used the government's own argument. The government argued that the treaty agrees with the "material core" of the constitution, and the rest can be ignored. Klaus surely doesn't say that the "rest" can be ignored but he argued that the treaty disagrees even with the "material core" of the constitution, namely with the sovereignty of the Czech Republic, more precisely with the "competence to take further competence". This essential principle of the Czech constitutional law has been defended by the same court in a 2006 decision about sugar quotas, Klaus recalled.

The judges said that they would postpone the decision because they have new stuff to think about. Tomorrow, they will meet again at 10 am.

New update

On Wednesday, the Constitutional Court decided that the treaty was consistent with the constitution - although the court has explained that the decision was an extremely close call because the formulations in the treaty are vague and could be easily misinterpreted so that the sovereignty of the member nations (to decide in what fields the EU can sign international treaties and other things) could be crippled. Mistake. Assuming that the Parliament will ratify it, after some discussions, Klaus will be needed to block it, then.

Typealyzer: INTP - The Thinkers

Typealyzer seems to be a pretty good gadget to estimate the personality of bloggers, at least in comparison with many other gadgets that seem to produce rubbish. When I entered motls.blogspot.com, it said the following:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

(That sounds pretty sensible. The two paragraphs above forgot to mention that I am right and those "other people" are wrong. ;-) The website also showed a map of the brain with an "active triangle", indicating most activity in the logic/mathematics corner and significant activity in the intuition/imagination/symbols corner, too. Sensing wasn't quite turned off, either.)

Via Clifford Johnson.

Obama's chetviorka: Geithner, Summers, Orszag, Romer

Barack Obama is likely to reveal his economic team today.

Bloomberg

• Timothy Geithner is set to be the Treasury secretary.
• Lawrence Summers who needs no introduction among the TRF readers will be the White House economic director, with a chance of superseding Ben Bernanke in 2010
  
• Peter Orszag will chair the Congressional Budget Office.
• Christina Romer who was denied a job at Harvard by the new administration will head the Council of Economic Advisers.
  

Sounds pretty good, at least if you compare the group above with the most typical Obama supporters. ;-) Because this blog was the Google hit #5 for Christina Romer before many articles about the choice exploded today, we are getting a few thousand extra hits a day.

Doubling the U.S. debt, at least for a while

Gordon has pointed out a Bloomberg story that the segments of the U.S. federal government are lending or going to lend about USD 7.4 trillion in total. Just to be sure, I mean 7.4 x 10^{12} dollars, about 25,000 per American capita, including newborns. It equals the U.S. federal budget for three years. These numbers are completely scary and suggest that the negotiations in the U.S. Congress were just a joke about a tiny tip of an iceberg.

As a U.S. citizen, I would disagree with such policies. They're no longer about some marginal attempts to keep some macroeconomic quantities constant and about a piece of sugar meant to cure the investors' irrationally sour mood. They're about a radical change of the character of the U.S. economy and about a seed to a future massive inflation. I am ready to believe that Bernanke or his successor would get the money back at some moment but the amount could already be severely cut by inflation.

I don't believe that every industry of the U.S. economy is viable in the current form and should be expected to return all loans with interests. If someone believes that it should, doesn't he also think that the whole national debt should be equally safe and profitable? It's just wrong for too many industries to live from loans because it cripples their innovation and the creativity needed to survive.

For example, are you certain that the Detroit carmakers are doing the right job these days? These previously great companies are confined by the excessive power of the labor unions and overpaid workers. Are they really competitive? Can they ever become competitive again? Is that just a matter of loans? I kind of doubt it. It is likely that there exist other industries in which the U.S. still beats the world and they should be given the freedom to expand and absorb workers from the less successful industries.

Today, the euro has "slightly" strengthened against the U.S. dollar, namely by 3 cents. Ten more days like that from new records. On the other hand, Dow Jones jumped by 5 percent today. It's usually attributed to the two good news (for the investors) above - the bailout, especially the rescue of Citigroup, and Obama's picks. But I am not sure whether the second news is good and balanced for the whole U.S. nation (or mankind).

Why can anything ever fall into a black hole?

That was one of the questions in which I was "retarded" because even though I kind of knew what Einstein's equations were exactly saying in the middle of the high school, it was unclear to me how can someone ever manage to cross the horizon. Fortunately, CommunistSocialistSwine, pretending to be CapitalistImperialistPig in order to damage the capitalists' image, has repeated the same question.

The (wrong) argument that nothing ever manages to get inside the black hole goes as follows. The observer at infinity, Paolo, never sees the infalling observer - that will be referred to as a beer can to preserve the standard conventions here - crossing the horizon because the final moments of the can's live before the horizon crossing are infinitely stretched.

That's fine but even the observer who lives closer to the event horizon, Julio, seems to see the can's moments right before the horizon crossing stretched to infinite time intervals. At some moment, this expansion gets really extreme. Microseconds of the can's life can get stretched to times that are longer than the lifetime of the black hole (that evaporates by the Hawking radiation).

Moreover, as you choose Julio's base to be ever closer to the horizon, he seems to see the black hole evaporate ever faster, as measured by his proper time. You may put him so close to the horizon that it only takes a microsecond of his proper time to see the whole black hole evaporation process.

It's such a short time that you must conclude that the beer can, which is really close to Julio, simply can't have enough time to cross the horizon. Before the beer can manage to cross the horizon, the black hole must surely evaporate, so the beer can (or parts of the stars that is supposed to collapse into a black hole) can never get inside. Or can it?

As you should expect, this argument is wrong and the diagram above, the Penrose (causal) diagram, should answer all questions of the type "who can get somewhere".

Because we will need the diagram in the rest of the text, I decided to borrow a technology from the postings with song lyrics and confine the whole remaining text into a scrolling box.

When you want to use the Penrose diagram to settle these questions, you need to understand or check three types of facts:

• The meaning of the Penrose diagrams in general
  
• The reasons why the particular picture above describes an evaporating black hole arising from a collapsing star
• The tricks to derive all the desired answers from the picture above

What are Penrose diagrams

A Penrose diagram is a two-dimensional drawing similar to the picture above whose goal is to capture the geometry of a two-dimensional spacetime with Minkowski, special relativistic signature - especially its causal structure, a point we will explain in more detail.

It can also be used to clarify the same information about a higher-dimensional spacetime geometry as long as the remaining dimensions are trivially attached to each point of the two-dimensional diagram.

For example, each point on the picture above is a two-dimensional sphere of some radius (that depends on the point) and the full formula for the geometry, "ds^2", is simply the sum of the "ds^2" from the two-sphere and "ds^2" from the two-dimensional diagram. This simplification of a higher-dimensional geometry into a two-dimensional picture is possible because of the rotational symmetry.

The trick of the diagram is that it must correctly encode all the (hyperbolic, Minkowskian) "angles" in the two-dimensional spacetime, but it is not expected that the actual distances agree: they can be rescaled by a factor that can depend on the point in the diagram.

The angles must be chosen in such a way that all the diagonal lines slanted by 45 degrees must be light-like i.e. null: "ds^2" must be equal to zero, just like you expect in normal pictures of the flat Minkowski space. Correspondingly, all lines that are mostly horizontal are spacelike and all lines that are mostly vertical are time-like i.e. acceptable world lines for massive observers (who can never move faster than light).

Why Penrose diagrams always exist

Now, it is not hard to see that it is always possible to draw a similar picture for a region of a two-dimensional spacetime. Why? Because the two-dimensional geometry is described by the metric tensor, i.e. three independent functions g_{00}, g_{01}, and g_{11} of the coordinates "x^0, x^1".

On the other hand, the "ds^2" geometry is encoded by the Penrose diagram if the diagram is supplemented with one function of the two diagram coordinates, namely with "scale(x,t)" where "x,t" are the horizontal and vertical axes on our Penrose diagram.

So the question is whether there exists a coordinate transformation from the old general coordinates "x^0, x^1" (where the metric tensor was given by its three components) to the special coordinates "x,t" of the Penrose diagram (where the geometry is given by "ds^2 = scale(x,t) (t^2 - x^2)"). Well, obviously it exists, at least locally (in a region) for sensible enough geometries. Why?

Because the task is really to find three functions, "x^0(x,t), x^1(x,t), scale(x,t)" such that the induced geometry converted to the "x^0, x^1" coordinates will coincide with the geometry encoded in "g_{mn} (x^0, x^1)". That's a set of three differential equations for three functions and you may be pretty certain that a solution exists, at least given some reasonable conditions.

This explanation also makes it clear that such an angle-preserving diagrams can't generally exist in three or more spacetime dimensions (if the geometry non-trivially depends on all of them) because the metric tensor will have 6 independent components (in 3 dimensions) which is more than the 4 functions that would determine the geometry of the diagram (one scale plus three new coordinates): in higher dimensions, the counting would get even worse.

By the way, the explanation in the previous paragraph is also the reason why strings from string theory - with their two-dimensional world sheets - are special and, unlike their higher-dimensional counterparts, they allow us to get rid of all the dangerous physical features of the gravitational theory inside the world sheet (unlike the higher-dimensional world volumes).

Uniqueness

Fine. Is the solution - the diagram for a given spacetime geometry - unique? The answer is No. But the non-uniqueness is easy to understand. Consider the two-dimensional spacetime encoded in a Penrose diagram with coordinates "x,t" on the paper. Introduce the coordinates "xPLUS, xMINUS" which are equal to "x+t" and "x-t", respectively. If you remember the formula for the difference of squares, the geometry may be easily written as

ds^2 = scale(xPLUS,xMINUS) xPLUS xMINUS

What you are allowed to do is to redefine xPLUS to its increasing function yPLUS and xMINUS to its function yMINUS. The metric will continue to factorize simply because "scale" will only be replaced by "dxPLUS/dyPLUS times dxMINUS/dyMINUS", the "Jacobian", and it will continue to be

ds^2 = scale(yPLUS,yMINUS) yPLUS yMINUS

That's also known to be the only freedom you have to redesign a Penrose diagram. For the simplest and most important case of the flat space, xPLUS and xMINUS were real numbers between -infinity and +infinity (much like "x,t" themselves). But you may replace them by their functions yPLUS, yMINUS that go e.g. from -pi/2 to +pi/2, by defining "y" to be "arctan(x)" for both xPLUS and xMINUS.

The function "tanh" would also work (putting the result between -1 and +1) but there are reasons why "arctan" is the popular convention.

That means that the right, finite (or "compactified") Penrose diagram for the Minkowski space is a square rotated by 45 degrees - which is easier to manipulate with than an infinite piece of paper. It's important that the boundaries corresponding to some regions at infinity are light-like - the boundaries of the square.

If you are interested in the four-dimensional (or higher-dimensional) flat spacetime, each point on the "x,t" Penrose diagram corresponds to a sphere (more concretely, a two-dimensional sphere in the ordinary case of four spacetime dimensions).

A spatial coordinate - the old "x" in the Penrose diagram that was infinite, before we "compactified" it - also determines the radius of the sphere hiding at each point. It's the radial coordinate that should never be negative. So the Penrose diagram for the four-dimensional Minkowski space is just one half of the rotated square, i.e. a triangle with a vertical line on the left side. That's where the internal two-spheres shrink to zero.

Penrose diagram of the Schwarzschild black hole

Parts of the picture above look like the triangle but there's more structure in it. The bottom of the picture, the "infinite past", looks just like in the flat space. You can see that we also had some star with a surface (the yellow world line). At the beginning, it was larger than the Schwarzschild radius (the orange line, the points where the radius of the internal sphere is "R=2GM/c^2").

The whole "infinite past" of the star is concentrated in the very bottom portions of the yellow line, because of our "arctan" transformation of the light-like coordinates explained above.

The lower part of the picture also contains the diagonal light-like line called the "infinite past" on the picture or "scri minus" (use a script letter "I" with a minus index, and read "scri" normally as "s-cry"). Analogously, the upper, future portion of the picture contains the "infinite future", the "scri plus".

Note that the extreme upper tip of the picture also looks just like in the flat space even though it is moved to the right side relatively to the lower portion of the diagram. That's where the black hole has already evaporated. If you want to consider a black hole that never evaporates, you must shrink the small "tooth" at the top to zero.

If you care, the radius of the hidden sphere shrinks to zero at both vertical lines in the picture and at the horizontal singularity, while it goes mostly to infinity at all the diagonal lines. The only places on the boundary of the diagram where the radius is finite are the upper and lower corner (point!): that's where all the "r_{sphere}=const" lines converge.

Looking at the black hole and world lines

Of course, the remaining part of the picture contains the actual "black hole" that is so exciting. But let us start at the beginning, before the animal was born.

We see a world line of a point on the star surface: see the yellow line. The star has burned its fuel whose pressure kept it from the gravitational collapse. At some moment, the radius of the star drops below the Schwarzschild radius - that's where the yellow and orange lines intersect. At this moment, the star is pretty much doomed. Right now I am not sure whether one can generally prove that the event horizon becomes inevitable at this point but I am sure that it is going to be there in a moment according to the picture above which is surely realistic.

You should notice that after (="above" in the picture) the intersection of the yellow and orange lines, the star surface keeps on shrinking. At some moment, a point on the star surface - or the beer can - crosses the diagonal green line, the event horizon. The event horizon is the boundary between the (red) black hole interior and the rest of the spacetime.

This boundary is inevitably null i.e. light-like as you can easily see from the definition of the (red) black hole interior. It is the collection of points from which you can never get to the infinite future (scri plus) by following a time-like (mostly vertical, up) trajectory.

As you can see, there only exist two types of (timelike) world lines that are qualitatively different: the yellow world line, describing the star surface or the beer can, and the orange line, describing all observers such as Julio and Paolo who manage to escape from the gravitational grip of the black hole and survive at infinity.

If you want to stay outside the black hole but get really close to the horizon, your world line on the diagram will approach the green line, the event horizon, especially in the upper part of the green line where most of the spacetime volume (of the long black hole life, before it evaporates) is concentrated: the scale factor goes to infinity in all corners of the picture, with a possible exception of the left end of the singularity (I don't want to think too hard now), and in the whole "scri minus" and "scri plus".

On the other hand, if you lose your fight, like the beer can did, you will qualitatively follow the yellow line. When you cross the green event horizon, you don't even notice. But you should expect the last portion of your life inside the (red) interior to be finite, according to your proper time (clock).

You will experience increasing tidal forces (the gradient of the acceleration, using the old language) and right before the singularity (or earlier), you will be crushed into pieces. The Schwarzschild singularity is horizontal i.e. spacelike: that's because the timelike and spacelike directions are kind of interchanged inside the black hole because the factor (1-2GMr/c^2) flips the sign at the horizon. If you use the Schwarzschild coordinates, the line r=0 with t arbitrary is a spacelike, not timelike direction.

Once you're destroyed at the singularity, you die. Incidentally, the information about you must be secretly encoded and it must "superluminally tunnel" outside the black hole so that it is imprinted into the Hawking radiation at the "infinite future" because the information is not allowed to be lost at the singularity. But I don't want to discuss quantum gravity in this rudimentary posting.

The picture makes it clear that there is nothing surprising about the fact that the yellow and green lines intersect (much like the yellow and orange lines): a star can collapse so that all of its atoms are doomed to be destroyed at the singularity. They're surely doomed once they cross the horizon.

The orange observer

But you should really be interested in the orange observers who manage to stay outside the black hole. Because the black hole attracts them, they must accelerate away from the black hole. A spaceship would need powerful jets to escape the strong gravitational field, especially if it got really close to the event horizon.

In the Schwarzschild coordinates where the black hole looks static, you may be tempted to think that sitting at "r=const" is a natural state of affairs. However, there's nothing natural about it: "r=const" is not a geodesic: a "coordinate=const" line is rarely a geodesic in a curved spacetime. You need a nonzero acceleration to stay there. A spaceship would have to emit a lot of burned fuel to keep this position which would mean that its mass/energy would have to exponentially drop as a function of the proper time of the spaceship. But if you allow this "diet", a spaceship can sit there, of course.

If you want the spaceship to sit at "r=const" in Schwarzschild coordinates where "const" is just a little bit higher than the Schwarzschild radius, "r=2GM/c^2", you actually need a nearly infinite acceleration. You can see that the orange line approaches the green (null) line going in the Northwest direction as you approach the future (the upper part of the diagram).

Once the orange observer realizes that he must accelerate away from the black hole to save his life and freedom, his trajectory inevitably looks like the timelike hyperbola, "x^2 - c^2 t^2 = c^4/A^2" in the Minkowski space ("x" is positive).

This hyperbola describes an observer whose proper acceleration is constant: note that the hyperbola is given by a Lorentz-invariant equation so its form doesn't change if you switch to a different inertial frame, associated with the same observer after its velocity has accelerated a bit. The curvature radius of this hyperbola, "c^2/A", is proportional to the inverse acceleration (multiplied by the squared speed of light).

All the observers near the black hole horizon will be able to use the normal physics of special relativity because the curvature is very small there - if the black hole is large. General relativity always reduces to special relativity in spacetime regions that are much smaller than all the typical curvature radii. That's a statement that holds for any kind of the Riemannian geometry: in small enough local regions, it reduces to the Euclidean geometry, too. That's why the surface of the Earth is flat for most practical purposes. But these nearly flat "maps" can be glued into a globally curved picture.

If you introduce some natural, special-relativistic coordinates for such a small spacetime region near the horizon, in which the geometry is essentially "c^2 t^2 - x^2 - y^2 - z^2", you will see that the horizon itself is nothing else than a plane that is moving outwards by the speed of light, creating a null hypersurface in spacetime "x=ct" (flat Minkowski coordinates) and trying to eat everyone who hasn't escaped. This "x=ct" is the very same thing that you would describe as "r_{Schwarzschild} = 2GM/c^2" in Schwarzschild coordinates.

On the other hand, the massive observers who want to escape from the horizon have world lines analogous to "x^2 - c^2 t^2 = c^4/A^2". They rapidly approach the speed of light in these special relativistic coordinates that are locally valid. For a very small vicinity of these world lines, you may still introduce pretty good coordinates. But you should understand that the observers who are close to the horizon but who resist the gravity and stay outside are nothing like inertial observers. They're like heavily accelerating observers because their jets are on.

Shrinking horizon

There is one more point that may be confusing. I wrote that in the special relativistic coordinates describing a region near the black hole horizon, the horizon itself looks like a plane that moves outwards, i.e. away from the black hole center, trying to eat everyone who is not escaping.

On the other hand, you know that if the black hole evaporates, the radius of the event horizon should be slowly decreasing. It looks like the horizon is moving inwards. Is there a contradiction? Of course, there is no contradiction here.

In flat Euclidean geometry, the same coordinate "r" describes the proper distance from the origin as well as the circumference of the maximal circles on the sphere (divided by 2 pi) and other things. But in general relativity, there are infinitely many things that can be called "r" - there exists a freedom to choose coordinates - and the different types of "r" from the case of flat geometry no longer coincide.

For example, the circumference of the Earth's equator is not equal to pi times the distance (along the Earth's surface) of its antipodal points. Pi must be replaced by 2 here, in fact.

So when you look at the green event horizon and you follow it to the future - from the bottom up - you see that it is moving to the right side, which is analogous to an "increasing radial coordinate". However, there is a two-sphere sitting at each point of this green line and the radius of the two sphere is actually decreasing as you move towards the future. There's no paradox here: the proper radius of the hidden sphere is an independent function from the coordinates on our Penrose diagram. The only way to "prove" that their time derivatives should have the same sign would be to incorrectly assume that the geometry is flat: well, it's not.

Summary

The causal structure of a black hole may look paradoxical. The main reason is that an orange observer who succeeds in keeping himself outside the black hole had to be accelerating for a pretty long time which makes his world line "highly boosted" relatively to "natural" coordinates of observers who didn't have to accelerate for such long periods of time (e.g. because they either kept themselves very far from the black hole or they gave up and decided to fall inside).

The other point is that physics in small enough spacetime regions - except for the regions near the singularity - obeys the laws of special relativity pretty accurately. That's true even for the regions near the black hole event horizon. If you choose coordinates in which the local geometry looks like the Minkowski geometry in special relativity, the horizon becomes a plane moving outwards by the speed of light, trying to eat everyone. The observers who escape from it look like the constant-acceleration, hyperbolic world lines. And the black hole exterior looks like the Rindler wedge, i.e. the region with "x" and "x^2 - c^2 t^2" positive in the Minkowski space (with "y,z" arbitrary).

And the last thing you must realize is that in a curved spacetime geometry, the letters like "r" or "t" can mean many things. Different types of "radial coordinates" that agreed in the flat space differ once the geometry is curved, as we explained. But analogously, there are also many different meanings of "t": you can choose many types of the time coordinates. Even if you tell me that someone's proper time should be used and you tell me where the observer is located (i.e. a distance from the event horizon), it doesn't determine how quickly his time is going relatively to nearby objects in motion.

Just like in special relativity, you also need to know his velocity - the tangent direction of his world line. That's nothing new: special relativity must still be a limit of general relativity in small enough regions. The observers who live "right above" the event horizon see everything in a short proper time. But that's just because they move - morally almost by the speed of light - relatively to other observers. Different observers, such as the infalling beer can, view time very differently. After a very short time, they cross the horizon. Time is relative, just like it has been since 1905: observers at different velocities experience it differently.

I will probably not have time to check the text above and fix the mistake, at least not for half a day. So the text above is likely to be imperfect.

Press F11 for full screen, to get more vertical space: another F11 gets you back. Use the arrow keys, Page Up/Down keys, the mouse button, or the mouse wheel to navigate through the box above, after you click inside it.

The Weather Channel: "Forecast Earth" nuked

A commenter informed us in the slow comments about another good consequence of the financial turmoil and the dropping TV ratings of NBC.



The Weather Channel - a channel founded by John Coleman, a well-known climate skeptic, but recently bought by NBC Universal (and two private equity firms) and overrun by left-wing activists - has finally fired pretty much all the staff of the "Forecast Earth" program.

See Google News

"Forecast Earth" was a hysterical activist, doomsaying program (check some of the videos) that followed the example of "Climate Code" of Ms Heidi Cullen. Unfortunately, this lady who wanted to decertify and fire all climate skeptics in the U.S. remains at The Weather Channel.

Well, the ratings have to drop a little bit more for NBC to realize that it is not just one program but the repetitive, biased advocacy in general that is not compatible with the NBC's financial sustainability because the viewers are not as stupid and thirsty for repetitive propaganda as some people seem to think. And believe me or not, most of The Weather Channel viewers actually like to watch it to learn something about the weather! ;-)

You know, for example, this babe (probably Natalie Allenn - who performed an interview with an insane CEO about the dying living system on Earth) is hotter than Heidi Cullen and she probably had to go.

I am not afraid of these people's fate but it is good that useless - and perhaps even harmful - jobs are finally being liquidated. There are tens of thousands of similar jobs that have to be abolished, too. Unless, of course, the trend will be reverted and some of the weird people will succeed in creating not thousands but millions of new, useless, "green" jobs. If that ever happens, expect the national ratings to follow the fate of NBC.

"Global" hockey stick lives in the Californian mountains

Willis Eschenbach has statistically analyzed the contribution of different proxies to the hockey stick shape in the new hockey stick graph paper, Mann et al. 2008. Recall that Mann's strategy is to give a significant weight (choose) the proxies that show a significant trend in the 20th century, because this is what Mann says is "good for the agreement with observations". As a result, the average of such proxies "shows" that the 20th century trend is stronger than that in the previous centuries: he gets the hockey stick shape.

As you can see, the "result" can be directly derived from his assumptions. He actually assumes that the result must look like a hockey stick. If you require that there is a 20th century trend but you require nothing about the previous centuries, it is obvious that you will amplify the data whose 20th century trend is higher than for the previous centuries; the previous centuries will average essentially to a constant function.

At any rate, Willis looked which proxies contribute most to the hockey-stick-like shape. He found that all of them are "stripbark" pines in high-altitude southwestern United States. When you remove these trees, the hockey stick shape disappears. So even if you didn't realize that Mann's method of "proving" the hockey stick is based on circular reasoning, this analysis proves that the "unprecedented global warming" is only supported for the mountains in California and nearby states. It doesn't look terribly global. But maybe, we shouldn't underestimate the global influence of the Terminator who has probably has a cottage there. ;-)

James Hansen in high-energy physics

The first paper on Monday's high-energy physics theoretical preprint list - a paper about the holographic methods to study the relationship between magnetohydrodynamics and gravity in curved spaces - was written by Per Kraus and a collaborator with a scary name. No, it's not the same one. ;-)

A huge landscape with 16 supercharges

Jester at Resonaances writes about a project of Edward Witten who is spending some time at CERN, apparently bringing shock and awe to some slightly less famous string theorists over there. ;-)

I understand where the fear comes from but I think it is counterproductive and irrational, after all. And as a citizen of EU, I have to urge the CERN people to defend the good name of the European hospitality rather than the image of CERN as a very cold place (1.9 Kelvin).

So please, participate at some lunches with Edward Witten and listen not only to his cool ideas but also to some precious observations why some of your work or approaches suck, please: he is a very pleasant person, after all. Thanks! :-) But that's not what we want to talk about here.

How large is the landscape?

Recall that a substantial body of evidence has accumulated since 2003 that implies that there exists a countable but huge number of semirealistic stringy vacua in four dimensions. They're parameterized by the topology of the internal dimensions, the information about the branes, fluxes, Wilson lines, and many other things.

The existence of the extensive landscape is not really new: people have known that string theory admits a large number of four-dimensional backgrounds for more than two decades. However, during the last 5 years, the number of these vacua has been estimated as 10^{500} or more. (Some people, e.g. Wolfgang Lerche, have been mentioning even higher number as early as in the 1980s.)

Many people dislike the very existence of the landscape but their emotional gestures are probably the only thing they can do against this mathematical fact.

An entirely different question is concerned with the rules that choose the right compactification. The anthropic people want to believe that Nature has chosen a random vacuum from the landscape, in order to make the cosmological constant small and to make a few dozens of other low-energy parameters "life-ready".

For this interpretation, they need the number of a priori conceivable vacua to be qualitatively similar to one googol, something like 10 to the power of a few hundreds. There's no real proof that the total number of vacua to start with is of this form: no upper bound is known. In the anthropic ideology, the existence of our world required a random event in which our vacuum was chosen from 10^{500} candidates or so. That reduces our ability to predict the world by "pure thought" but the information you need to extract from the real world to identify the right vacuum and to restore predictivity is only of the order of "500 x log(10)" which is considered acceptable by the anthropic people.

An infinite landscape?

Of course, if the number of a priori conceivable vacua were infinite, it would be impossible to assume that all vacua are equally likely: there is no uniform yet normalizable probability distribution at infinite sets. So all the anthropic arguments that our world is generic need to assume that the landscape is finite. And in fact, it shouldn't really be much greater than a small power of one googol, otherwise the "generic" vacua could have low-energy parameters that are much less random than what they seem to expect.

For example, among 10^{10^{120}} vacua, virtually all of them could have a cosmological constant almost equal to the constant we observe.

In 2006, Michael Douglas and Bobby Acharya articulated the "anthropic" assumptions of the landscape. The landscape of the four-dimensional vacua is finite as long as you require that the cosmological constant is lower than a certain bound, the lightest Kaluza-Klein tower is heavier than a certain bound, and the compactification volume is similarly smaller than a certain bound.

This conjecture has been pretty much proven. As far as I understand, Witten's construction below doesn't give us a counterexample to the Douglas-Acharya conjecture; their having a universal bound on the compactification volume is a very strong assumption, after all. But it changes the numbers so substantially that it makes the Douglas-Acharya theorem "morally wrong".

Witten's AdS orbifold vacua

We are going to follow Witten and Jester and construct a huge class of four-dimensional AdS vacua with sixteen supercharges (and a negative cosmological constant). These vacua allow you to count instantons by various quiver theories and enjoy the new Gaiotto-Witten mirror symmetry relating the Higgs and Coulomb branches. But we will focus on their existence and implications for the interpretation of the landscape.

Start with the maximally supersymmetric AdS4 x S7 background, the near-horizon geometry of M2-branes in M-theory. And orbifold it. What you want to study are orbifolds of the type

AdS₄ x S⁷ / Z_m x Z_n.

Fine. So I must explain how the Z_m, Z_n groups act. They rotate the 8 transverse dimensions of spacetime by elements in SO(8). The generators of both Z_m and Z_n are chosen to preserve the same one half of supersymmetry; at least I hope it is possible to embed them in SO(8) in this way: some other choices of Z_m and Z_n would probably break the SUSY down to one quarter. But when an SO(4) x SO(4) subgroup of the transverse SO(8) is considered (because of triality, note that there are 1 vectorial plus 2 spinorial qualitatively different ways to embed it), the Z_m group belongs to one SO(4) factor while the Z_n group is a subgroup of the other SO(4).

This description of the orbifold makes it clear that there will be two, A_{m-1} and A_{n-1}, singularities in the compactification. They will intersect one another. SU(m) and SU(n) gauge theories live on the singularities. Note that both of them are real codimension four loci inside the seven-sphere: they are three-dimensional (times the AdS4). The geometries supporting the gauge theories are AdS4 x S3 / Z_m or Z_n, respectively.

In seven dimensions, two three-manifolds behave similarly as a pair of strings in three dimensions: you may entangle them in "knots" and these "knots" can carry additional information analogous to Wilson lines. More explicitly, the Z_m and Z_n groups above may be chosen to act not only on the 8 transverse coordinates but they can also act on the "other" SU(n) or SU(m) gauge group. The combined action of the orbifold generators requires you to define elements of SU(n) and SU(m) whose m-th and n-th power is the identity, respectively.

Seeing why the sets are gigantic

If you write the eigenvalues of such SU(m) and SU(n) matrices, it's easy to see that the number of choices is very large even for moderate m,n. The number actually is

(n+m-1 choose n) x (n+m-1 choose m)

Wow. Taking m=n for simplicity, it is

(2m-1 choose m)²

These combinatorial numbers grow rapidly with "m". Qualitatively they go like "m!", the factorial of m.

A small googolplex of vacua

Think about the bounds on the compactification volumes. If you allow the compactification volume to be comparable to 10^{10} in the eleven-dimensional Planck units - an estimated gap between the fundamental Planck scales and the scales accessible to the accelerator - the construction above admits something like

(10¹⁰)! = 10^{10^{10}} or so

vacua. In the counting of the landscape, we have essentially replaced the popular exponent 500 by several billions. These vacua with 16 supercharges are unrealistic - too many supercharges and too high cosmological constants - but it is conceivable that similar constructions may be developed for vacua with 4 or 0 supercharges, too. The realistic Standard Model-like spectrum could perhaps be restored by adding stuff to Witten's construction and the excessive cosmological constant could perhaps be canceled.

(I don't know how to extend the construction above to smaller supersymmetries because in this form, it is linked to S^7 and its isometries too tightly.)

If you deal with 10 to the billion of vacua and treat them "democratically", as the anthropic people like to do, I think that the expected statistical distributions for low-energy parameters will no longer be uniform. On the contrary, the "density of vacua" in the low-energy parameter space is almost guaranteed to resemble "exp(L)" where "L" is a large, non-constant function of the parameters, taking values comparable to a billion. With such an Ansatz, almost all the vacua sit at the maximum (or a few maxima) of "L", by a "saddle point approximation".

Note that if the number of vacua were even more gigantic than considered previously, the predictivity would actually return to physics if you assumed that we live in a generic vacuum within a pre-defined set.

On the other hand, I think that such a substantial increase in the estimated number of the vacua also makes it more manifest that the "uniform" probability distribution on the vacua can't be the correct one. If you believed in genericity, the large sets of vacua in Witten's case would be dominated by the vacua with the maximum allowed values of m,n, i.e. the cutoff. While all values of the fluxes in KKLT vacua could have looked like "equally fundamental", Witten's construction makes the vacua with small m,n feel "more fundamental" and the "first among peers". It seems pretty manifest that in all sensible statistical distributions, the vacua with small values of m,n would be "more likely".

At any rate, Witten's enhanced landscape would falsify the comments that "physics is over" and "physicists should give up any research of the vacuum selection". Even the simplest assumptions about the probability distributions on the landscape would be highly predictive. Moreover, everyone should see that it is not the most naive, but the most physically natural and viable distributions that should be considered. The early cosmology and the vacuum selection problem provide us with a lot of legitimate scientific challenges that haven't yet been solved but that can be solved in the future.

And that's the memo.

ICC ordered to steal USD 1 billion from skeptical politicians

DeSmogBlog,

a propagandistic blog about the climate funded by John Lefebvre, a criminal arrested for money laundering, informs us about a lawsuit filed by Danny Bloom, a radical environmentalist activist.

In this lawsuit, Bloom claims to represent the "future generations of human beings on Earth - if there are any" and he wants to be personally paid USD 1 billion from those world leaders who are skeptical about the catastrophic climate change. This list is supposed to include politicians as undecided as Stephen Harper of Canada.

Bloom claims that he will donate the money to the IPCC. Of course, unless the capital will be needed to repay some money to John Lefevbre and others.

Now, I think that the probability that Bloom could win this absurd case is infinitesimally tiny. Still, it may be a useful exercise to imagine that he will. Just imagine that these internationally organized criminals - John Lefevbre, Danny Bloom, RealClimate.ORG, and many others - will also be able to take over the International Criminal Court and steal billions of dollars from any innocent individuals they dislike, according to their own choice. After the next lawsuit, climate skeptics could perhaps be executed, too.

Climate skeptics would become as threatened by these organized fanatics as the German Jews were around 1938: it became legitimate to steal their ski or furcoats and to break their windows but not to steal billions of dollars from them.

Sane and human countries should leave the International Criminal Court, outlaw the climate activists, and freeze all of their assets. Yes, I am afraid that if things like Bloom's victory in the lawsuit would occur, a world war against the climate alarmists, analogous to the war on terror, would be my preferred next step.

TED: How science is nothing like democracy

Recently, I was very pleased by the people's wise reactions to a February 2003 talk that TED posted to YouTube last week:



This talk by Lee Smolin is titled "How Science Is Like Democracy" and it is another postmodern tirade against the very essence of science. At 0:15, he tells us that he needed 25 seconds to agree with a project that could involve a USD 120 million gift. Well, that's not terribly shocking.

More seriously, at 1:25, we are told that everything we learned about science at school is wrong. Most importantly,

there is no scientific method.

Wow. Hasn't Mr Smolin at least considered the possibility that the scientific method actually does exist - only he's been unable to take notice so far? He continues with bizarre comments about democratic communities and their strange links to science. Well, science has nothing to do with communities and certainly nothing with their collective ethics because science is about objective insights and evidence while ethics is always subjective.

Another fundamentally incorrect proposition, articulated at 2:20 or so, is that people in 20-30 years will be able to correctly answer all questions that are debated and undecided today. The history of physics - even the biographies on this blog - are full of stories when it took 50 years, centuries, or millenia to converge to the right answer. The truth can't be blackmailed or delayed by any silly, bureaucratic deadlines. Sometimes, scientific evidence needs a few weeks to accumulate. Sometimes, it needs millenia.

At 3:14, he moves to "science of cosmology" and the "first science" was Aristotelian. So he explains some crystal and celestial spheres, being obviously unaware about the difference between this ancient crap on one side and science on the other side: this stuff is simply not "science" according to the present terminology because it hasn't survived any nontrivial empirical tests. Smolin even derives this "science" from some features of the ancient or medieval society where everything had a place (and institutions were hierarchical).

I have absolutely no idea what he could have possibly meant, except for emitting a sequence of meaningless sentences. In Newtonian physics or any kind of real science, things have their place, too. Modern cosmology also has hierarchies (clusters of stars, galaxies, and perhaps multiverse) - in fact, a more complex one than the old cosmology.

He completely omits the scientific revolution - because the scientific method, as pioneered by Galileo, obviously doesn't exist in Lee Smolin's picture of the world of knowledge. Instead, he talks about Isaac Newton but he says very different things than what scientists would normally say. More concretely, he claims that Newton invented a "liberal universe" because philosopher John Locke inspired him by some opinions about the society. The common theme is that there was no center.

According to Smolin, another pillar of Newton's world view was God, an external observer. That looks like a marijuana perspective on Newton's theory. To make things worse, he literally identifies Newton's theory with liberal political and legal theory around 5:50. Wow.



The Library of Congress has finally figured out what Lee Smolin and his colleagues are actually doing in their institute. Via Backreaction.

The 20th century revolution in physics is supposed to be about the pluralistic, "relational" society. He claims that there is nothing fixed or absolute in this Universe, zilch. I have no idea what he could possibly be talking about. Every scientific theory has fixed concepts and facts - e.g. the laws - and absolute, invariant quantities, and the modern theories often admit new absolute notions that didn't exist previously. For Smolin, God must be eliminated because no one can see everything in modern physics. Again, it makes no sense. He's just trying to project and impose his marijuana-induced political and ideological prejudices about politics on poor physics that has obviously nothing to do with this assorted crap.

General relativity and quantum mechanics are linked to "critical legal studies" at 7:20. He is probably talking about the Tribe-Obama paper on the curvature of constitutional space. ;-)

In his view, the "last" type of cosmology is "relational", meaning that objective facts can't exist in it. But there is nothing in cutting-edge science that would be linked to these words. At 7:50, he explains that guys can be men and women which suggests that even when he says "cosmology", he is actually thinking about sex (with the feminists).

Also, the Universe has made itself, he says. Well, structures may evolve from others inside a Universe, but what it operationally means for the whole Universe to make itself is beyond me. Suddenly, he returns to Darwin and promotes his (Smolin's) nonsense about the cosmic natural selection. He also claims that Darwin would make no sense in the Newtonian world (because it had "absolute quantities") - which is obviously rubbish, too. Darwin's theory was designed exactly in the context of the Newtonian world view on physics.

At 10:00, Smolin switches from the marijuana mode to the cocaine mode. The two major 20th century scientific discoveries are Darwinism in biology (which was really a 19th century paradigm!) and democracy (which is a completely unrelated social organizational system developing since 508 BC when it was established in Athens). The latter - democracy - is thus necessarily "pluralistic" and "experimental", he says. By now, all the buzzwords and adjectives are being mixed up arbitrarily.

The last minutes of the talk are dedicated to his "new revolution" in science which will reflect the postmodern philosophy and deconstructivism. There are many different agendas, no objective opinions, and this jelly will unify Darwinism and relationism, he thinks. ;-) Wow. This talk is almost indistinguishable from Alan Sokal's famous hoax paper about Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity except that unlike Sokal, Smolin is as serious as the drugs allow him.

The last sentence claims that science will never go away. It's a tautology. It can't go away because it doesn't exist in the first place, as we learned from Lee's first transparency.

The reactions

What surprised me was that virtually all of those 100+ comments under the YouTube video realize that Smolin's talk was postmodern, anti-scientific crap that contradicts all the very basic features of science. Creationism is the most widely quoted example showing why democracy has nothing to do with scientific evidence. Other people argue that science is a meritocracy, not a democracy.

I had to think why it was that almost everyone was wise and sane over there and why I had the bad luck to interact with so many people - in the physics blogosphere but also in the non-physics departments of the broader Academia (and sometimes even at physics departments, but fortunately not those where I have been) - who love to write similar deconstructivist junk about science as democracy etc. Well, the likely answer can be found after a few minutes of thinking and reading: most of the people who watched and commented on the video are subscribed to see the talks uploaded by TED.

These mostly 5-star talks are typically very good and science-oriented - see e.g. George Smoot's visually hot talk posted yesterday (note that this pretty fresh Nobel prize winner defends exactly the hierarchical design of the Universe that Mr Smolin dismisses as ancient science). Smolin's 3.5-star talk just happened to be one of two recently posted lousy, anti-scientific pseudo-entertaining rants that TED has uploaded, leading some people to unsubscribe. Nevertheless, it looks surprising that a pretty informal group, TED, has collected a much more pro-scientific community than the institutionalized Academia. It is both surprising and worrisome.

The Academia is probably unable to cure itself - and in 2008, the postmodern charlatans could be able to crucify Alan Sokal if he did the same thing today - but at least Mike Lazaridis should be able to freeze the money to all of the deconstructivist babblers he's been feeding for years and hire a couple of selected TED subscribers instead.

Are G20 leaders double-faced hypocritical opportunists?

Much like socialist physicist Tommaso Dorigo, I am appalled by this video.



Those twenty G20 leaders have exchanged almost 20 x 19 / 2 x 1 = 190 handshakes except that 19 of them were missing. Not only Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and other people of this category, but even Silvio Berlusconi decided to pretend that they didn't see George W. Bush.

If someone can't see the difference of their behavior from what it looked like a few months or years ago, he or she must be blind. And if someone doesn't realize that the difference shows that these politicians only behave nicely to others if they can personally benefit out of it, must be completely stupid. And whoever thinks that such a behavior is morally acceptable is an immoral jerk.

You know, this is a theme that has been intensely discussed - and lived - in Czechoslovakia since the totalitarian era. Many people used to be trucklers, licking the buttocks of the communist party (or even the Nazis). Later, many of them were proudly dismissing the communists, when these communists were no longer useful for their careers. I am sorry but my stomach is simply not strong enough to keep these feelings inside, so I must conclude with this punch line:

Unless there exists a strict and bizarre rule in the protocol that I am missing, Ms Merkel, you seem to be an immoral female dog, and the rest of the group should be deeply ashamed, too. You know, I am not surprised by the attitude of Gordon Brown or José Manuel Barroso. But seeing Silvio Berlusconi in the same group is deeply disappointing.

Another CNN video, based on the White House's spokespeople, argues that Bush didn't shake other people's hands in the video above because he had already done it in the morning, while other pairs of politicians hadn't have the opportunity. I remain mostly unconvinced by this interpretation. I don't believe it is a strict condition for hand shakes not to repeat themselves. And regardless of the previous hand shakes, these other politicians simply helped Bush to look bad and feel lonely.

Seeing that the encounters in "pairs" looked more cordial than the group behavior doesn't satisfy me. The difference is the key part of my very bad impression from the politicians' behavior.

Odiogo: listen to this blog

I have hired the former spokesman for the White House to record the audio version of all 2,600 postings on this blog, The Reference Frame. With his authentic English that your humble correspondent could never achieve, you may currently enjoy hundreds of hours of high-quality podcasts.

For example, you may wait for 20 seconds or so, until the "listen" button appears right below the title of this post, or any other post, for that matter. As soon as you click the button, you will be able to listen to these very sentences. You may also download all these texts as MP3 files either from a special page or a new audio-powered feed. If you want to check an MP3 file by one click, you may try this URL.

The speaker should have no problems to talk about string theory, the landscape, F-theory compactifications, fuzzballs, those 0.6 °C of warming in the 20th century, the Czech politicians, or many other things. Oh yeah: I wanted to test how he pronounces my name, Luboš Motl or Lubos Motl. Or do I have to spell it Loo Bosch Maw-tuhl to get the desired result? No, I don't. It was pronounced very well even when the template was written in Czech.

If it works well enough, I will also add the option to the HaloScan fast comment threads, so that the spokesman will also articulate the opinions of Rae Ann, Gene Day, and yourself. We report, you decide.

And that's the memo.

P.S.: I learned about Odiogo while browsing the information about Mathematica 7. But later I learned that Cynthia was recommending me the gadget already in March 2008.

Snow returns to Pilsen

So far the temperature is around 0 °C so it melts rapidly. But that should change during the following days. For Tuesday, the temperature is forecast to go to -12 °C. Brrr.

Do you have deja vu? Yes, see 2007.

Barack Obama and climate change

Few challenges facing America — and the world — are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.

Well, indeed. Quite a few challenges are more urgent than climate change: pretty much all of them. The science is, by definition, never beyond dispute. But it is true that some facts are established pretty well. They just seem to disagree with Mr Obama's statements.

For example, the sea levels continue to be rising by 2-3 millimeters a year, about 10 times slower than how they were (naturally) rising between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago. Coastlines are generally not shrinking and those that are changing are more affected by geological processes, erosion, and by the local human activity than by the climate.

We haven't seen record droughts. The famines generally seem to belong to the history as the national economies grow stronger. The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season was 1.5 times stronger than the 2006 and 2007 seasons but it was still 1.5 times weaker than the 2005 season. Sometimes things go up, sometimes they go down. There seem to be no statistically significant trends in the hurricane activity. Even theoretically, it is very unclear what the sign of such a hypothetical trend should be.

Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.

Climate change cannot continue to do something if it hasn't yet started to do it. The dependence of countries on foreign oil is a function of objective circumstances, especially their own reserves relatively to other countries' reserves.

These geographical facts are usually pretty much constant as a function of time, so they cannot contribute to any weakening or strengthening of economies. The economies and trade patterns adapt to whatever external conditions they face. Moreover, as a commenter points out, the dependence is always mutual.

The dependence of a country on other countries may pose a threat to its security and independence but this threat is never infinite and a sensible politician should never try to pay an infinite price for changing the situation. Incidentally, the oil price dropped below $50 today, near 1/3 of the peak price from July 2008. Chances are for a drop towards $30. These are the developments about oil that actually matter.

I know many of you are working to confront this challenge. In particular, I want to commend Governor Sebelius, Governor Doyle, Governor Crist, Governor Blagojevich and your host, Governor Schwarzenegger – all of you have shown true leadership in the fight to combat global warming. And we’ve also seen a number of businesses doing their part by investing in clean energy technologies.

Indeed, many kinds of people and institutions are deeply immersed in this rubbish. I want to commend Václav Klaus, James Inhofe - who was reelected into his office, and others.

But too often, Washington has failed to show the same kind of leadership. That will change when I take office. My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process.

America should be ready to a new, somewhat unprecedented global situation in which it will stand on the political left side from the rest of the world and no one will be interested in its extreme policies. In the Asia-Pacific region and Europe, the support for all kinds of climate regulation is evaporating rapidly these days.

Germany is pretty much joining Italy and the Eastern Europe in rejecting any specific post-Kyoto regulations and other regions seem to follow a similar evolution. The Czech prime minister - who will probably take over the EU since January 2009 - announced today that he will reject proposals that would increase energy prices. He also opposes a "brutal" introduction of carbon indulgence markets that would be useless because other countries will ignore it.

That will start with a federal cap and trade system. We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050.

God bless America. If new economically viable alternatives emerge, there won't be any need to dictate such reductions. On the other hand, if they won't, such regulations will mean a decrease of the GDP that will be qualitatively comparable to those 80% because under normal circumstances, the inflation-adjusted GDP growth and the CO2 emission growth don't differ by more than 1-2% a year.

Further, we will invest $15 billion each year to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future. We will invest in solar power, wind power, and next generation biofuels. We will tap nuclear power, while making sure it’s safe. And we will develop clean coal technologies.

"Next generation biofuels" is a bizarre term that reflects a wishful thinking rather than existing and usable new technologies. Solar and wind power are ludicrous fads. By the way, the production of solar panels causes a huge amount of the greenhouse effect (via NF3 used for cleaning).

"Making sure that nuclear energy is safe" is just a different way of saying that President Obama might be open to the sentiments of anti-nuclear critics who may bury any conceivable future nuclear development of the U.S. at the time when nuclear energy is the only known, economically viable alternative to the fossil fuels.

This investment will not only help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, making the United States more secure. And it will not only help us bring about a clean energy future, saving our planet. It will also help us transform our industries and steer our country out of this economic crisis by generating five million new green jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.

Well, they can be surely paid from the increasing U.S. debt if the country decides to pay millions of parasites who pretend to be doing useful work. But such a hot air economy will collapse soon or later.

The green jobs clearly don't bring any profit to the citizens that would make them voluntarily pay trillions of dollars. The only way how these millions of jobs can exist is that the people will be forced to pay them, either directly (for useless expensive "services" replacing the good old - but banned - energy sector) or indirectly by ballooning green budgets.

But the truth is, the United States cannot meet this challenge alone. Solving this problem will require all of us working together. I understand that your meeting is being attended by government officials from over a dozen countries, including the UK, Canada and Mexico, Brazil and Chile, Poland and Australia, India and Indonesia. And I look forward to working with all nations to meet this challenge in the coming years.

Don't expect any smooth sailing. The inclusion of Poland that critically depends on coal and that simply won't give it up is very entertaining but the other nations will oppose similar dictates, too, as soon as they realize that the projects to regulate the economies are becoming real rather than abstract nonsense used to bash America - which is what they have been so far.

Let me also say a special word to the delegates from around the world who will gather at Poland next month: your work is vital to the planet. While I won’t be President at the time of your meeting and while the United States has only one President at a time, I’ve asked Members of Congress who are attending the conference as observers to report back to me on what they learn there.

I am still not sure whether I will attend this conference in Poland, as some of the plans envisioned, because I should probably start to prepare a powerful talk in the case of Yes. ;-)

And once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change.

You should primarily check e.g. that the intelligence services will protect your life against the people in the Middle East who think that you are a Muslim traitor who has to be executed according to the rules of Islam. For ordinary infidels, the execution is optional. ;-) Also, the transition period is an ideal time for a possible new terrorist attack. See Al Qaeda's al-Zawahiri's brand new 10-minute speech dedicated to Obama's victory.

Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences, too serious.

Well, delay and "denial" are not only options but they're the preferred ones, at least in democratic Europe.

Stopping climate change won’t be easy. It won’t happen overnight. But I promise you this: When I am President, any governor who’s willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that’s willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that’s willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America. Thank you.

Stopping climate change will be hard, indeed. You may practice - try to first stop the Earth's rotation. It's very nice to promise special advantages to companies who are going to support your ideology and politics - this approach to the state-corporation relations is usually called corruption - but be ready that not everyone will be happy to join this movement, and even for those who will join, you will not have enough resources to show all these trucklers how good an ally you are because America, its economy, and its comparative advantages are finite.

Tommaso Dorigo: luminosity class is tough!

The discussions with people whose knowledge about physics follows the weaker part of the physics blogosphere but whose self-confidence would suggest that they are Newittons - hybrids of Newton and Witten - often reaches comical proportions.

That was the case of a recent debate with Tommaso Dorigo about luminosity, too. As we mentioned, Tommaso wanted Matt Strassler to admit that experimenters like Dorigo were infallible.

But in the middle of bizarre sociological Dorigo's prayers to the new deity, there was one cute technical comment. For no good reason, Tommaso decided that Matt Strassler's interpretation of the CDF estimate of the cross section for the ghost events - namely 75 pb (picobarns) on page 3 of Matt's paper - is incorrect by a factor of three or so. I suspect that Dorigo just invented this absurd "correction" for the sake of it, in order to undermine Matt's authority a little bit, believing that no one would notice that his "correction" is wrong.

Matt obtained the cross section of the "new", ghost events in the following simple way:

153,895 / (2100/pb) = 73.28 pb

Tommaso Dorigo proposes a different calculation,

153,895 / (742/pb) = 207.4 pb

although he is never quite able to complete this division and announce his - ludicrously high - result. Given the fact that e.g. Giromini et al. predict the cross section to be 50 pb or 35 pb on page 4 for various masses of the Higgs, in a paper that claims to match the data, Dorigo could perhaps find a reason to figure out that 207.4 pb could be too high. But he seems to have no idea about the difference between 75 pb and 200 pb.

Dorigo offers no technical arguments to support his bizarre figures. Instead, he mysteriously tells us that he has talked to the "main author of the CDF study". Well, maybe he should subtly inform her that she is dumb as a door knob, too, if she exists. ;-) On the other hand, Matt includes a very detailed and crystal clear explanation of the way how the cross section - and especially the number of events - was calculated.

Fine: so 742/pb or 2,100/pb?

Of course, the total integrated luminosity, 2,100/pb (two thousand and one hundred inverse picobarns) must be used as the denominator, as Matt Strassler explains in detail, and my task will be to explain this simple fact so that even people like Tommaso Dorigo will understand. It may be a bit like Brian Greene in the TV show, trying to explain Einstein's equations to his dog ;-), but let me try, anyway.

The luminosity is a quantity that determines how many times the initial state of two-particle collisions has been repeated in an experiment. It is expressed as the "number of colliding particle pairs per unit area and per unit time". The more particles you collide each second, the more collisions you will get. The more accurately you focus the beams, the smaller the area becomes and the higher chance of collisions you get. That explains various proportionality laws.

All the areas are usually expressed in barns: one barn is exactly 10^{-28} squared meters, roughly the cross section of a proton. The typical cross sections of new, interesting processes in particle physics are much smaller, e.g. several picobarns: one picobarn is 10^{-40} squared meters.

If you integrate the luminosity over time, you obtain the so-called "integrated luminosity". It is expressed as the "number of colliding particle pairs per unit area". The integrated luminosity has units of inverse area: note that the inverse seconds have disappeared. This quantity is a coefficient that you should multiply by a cross section "sigma" of a given process to predict the dimensionless number of actual events.

The Tevatron, the accelerator at Fermilab, has been colliding protons against antiprotons. So the "total integrated luminosity" refers to the flux of colliding proton-antiproton pairs.

Analogously, the cross sections that should be multiplied by this "total integrated luminosity" to get the number of events are cross sections calculated from proton-antiproton pairs as the initial states. Protons and antiprotons are pretty complicated beasts and the theoretical calculations with proton-antiproton initial states require a lot of dirty QCD technology - like the parton distribution functions. But that's what you have to do if you want to predict how many times the colliding protons and antiprotons produce e.g. a top-quark.

Now, there's no doubt that the total integrated luminosity (of proton-antiproton beams) used to suggest the "lepton jets" in the recent CDF paper is 2,100/pb: see e.g. the second sentence of the abstract. If you want to keep things simple, the right denominator has always been 2,100/pb and there is nothing to talk about. But still, you may ask: why the hell Tommaso Dorigo is talking about 742/pb? Isn't he supposed to know at least some basic things here?

Silicon vertex tracking

So let me explain what the number 742/pb means and why it's wrong to use it as the denominator in the calculation of the "ghost events" cross section. I have spent literally hours, trying to explain it to Tommaso. And I have mostly given up, much like Brian Greene did with his dog. It is probably not possible. But I am almost sure you will get it.

Most of the proton-antiproton collisions are boring. They produce a few jets - streams of strongly interacting particles arising from gluons or light quarks or antiquarks. They must also be correctly described by QCD, and they arguably are, but every sane person believes QCD, anyway. What is interesting and "uncertain" are some events in which heavy particles are almost universally produced in the collisions.

Now, what are the heavy particles that the Tevatron routinely produces? The top quark is the heaviest quark but it is too heavy: the Tevatron doesn't produce too many. The generic heavy particles produced by such colliders include the other heavy quarks, bottom and, to a lesser extent, charm. They are referred to as the "heavy flavors".

Can you select the events in which the bottom quarks were created? Yes, you can and you should. A few years ago, they built the silicon vertex tracker (SVT).

It is a small specialized "computer" that takes the data from the silicon vertex detector (SVXII) and the central outer tracker (COT). The gadget quickly reconstructs the tracks and if it finds sufficiently unambiguous evidence that the bottom quarks appeared in the collision area, right after the collision, it tells the system that the event was interesting - at least for the people who study B-physics (of bottom quarks), e.g. in the context of CP-violation (that requires three generations, including the third one with the bottom quark).

Now, only a subset of the events are picked by the strict SVT criteria: the jets in these events are said to be "b-tagged". The precise percentage depends on how strict criteria the SVT adopts: it is partly a matter of conventions. In reality, about 24.4% of the events that excite the dimuon triggers also pass the strict SVT filter: this percentage is referred to as the "efficiency" of the (heavy flavor) QCD events. The silicon vertex tracker may also choose the events "loosely"; in that case, the efficiency jumps to 88% or so. However, if you assume that there is no new physics, pretty much all events in which the dimuon trigger "clicks" should be caused by heavy flavors - essentially by the bottom-antibottom initial states.

In these most special 24.4% events, bottom-antibottom pairs "almost certainly" appear at the very beginning. So at the very beginning, it looks like you just collided bottom-antibottom pairs instead of proton-antiproton pairs. If you now interpret the Tevatron as a machine where you effectively collide bottom-antibottom pairs, it has a smaller luminosity because only a small portion of the proton-antiproton collisions included protons and antiprotons that were "ready to make heavy flavor collisions". Even though the remaining 75.6% dimuon events probably also contained bottom quarks, you discard the collisions as inconclusive.

You may define the corresponding fraction of all the events and normalize it in the same way as you would do with bottom-antibottom collisions. Assuming that the bottom quarks are there whenever the SVT says "Yes", the integrated luminosity of this subset is just 742/pb, not 2,100/pb. The collisions up to this day that have passed the intermediate, loose SVX filter, give you the integrated luminosity of 1,426/pb or so.

So is it OK for someone to write 742/pb in the denominator when he calculates the cross section of the "lepton jets" ghost events? The answer is, of course, No. It's because these "new" events are actually argued not to include bottom quarks as the initial states. For example, Giromino et al. claim that the Higgs is produced and subsequently decays to various h1, h2, and/or h3 pairs (and 16 tau's at the very end). Nima and Neal use various supersymmetric particles instead. So you can't normalize the initial states with the assumption that the bottom quarks are there in the initial states because they are not there.

If the "ghost events" show any new physics or new particles, they are of a very different type than the events okayed by the SVT tracker: let me emphasize that the "ghost events" are okayed by the dimuon triggers only, not by the SVT tracker.

The tight SVT efficiency is 24.4% for the heavy flavor QCD processes but it is close to 0.0% for the ghost events! In that case, it is a childish mistake to clump these two different sets together because the initial states are very different. There are no bottom-antibottom pairs in the initial states of these "ghost events" so you can't simplify the calculation by assuming that they have bottom-antibottom initial states. Instead, you must return to the collisions of protons and antiprotons, unconstrained by any SVX filters, to use the luminosity of proton-antiproton pairs, and to calculate the corresponding cross sections from proton-antiproton initial states.

The relevant integrated luminosity is 2,100/pb and because it is pretty high, the calculated cross sections will be deservedly low. Let me summarize the integrated luminosities:

• 2,100/pb: all, SVX-unfiltered events; a small part (743,006) were dimuon events; the number 153,895 or so ghost events among them was reconstructed
• 1,426/pb: the loosely SVX-filtered events; a small part (590,970) were dimuon events; the number 72,553 or so of ghost events among them was reconstructed
• 742/pb: the tightly SVX-filtered events; a small part (143,743) were dimuon events; none of them (0) was a ghost event but the detailed composition of the QCD events is known and important
  

Tables

There's one more simple, graphical way to see that the 153,895 events were (and had to be) chosen from the broader 2100/pb sample and not from the 742/pb sample and that the interpretation of the numbers in this list above is correct.

Open the CDF paper on page 16. The set of all dimuon events - 743,006 - is divided to the 589,111 QCD events and our 153,895 ghost events. In the second column of this Table II, you see that only 143,743 events passed the tight SVX filter, neither of which was a ghost event.

Now, if you switch to page 12 and look at Table I, you may add the entries to get 143,000+ and to see that exactly these tight SVX-positive events correspond to the (smaller) integrated luminosity of 742/pb, as the caption of Table I says. For another "written proof" that the 742/pb luminosity corresponds to tightly SVX-filtered collisions, and not all (unfiltered) collisions as Tommaso seems to think, see page 11/52 of Giromini's talk.

In other words, among the 742/pb events (those that passed the tight SVX filter), none of them was a ghost event. You must go to the larger set of all 2100/pb events - unconstrained by any SVX filters - to "see" any ghost events, and their actual number still remains questionable, as Matt argues.

Incidentally, if you only picked the loosely SVX-filtered events, you would get exactly 590,970 events (Table II), roughly 518,417 of which would be heavy flavor QCD events. The remaining 72,553 or so ghost events that passed the loose SVX filter would give you an estimated 72,553 / (1426/pb) = 51 pb cross section for the ghost events, less than 75 pb in the unconstrained ensemble: 1,426/pb is the estimated luminosity after the loose SVX filter. Once again, among the tightly SVX constrained events, your calculated cross section for the ghost events would be 0 pb because the tight SVX constraint doesn't allow the muons to get too far.

If you analyze how various numbers above were determined, you will find out that the number of all dimuon QCD events, 589,111, was actually not directly measured but calculated from the measured number of 143,743 tightly SVX-filtered events, by dividing the latter number by the 24.4% efficiency (by 0.244) that was determined otherwise.

Analogously, the approximately 153,895 ghost events are calculated as the difference of all exactly 743,006 events (which were actually seen) minus all the approximately 589,111 QCD events (whose number was calculated from the efficiency and from the number of tightly SVX-filtered events). However, both of these calculated numbers, 589,111 and 153,895, are subsets of the set of 743,006 events that correspond to the SVX-unconstrained sample whose integrated luminosity is 2100/pb. The sizes of the subsets of all the 743,006 events are calculated from the detailed knowledge of the tightly SVX-filtered events (by a method that Matt has explained, too) but these calculated events are not SVX-filtered themselves: only 143,743 (exactly) events were tightly SVX-filtered.

This key difference between "events actually belonging to an ensemble E742" and "events belonging to a larger ensemble E2100 whose number is not directly measured but rather calculated by looking at a smaller ensemble E742" is another point that has probably confused Tommaso Dorigo profoundly and hopelessly. At any rate, there were dozens of other ways for him to see that his conclusion was wrong. He wasn't able to realize either of them.

The moral of the story

So, a recommendation for Tommaso Dorigo: don't ever try to ignore comments of people like Matt Strassler and their understanding of physics and your papers. Thank me. You're welcome. ;-)

And yes, I think that you should be kind of mildly punished for deliberately directing the anonymous hostile people who read your blog against me in his "appetizer". It's not my fault that you have demonstrated your incompetence. You began these silly attacks of yours and you politely asked me to explain you how Matt calculated those 75 pb which you couldn't possibly get. So I did so. Is that a crime? But you collaborated on it!

Everyone who knows me knows that I love tigers and other animals to live in peace in the dens as well as the holes that you prefer, Tommaso. ;-)

Update

Other members of CDF have sent me the information that indicates that they really meant that the cross section of the new events was above 200 pb i.e. 153,895 ghost events all came from 742/pb. Because the main discussion with Tommaso was about the proposition that they meant, not about the real cross section and not about the natural interpretation of the paper, I gave Tommaso the apology he wanted.

Such a statement of CDF about unexplained events is 3 times more unusual than the already-unusual previous statement and I feel that the paper was written in a confusing way deliberately so that the full craziness of the main statement remains fuzzy not only for the theorists who read about 1/2 of the paper but even for some CDF members.

Mikhail Lomonosov: a birthday

Mikhail Lomonosov was born to a fisherman at an Arctic Russian island on November 19th, 1711, i.e. 297 years ago (according to the new calendar).

On the picture, he may look like a French nobleman but that's how peasants looked like in the Russian Empire - after some successful life. The people who despise the Russian Empire are surely deluded. Lomonosov was a remarkable poet and polymath. He died in 1765.

A curious kid

Mikhail's thirst for knowledge was unlimited so he decided to walk to Moscow: notice that Russia is a pretty big country. He lived from 3 kopecks a day - something like 3 U.S. cents a day - but his progress was stunning. In 5 years, he completed a 12-year course and he was the best guy in his class.

After a year in Kiev, he returned to Moscow and then he went to Saint Petersburg. Those guys sent him to Germany. He learned French and German and imitated German poets, establishing the modern Russian literary language along the way. The Russian scholarship was not enough to live in Germany well so - together with his new wife - he returned to Russia.

After having been a chemistry professor and the university president in Petersburg, he founded the State University in Moscow (together with Ivan Shuvalov, his patron). These days, it is the largest Russian university and it is named after him (much like the Lomonosov Ridge in the Arctic Ocean).

He also revived the art of mosaics. The Battle of Poltava (in 1709, where Peter I humiliated Sweden) on the left side is his most sophisticated piece. In letters to Leonhard Euler, he explained that he was led to this art by chemical experiments with minerals. ;-)

Now, you shouldn't doubt that he also wrote The History of Russia, The Russian Grammar, established his own style of poems, and attempted to write an epic about Peter the Great. But let us quickly switch to another discipline that showed his remarkable versatility:

Science

As a physicist, he made some experiments leading him to the importance of the mass conservation law. I can't quite believe that it was such a new insight at that time but Euler had to read about this stuff all the time. ;-)

Related experiments convinced him that the commonly accepted phlogiston theory - presenting heat as a material - was rubbish. The mass of the metals didn't change and Lomonosov thus concluded that "Robert Boyle was deluded". ;-) Of course, when you want to be really accurate, the heat has a nonzero mass, m=E/c^2, but it was clearly too small to be measured by him.

So Lomonosov in fact did consider heat to be a form of motion. These changes of the paradigm were important for the later formulation of the kinetic theory of gases and statistical physics in general. The role of people like Lomonosov is often underestimated. He was convinced that light was made out of waves, too. His intuition (or just good luck?) that led him to choose the "better" theories of pretty much everything looks remarkable to me.

His Northern origin helped him to become the first person to see frozen mercury (around -40 degrees: it doesn't matter whether you like Celsius or Fahrenheit degrees in this case).

As far as the planets go, you might think that Mercury has made him famous, too. You would be slightly wrong but you would be close to the truth: Lomonosov was the first man to argue that Venus had an atmosphere. He believed in some kind of evolution which allowed him to demonstrate the organic origin of soil, peat, coal, petroleum, and amber. He published a catalog of 3,000 minerals and explained the formation of icebergs.

Geology

He was an extraordinary geographer (and a geologist!), too. Lomonosov theoretically predicted the existence of Antarctica, by looking at the size and features of the Southern icebergs. He was right once again. He improved the methods of navigation and even organized a 1764 expedition to find the Northeast Passage (from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, via the Russian North).

The most impressive achievement seems to be his incomplete theory of continental drift: he mentioned the moving continents in his book, "On Earth's Layers". He was very close to this theory 200 years before it was accepted. Even though Lomonosov didn't like to paint himself as an exceptionally deep and mysterious philosopher, as a polymath, he was probably more often right about things than e.g. Gottfried Leibniz. Nevertheless, his fame in the Western world remained infinitesimal and it is infinitesimal even today.

Parallel Universes and science on TV

The History Channel has aired

Parallel Universes

and one of the stars of the show, Clifford Johnson, seems to be unhappy about the outcome.

The idea of the program is that the newest results in science indicate that our Universe is probably much larger than we thought and it can contain many regions that are not smoothly connected to ours but that are qualitatively similar, the parallel universes. And the filmmakers thought it was a great theme for a TV program. And in fact, so do I. But...

What do these parallel universes mean?

Let me begin with the term "parallel universes". It is a term that seems to be exciting for a certain large group of the laymen (and filmmakers) although it creates almost no excitement among most professional physicists. The phrase has been given at least three vastly different meanings:

1. different histories that could occur in quantum mechanics interpreted with the many-worlds interpretation
   
2. different stringy vacua that may or may not be connected with ours by bubble nucleation within eternal inflation
3. different branes that may be parallel to our, Standard Model brane in our world if it is a braneworld

Again, professionals would never confuse these three concepts but the laymen and filmmakers often do - because what they really understand about these concepts are just the two words, "parallel universes". With this poor resolution of their wavelets, the very different concepts above may coincide.

However, the "parallel universes" in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics do not change any observation we could ever do, at least in principle. In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there exists a whole tree of alternative worlds where the past events took place with different outcomes. Our "branch" of the tree was chosen randomly. But we can't have any contact with the other branches where the history differs. For example, in many "alternative universes", Adolf Hitler may have won the war.

But we will never see these other worlds because the history of our world is something that can never be rewritten again. These different worlds have separated from ours, they will never reunite, and if you wish, you may also decide to believe that the other worlds don't exist (and choose e.g. the Consistent History approach, a fully satisfactory post-Copenhagen interpretation).

Adopting the many-worlds interpretation can't change the morality of rational people, either. While there may exist other worlds where you are a thief, mass murderer, global warming alarmist, or even an aggressive crackpot ;-) and you might think that these other worlds diminish the importance of your decisions, the reality is different. In this world, you will only be judged for the things you have done in this world, not in the others, so the existence of other worlds is inconsequential once again.

Also, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was first coined half a century ago. That's surely not a topic that should be discussed as cutting-edge science.

Instead, this program primarily focused on the other two types of "parallel universes" - those from the stringy landscape and the possible parallel branes in our world. In principle, there may exist a causal contact between our world and these "parallel worlds" if the latter exist. But the nature of this contact is very different in both cases. In the case of the different vacua of the string landscape, they might exist within bubbles that emerge somewhere in our Universe and that will expand (or bubbles in a grandson or great grandson universe etc.) or, on the contrary, our Universe might have arisen from a bubble in another one. The causal relationship is very distant and asymmetric.

On the other hand, if there are parallel branes inside our braneworld, they are just a tiny fraction of a millimeter away from us (in the direction of a new coordinate of space). In principle, we can interact with them, at least gravitationally. We could send and receive gravitational waves - and perhaps other signals - to/from this additional brane if it existed and hosted life.

Clifford Johnson says that he has never heard about "level N parallel universes" in the scientific context, where N is an integer. Well, it's time to read one of Max Tegmark's papers, Clifford. ;-)

Are these things exciting?

Now, are these scenarios more likely than they were two decades ago? I think that the answer is clearly Yes. Are they guaranteed to be true? In the case of parallel branes in our world, the answer is No, we don't know how many parallel branes (and hidden gauge groups) there are in our compactification if any; in the case of other compactifications of string theory, the answer is Probably yes, we are almost certain that our type of "vacuum" is not the only vacuum-like solution to the fundamental equations of Nature. Even if you wanted to be extremely speculative and assume that all of string theory is wrong, more general insights have made it unlikely that our vacuum is a completely unique solution to some equations.

But we're not really sure about the existence of any "evolution links" between these other compactifications and our world; we're not sure whether the eternal inflation and other "nonminimal cosmologies" are physically relevant. So we don't know whether the multitude of compactifications has some implications that can influence the lives of the ordinary and even less ordinary people.

But are these notions exciting? Well, in science they are acceptable only if they are compatible with the experiments that have already been done. For example, one easy experiment implies that there are no dinosaurs in your apartment. All theories that would imply that there are easily visible dinosaurs over there are ruled out. There is still room for new phenomena but they are pretty subtle and it's damn hard to discover them. So if someone only gets excited by the dinosaurs in her bedroom or something else of the sort, she will be disappointed!

Now, are the typical viewers of the History Channel excited about the prospect of having an unusual signature at the LHC? What about a newly created particle that decays into many smaller particles isotropically, with apparently thermal distribution? Well, I think that the answer is obviously No, she is not excited. She doesn't even recognize that we have just produced a mini black hole. Even if she were told so, she has no idea whether it should be surprising or not.

Why isn't she excited? Because she doesn't know the things that you need to know to have sensible expectations about these relatively abstract experiments. She's been doing other things in her life. You only absorb the necessary background if you study these and related things at the technical level for years. By definition, the History Channel is not focusing at this expert audience. If it were, it would be the arXiv.TV station, not the History Channel.

Does it mean that non-experts shouldn't be shown any science? I think that the answer is a resounding No. Science on TV is important because it inspires newer generations and because it removes some kind of "unhealthy mystery" from the scientists. People should know that scientists do things that may be fun for many other people and they should know that these mysterious scientists who seem to be decoupled from the "ordinary world" are not conspiring to secretly destroy the world all the time. ;-) However, the TV programs are not focusing on the expert audiences so they have different (lower) technical standards and different (more entertainment-industry-like) criteria.

Still, I think that a good filmmaker of scientific programs should try to understand the topics and should try to be accurate. The accuracy will never be the only benchmark of his or her work but it will be one of them. The accuracy of technical statements that would turn a regular viewer off is almost likely to be sacrificed, to one extent or another. The Big Bang Theory at CBS is an exception: Sheldon Cooper's statements are remarkably accurate and reflect how a very bright and well-informed physicist would genuinely react to various things. The adviser is doing a superb job.

The price that you pay for this accuracy in TBBT is that the audiences can't quite identify themselves with Sheldon. They still (usually) like him but they know that "he's somewhere else" and they are ready to ignore the details of what he says. This decoupling is a price for the accuracy: the experts and the laymen are at a different frequency, indeed, and any TV show that shows them to be at the same frequency is guaranteed to be inaccurate about the science.

By the way, I want to mention a few examples of the better-than expected accuracy of TBBT. For example, Penny said something about "waiting for light years, as you - the physicists - would say". In a generic sitcom that mentions science, the actual "scientists" would think just like Penny does. A "light year" sounds scientific so it should clearly be used by scientists and others who want to sound as scientists.

But in TBBT, Sheldon explains very aptly that a physicist would actually never use the phrase because a "light year" is a unit of distance, not time, and gives a few more examples of a similar confusion.

He also defines astrology very accurately to make it clear why it is a mass delusion and debunks several additional science-loaded myths. Leslie Winkle realistically mentions some would-be predictions (e.g. modifications of dispersion relations) that some of her charlatan colleagues believe to follow from loop quantum gravity. And so on. These technically accurate sentences may only have been accurate because it is OK if the viewers don't quite understand - it's part of their purpose, after all. ;-) These sentences are produced by geeks who are not supposed to be understood.

However, there exists a different kind of statements and messages that the viewers are surely capable to understand and that should be communicated accurately, even in generic TV programs about science: the sociological statements.

The audiences should get a fair picture about the IQ of the people who work on various topics, the degree of respect they enjoy from their colleagues, the amount of time needed to develop and/or learn a scientific theory, and the confidence of various scientists in various basic, comprehensible statements. This is not hard and a distorted picture of these comprehensible points deserves to be called a dishonesty.

What I want to say is that a scientist should probably be tolerant if a TV program presents a technical idea inaccurately or if it makes it more "sexy" than the scientists actually think it is. Maybe it's because the scientist was narrow-minded, after all. Why didn't she think about a parallel world with dinosaurs in her bedroom? Maybe she should have! :-) And most of the simplification is because the normal viewers could simply not swallow the technical stuff in its precise form.

But scientists should expect and demand the accuracy in the filmmakers' description of the sociology of their fields: who believes whom and how much. These points don't have to be quite perfect but they should simply not be entirely wrong.

For example, it would be bad if a program created the impression that all top physicists are thrilled by Max Tegmark's level IV parallel universes. ;-) It would be bad because it is untrue - look at the citation counts - and moreover, even ordinary people are capable to understand that it is untrue. At least, Max Tegmark is a very serious scientist who also likes to write speculative stuff.

There also exist scientists who have never published any valuable stuff and who only create their name by publishing meaningless speculations directed at the laymen, not the peers - and I am talking not only about Lee Smolin - and it would be even worse if a filmmaker were presenting these things as the pillars of contemporary science. That would be as bad as presenting a "consensus" about a man-made climate catastrophe.

But be ready: if you were never imagining a dinosaur living in a parallel universe, it may have been due to your lack of imagination and the filmmaker is likely to be better in this respect, especially because he's been trained and selected to attract wide audiences and many people - and not only ordinary people - are more likely to be thrilled by visually attractive stuff! In fact, I often like visually intriguing stuff, too. It's a different stuff than scientific accuracy but it is another thing that I expect from TV shows that are worth watching.

And that's the memo.

Not Even Wrong and BRST

But let me mention another kind of distortion of science that I find absolutely stunning. Peter Woit, a critic of physics, decided to write a few blog posts trying to (dishonestly) suggest that he has an idea about the contemporary physics research. For no good reason, he chose the BRST quantization, a "modern" technical tool (from the 1970s) to analyze theories with gauge symmetries.

Now, this is a basic stuff that a normal graduate student usually learns when she is first introduced to gauge theories - surely not something that you can publish research papers about. But it is even more funny to look how Peter Woit divided this stuff into parts. In the first part, he talks about the action of symmetries on linear spaces - the material that, I am pretty sure, most string theorists have known since the high school.

Even more interesting is the second part because he effectively copies the section 3.2.1 of "Superstring Theory", a classic 1987 book by Green, Schwarz, and Witten. What Woit says about the BRST issues is more or less correct - it's what Green, Schwarz, and Witten have also written, after all. There are some strange delicate bugs - for example, a real physicist knows that the physically interesting ghost number is often a number different from zero - but most of his comments are OK. Now, isn't it ironic for a vitriolic, Al-Qaeda-style critic of string theory to choose a section of a string theory textbook as a source of explanations of a topic that he views important?

Now, what he is confused by is the philosophy and the very goal of the BRST machinery. The BRST machinery is not really "new physics". It is just a mathematical tool to apply to "old physics" and to determine the right Jacobians whenever gauge symmetries are gauge-fixed, to determine which states are physical, which states are not, and why the unphysical states do not cause any problems. You can use other (less convenient methods) to find the same results - and only the physical results about the physical states are physical (and measurable)! ;-)

Everything else about one's approach to a physical theory - whether we choose a gauge symmetry at all, whether we gauge-fix it now or then, how we gauge-fix it, whether we extend the gauge symmetry to a BRST symmetry, whether we use path integrals or the operator approach etc. - is just a question about our strategy to get the final results (such as the cross sections). We don't construct "new theories" in this way.

And once you learn the definition of the BRST cohomology, you are still light years (or at least years) away from being able to decide about the validity of string theory. These are just entirely different levels of knowledge.

The third and fourth part of Woit's "lectures" are purely mathematical and focus on things like exact sequences. That's perfectly fine but in combination with a grumpy guy who is often quoted as a critic of the abstract mathematical character of string theory that is claimed to be detached from experiments, the focus on the Chevalley-Eilenberg complexes sounds a little bit too ironic, doesn't it? What is the doable experiment that decides whether these complex are relevant for the world around us? Isn't it not even wrong blah blah blah? But none of his anonymous readers - or the journalistic garbage that has promoted the jerk in the media two years ago - cares because all of them are equipped with hypocrisy of an unprecedented degree.

Experimental chauvinism

One more controversy is going to be mentioned here. Matt Strassler published his first analysis of the recent CDF dimuon events paper,

Flesh and blood, or merely ghosts?

As the title indicates, Matt is skeptical about ambitious interpretations of the paper in terms of brand new physics.

Tommaso Dorigo decided to criticize Matt's paper. Tommaso thinks that it was politically incorrect for Matt to

• notice that only a subset of the CDF collaboration signed the paper
• consider the paper to be too short given the importance of the suggested interpretation
• be disappointed that certain extra checks were not performed and certain extra graphs were not included
• be disappointed with some logically questionable interpretations of other graphs.

Tommaso also seems to think that the experimenters themselves are the only ones who have the right to offer an opinion on the reliability of certain results. Recently, I agreed with Tommaso that the papers should be published if they are able to survive a fixed amount of scrutiny, regardless of the "sign" of the papers i.e. whether or not they are surprising for someone.

But I incorrectly thought that the agreement was due to Tommaso's reasonable opinions. In fact, the agreement was a pure coincidence and the reason behind Tommaso's opinions was the dumbest kind of experimental chauvinism you could think of. Tommaso is clearly not alone: other experimenters physically forced Matt to modify some formulations in his paper although - fortunately - the content of the paper hasn't yet been changed.

Now, let me tell you about the actual situation here.

Matt is an exceptional theorist as far as the analysis of raw collider data goes. As a winner of the LHC Olympics, he is probably better in these things than the union of the 370 worst CDF members and at least comparable to the union of the 370 best CDF members. He may lack some particular types of experience but on the other hand, he is clearly more intelligent than virtually all members of the CDF collaboration and the only reason why he didn't become an experimental particle physicist was that he was able to do something more difficult, too.

Which 370 members signed the paper may therefore be a relevant piece of information for a person less qualified than Matt who is deciding whether Matt should be trusted. Unfortunately, the subset is "unknown". ;-)

According to the CDF internal policies, a paper that gets a sufficient number of supporters is published as a paper of the whole CDF collaboration that claims "consensus" in this way. Well, it's questionable whether it is such a good idea to hide who agreed and who disagreed with something but it's their policy. On the other hand, it's just policy, not the truth. And it is only their policy, not an international law.

Theorists like Matt are in no way constrained by similar policies and their task is different from preserving someone's little secrets and taboos and from pretending that they don't know certain things. The theorists' task is to combine all the available information into the most convincing - and therefore hopefully correct - theoretical explanation of the observations.

If an imperfection of the experimenters seems to be a likely explanation - and it is surely a rather important candidate in this case where the alternatives involve a very shocking new type of physics - the theorist must also make reasonable guesses about the likelihood that the experimenters did a certain imperfect step. To make this guess, Matt correctly used all the available information - including the limited number of supporters of the paper - and, as an honest theorist, he also openly revealed all the arguments that have influenced his decisions. The counting of the people was just one of the minor ones.

Tommaso seems to think that it should be a heresy to think that the experimenters are fallible. To make things even more ludicrous, he offers us this nice quote by Freeman Dyson:

The professional duty of a scientist confronted with a new and exciting theory (or data) is to try to prove it wrong. That is the way science works. This is the way science stay honest. Criticism is absolutely necessary to make room for better understanding.

And what is Tommaso's interpretation? Freeman Dyson surely meant that the criticism is only acceptable if it is not directed against the "infallible" Tommaso Dorigo and his friends, Tommaso argues: the criticism must be "constructive". Well, that's an amusing interpretation, especially if Tommaso's idiotic and intimidating attack against Matt's paper is probably supposed to be constructive in this sense. ;-)

Sorry, Tommaso, but Freeman Dyson surely meant what he said: even experimenters are fallible. And some of them are not only fallible but they are as dumb as a door knob if not as Tommaso himself! The history of science is flooded by all kinds of "renowned" experimenters who have proved that relativity was wrong, the Feynman - Gell-Mann V-A theory of weak interactions was wrong, and dozens of other bizarre conclusions.

Whether or not the subgroup of the CDF collaboration discovered something new or important or whether they have just showed their imperfect abilities to manipulate with the detectors and the data remains to be seen. Attempts of hundreds of average experimenters to bully a theorist are surely not helpful in revealing the truth.

The Lizard-Spock Expansion

Watch the newest episode of The Big Bang Theory, 2x08, at

Megavideo (click)

AGW: Jack Schmitt quits The Planetary Society

Harrison Schmitt, an award-winning astronaut and a geologist, has resigned from The Planetary Society.

Letter

He explains that the return to the Moon - where he has been (he speaks about this issue in this lecture since 7:00) - is the most natural path to Mars (and perhaps other bodies). But he also criticizes the TPS statement accelerating research into global climate change through more comprehensive Earth observations:

As a geologist, I love Earth observations. But, it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a "consensus" that humans are causing global warming in when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. "Consensus", as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the "global warming scare" is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society's activities.

Global warming causes more sex - and hundreds of other things: a film version of this list.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

Lise Meitner: 130th birthday

Lise Meitner was born on November 17th, 1878, to a family of a Jewish lawyer in Vienna. She should have shared the 1944 Chemistry Nobel Prize for nuclear fission with Otto Hahn. Yes, it was the last chemistry prize that was received for nuclear physics; later, they realized that it was physics. ;-)

We will discuss both of the problems with the 1944 prize later.

According to many documents, she was born on November 7th. But the real date was probably one from the Jewish archives, November 17th. Elise Meitner had 2 older and 5 younger siblings. She has changed her name to "Lise" because Elise Meitner is not a famous name! :-)

With the money from her parents, she could attend private higher education which she completed in 1901. In 1905, she received a PhD degree from University of Vienna. Her thesis was about the thermal conductivity of non-uniform bodies. More importantly, her adviser was Ludwig Boltzmann, the "last classical physicist".

With a new PhD, she decided not to work at a gas lamp factory and went to Berlin instead. The "first quantum physicist", Max Planck, was annoyed by women in the classroom but allowed Lise to become his student. She quickly started to work with Otto Hahn, discovering new isotopes. At that time, this research was considered to be abstract - just a tool to get a Nobel prize.

In 1909, she wrote two papers on beta-radiation. In 1912, Hahn and Meitner moved to the new Emperor Wilhelm Institute (KWI) near Berlin.

Lise got an offer to work in Prague which was finally a sufficient stimulation for KWI to give her a permanent job - her first paid one, in fact. In the WW I, she served as a nurse specializing in X-ray equipment. She felt bad to return to research because so many people were suffering but she did return. She discovered the Auger effect in 1923. It's named after Pierre Auger who independently (?) re-discovered it in 1925. Since the 1930s, she and Hahn focused on trans-uranium elements. It was still considered to be abstract research, even by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ;-)

After 1933, she decided to ignore the Führer and hide herself in lots of work. Later, she was sorry about that decision. However, in 1938, the situation became desperate. Otto Hahn - who continued to work in Germany, collaborating with the Nazis - gave Lise a diamond ring from his mother so that she could bribe the border guards before entering Holland. She didn't need it. Otherwise, she only had 10 marks in her wallet.

She went to work to Stockholm, Sweden, showing that Manne Siegbahn who chaired the lab wasn't the "sexist discriminator" from his caricatures. She stayed in touch with Hahn who did many important experiments at that time but she couldn't publish, because of her illegal emigration. She was the first person able to use the nuclear droplet model to explain fission and argued that the electrostatic repulsion made trans-uranium elements unstable.

She was also the first person to understand that E=mc^2 explained the huge energy released in nuclear reactions. The fact that Otto Hahn got a chemistry Nobel prize wasn't just a classification idiosyncracy: Hahn actually believed that chemistry was behind the reactions. He had no explanation for his observations. Without Meitner, Hahn's work was alchemy, not serious physics.

Meitner was also the first person to say that nuclear chain reactions may lead to huge explosions. She refused to work in Los Alamos. Einstein called Meitner "our Marie Curie". After the war, Meitner participated in some blame games about Nazism and Heisenberg has heard some justified criticism from her, too. She became a Swedish citizen in 1949 but moved to England in 1960. She died in Cambridge right before her 90th birthday.

Eugene Wigner

We celebrate one more Jewish nuclear birthday today. Eugene Wigner was born 106 years ago to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest. When he was 11, he contracted tuberculosis. At least his parents believed so. In the Austrian mountains he was getting cured and, equally importantly, began to do maths. When he was 14, a famous teacher in Budapest (László Rátz) made him really excited about mathematics.

In 1919, Bela Kun and his fu*king communist comrades established the Hungarian Soviet Republic for half a year. Wigner's family moved to Austria to escape this left-wing mess. This particular communist republic was governed by people who were both commies and Jews. Wigner's family was so upset that they converted to Lutheranism. ;-)

Since 1921, Wigner studied in Berlin where he attended talks by Planck, Laue, Heisenberg, Pauli, Einstein, and others. He befriended Leó Szilárd, worked for David Hilbert, and did other things. Since the late 1920s, Wigner was researching symmetries in quantum mechanics in which he became the world's #1 or #2. The other guy in the "Gruppenfest" was Hermann Weyl.

Wigner realized that symmetries are associated with unitary (or antiunitary) transformations - Wigner's theorem - which is why he studied them in detail.

So he's largely responsible for the 3j-symbols, 6j-symbols, Wigner-Eckart theorem, Jordan-Wigner transformation (between spin chains and fermionic creation operators) but also for the law of parity conservation. In topics that are not directly linked to symmetries, he found the semicircle distribution, the quasi-probability distribution on the phase space and its modifications (also used in the Gabor transform), the Wigner crystal, Wigner (discomposition) effect, Wigner-Seitz cell and Wigner-Seitz radius, relativistic Breit-Wigner distribution, and Wigner-d'Espagnat inequality - a normal mathematical result that was popularized in the context of Bell's inequalities etc., among other things.

Many results of Wigner's students were probably initiated in Wigner's modest mind, too. That may include Bardeen, Weisskopf, Moshinsky, Shimony, Jaynes, and Seitz - the global warming skeptic and condensed matter hero who was mentioned above and who died in 2008.

Since 1930, he worked at Princeton. In 1936, they didn't rehire him so he went to Madison where he met his first wife who died in 1937, devastating him. In 1939 and 1940, Wigner, a self-described pacifist, was important in promoting the Manhattan Project. After some annoying politically-experimental experience in the Clinton Lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he returned to Princeton.

As an older guy, he focused on philosophy, including the meaning of life. In his "Wigner's friend" thought experiment - a counterpart of Schrödinger's cat - he showed that he believed that consciousness played a key role in the process of a measurement.

Fuzzballs: a modern review

In July, we discussed a paper by de Boer et al. about Samir Mathur's fuzzball proposal, an attempt to revise our understanding about the black hole interiors and the origin of black hole entropy in terms of many horizon-free configurations.

As a reader has pointed out, de Boer et al. just published a new, 79-page review of the fuzzball science:

Black holes as effective geometries

I am grateful to Mr Phantom for the tip because last week, I missed the preprint because when the paper was released, I was just reinstalling the OS on my desktop PC which is usually not a pleasant story. The message is that when you repeatedly restart your PC because a program badly freezes, you should be careful about the consistency of your hard disk: use CHKDSK.

(It seems to work flawlessly now, at least for a week.)

The work by LLM about the bubbling AdS space is presented as one of the simplest examples of the fuzzball approach - which is an interpretation that is clearly true but already slightly nontrivial. They also review various stringy situations in AdS5 x S5, AdS3 x S3 x T4, and AdS3 x S2 x CY and discuss the known things about the parametrization of the black hole microstates: they only talk about black holes that preserve a lot of supersymmetry. The analogous story in the non-supersymmetric case is likely to be much more complicated.

Besides their discussion of the construction of the horizon-free solutions associated with the black hole microstates, they also include a lot of qualitative comments about the framework. Let me organize the answers to some FAQ starting from the most obviously true ones:

Black holes allow both mixed states and pure states, much like all quantum systems

If you ask whether black holes are pure states or mixed states, the answer copies the answer in all other known quantum systems: black holes can be both, of course. In principle, you can imagine that the exact microstate of a black hole is known and you describe it as a pure state. In reality, the available probes prevent you from knowing everything about the object, so the black hole is represented as a mixed state (e.g. a thermal state). Mixed states (density matrices) are just a technical tool to deal with a situation in which the information about the system is incomplete.

The Hilbert space is a quantization of the phase space

Now, the smooth geometries (and perhaps geometries with some extra configuration of additional stringy stuff) are not "identical" to the black hole microstates (vectors in the Hilbert space). These solutions are points in the phase space (or "a" phase space) and this phase space should be quantized, just like in all other quantum situations. Each cell of the volume "(2.pi.hbar)^N" gives rise to one basis vector of the Hilbert space.

As we explained in July, if some region of the phase space is very thin, its small volume may include a very small number of basis vectors (or none).

If you take a generic pure state - a random linear combination of the basis vectors - you will clearly not obtain a unique classical solution: such generic states resemble Schrödinger's cat that is half-dead, half-alive. Only special pure states whose Wigner distribution (my word here) is quasi-localized on the phase space - states that they aptly call "coherent" - may be associated with unique classical smooth geometries (or their stringy generalizations).

Why is the entropy large?

Because the volume of the phase space is large.

Why should all these microstates be obtained by quantizing a phase space of SUGRA solutions?

Well, this is only true for some highly BPS black holes that classically have a vanishing area (when the higher-derivative terms are neglected). For more complicated (and non-SUSY) black holes, you have to quantize a phase space that is parametrized by other stringy, non-SUGRA degrees of freedom, too.

The fuzzball paradigm is still nontrivial in this case because it leads you to study what the new "classical" stringy degrees of freedom producing the phase space are. (When I was writing the previous sentence, my sister called me and independently asked me what the term "paradigm" meant - what a coincidence.) The point is that you shouldn't treat the "exp(S)" microstates of a black hole as degenerate, almost identical animals. They differ, the differences can be described, and they can be measured by fine enough probes.

Semiclassical probes won't be able to distinguish in between them.

Now, how is it possible that the stringy effects are supposed to change physics a long distance away from the singularity, the only place where the curvature seems to be high?

They argue that this whole "non-local" effect - that allows the stringy physics to modify the whole black hole interior and not just the vicinity of the singularity - is due to the "thin" regions of the phase space that don't admit a large number of microstates which is why it prevents you from taking the usual classical limit.

Note that this "paradox" only arises if the event horizon has actually a macroscopic area. In this case, you need stringy, and not just SUGRA, coordinates to span the whole phase space even though it is often useful to consider just a subspace, too.

However, they seem to believe that the "nonlocality" doesn't arise from having a large number of stringy fields or something like that but purely from the necessity to combine the widely separated points on the "thin" phase space into legitimate pure states.

Does the proposal (that black hole microstates follow from smooth horizon-free geometries/configurations) follow from AdS/CFT?

They don't claim so even though the combination of the fuzzball paradigm and the AdS/CFT methods allows one to obtain many cool explicit results.

What does an observer falling into a black hole see?

It hasn't been calculated yet. Now, it would be very bizarre if a macroscopic observer crossing the horizon of a large black hole saw anything else than what ordinary general relativity with black holes and singularities at the center predicts: namely nothing. Only very small and fast probes should see the new structure that distinguishes the individual microstates.

But this question remains open at this moment. I think that the obstacle is not just technical - that we don't know how to calculate the answer to this problem. I feel that we don't even know how the right observables describing the observer's feeling should be defined as she is crossing the horizon. Black holes scramble all the information very quickly: in fact, they're probably the fastest scramblers in the world.

Gottfried Leibniz: an anniversary

Gottfried Leibniz died 292 years ago, on November 14th, 1716. He was a remarkable polymath but you don't expect an uncritical biography from me, do you? ;-)

Let me begin with his name. Gottfried was born on July 1st, 1646, to a professor of moral philosophy in Leipzig, Germany.

You can often see people and books referring to Gottfried as "von Leibniz". The title pages of his books (published posthumously) even say "Freiherr G.W. von Leibniz". Was he really a Baron? I thought that the spelling without "von" was just a part of communist, anti-feudal propaganda which is why I preferred to use "von". However, I changed my mind once I learned that there is no evidence that Leibniz was ever granted a patent of nobility. He gave it to himself. What a pretentious chap. ;-)

When Gottfried was six, his father died and the boy gained access to his dad's vast personal library. By 12, he learned Latin - his main language throughout his life (his second preferred language was French) - and began to study Greek. At age of 14, he entered university which he completed at 20: the focus was on the law, classics, logic, and scholastic philosophy.

His mathematics knowledge was lousy at this moment, according to the French and British standards.

What was his first job? Well, you often hear people criticizing Newton for doing some alchemy. They never criticize Leibniz. However, Leibniz not only did alchemy but he was even paid for it even though he knew nothing about the discipline. What do you think is worse? Some people will simply do anything for the money.

In the 1670s, Leibniz developed a plan to protect Greater Germany from France: to offer Egypt to the French for free. This plan was only realized in 1798 by Napoleon who attacked Egypt and ... failed. ;-)

Finally, in the 1670s, Leibniz decided to learn some maths - from Christiaan Huygens. He read some Pascal and Descartes, designed his own calculator, and befriended a German mathematician. In 1676, he visited London and was probably shown some of Newton's work on the calculus that he probably plagiarized. There is no good reason to trust Leibniz's integrity because he's been altering and backdating personal manuscripts, among other things. Leibniz was charming, well-mannered, humorous, and creative but he was a jerk and an obsessed careerist, too.

Calculus

So the main indisputable contribution by Leibniz to the calculus is the modern notation. He invented the integral sign and the "d" symbol for the differentials. The law for a derivative of products is referred to as the Leibniz rule even though Newton probably knew it much earlier and Leibniz could have copied it, too.

The rules that both Newton and Leibniz used for the calculus were heuristic in character but they knew how to use them. That couldn't be said e.g. about George Berkeley, an Irish philosophizing religious nutcase who has made a few incorrect operations with the infinitesimal numbers and used his mistakes to explain that the infinitesimals were equally religious as Jesus Christ. ;-)

Another mathematical discipline that Leibniz probably didn't discover was topology. The only reason why some people say that he did was that he has used the term "analysis situs", an obsolete synonym for "topology", but he meant something else and didn't offer any "meat".

Mechanics, dynamism, relationism, monads

Leibniz has literally flooded the intellectual landscape with meaningless metaphysical jargon. When Newton was already computing the motion of many physical systems in detail, Leibniz was producing verbal concepts and theories that made no sense.

For example, he borrowed the term "monad" from the ancient philosophers, including Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. In the Greek context, the symbol referred to God or the totality of all being. In Leibniz's scheme of the things, monads were generalized atoms. These "pieces of existence" are so vague that they could mean anything. In category theory, one can at least give the term "monad" a new definition: they are functors equipped with two natural transformations. I still think that this concept is not terribly useful but at least, it means something in this case.

Kea, Penny's colleague in New Zealand, uses the concept in yet another sense at her kea-monad.blogspot.com blog. I don't understand this sense either but I suspect that "M" in M-theory stands for monads which I am ready to agree with. ;-)

Leibniz's monads were players in a broader framework called dynamism. Monads, the generalized atoms (or point masses or "things" or whatever), could have been affected by forces acting at a distance. The action at a distance was a crucial and nontrivial insight necessary for Newton's mechanics but I don't think that Leibniz has discovered it in any sense. Newton may have been inspired by Robert Hooke - the giant dwarf on whose shoulders Newton liked to stand - to invent the concept but not by Leibniz. When Newton was already computing things in detail, Leibniz continued with vague talk.

Leibniz introduced the concepts of potential and kinetic energy into mechanics but as far as I understand, he has only used the right words, not the right formulae.

A famous dispute between Newton and Leibniz is often described as the "absolutism vs relativism" debate. A lot of politically correct nonsense is often said and written about this controversy. The truth is that Leibniz was simply wrong while Newton was right. In their very lifetime, the dispute was about taking coordinates seriously and about the preferred role of inertial frames.

Be sure that the inertial frames are preferred in classical mechanics and coordinates must be taken very seriously. Newton appreciated Galileo's equivalence of inertial frames that are moving uniformly with respect to each other: that's what his first law is really about. All other "symmetries" are "relativities" proposed by Leibniz and his philosophical followers, including Ernst Mach, were simply wrong. And this conclusion is not altered by relativity, either.

Special relativity has as much symmetry as classical mechanics. The Lorentz group has the same dimension as the Galilean group; the latter is a contraction of the former, after all. And even general relativity confirms the absolute character of spacetime. Many people hear the words but don't understand their meaning (and Leibniz may have been their prototype). They think that the word "relativity" means that this theory has made everything relative. Well, it hasn't. Many things - such as spacetime - are more absolute and rigid than they have ever been and physicists, including Einstein, emphasized this point often.

Because of this confusion, we might say that the term "relativity" is a misnomer. Einstein preferred the term "Invariantentheorie" which would emphasize that the theory is based on things that do not change when you change your viewpoint. ;-) Well, "Invariantentheorie" could lead to other types of confusions. These simple words are "wavelets" that always cover some pieces of the picture incorrectly. But it may have been better than "relativity".

Should we believe that geometry only makes sense relatively to objects and that the geometry of empty space doesn't exist by itself? Well, if we're scientists and if we're talking about the real world around us, we must treat this proposition as a scientific hypothesis, not as a philosophical dogma. A little piece of scrutiny shows that the hypothesis is incorrect. Period.

In classical mechanics, it is very obvious that the inertial frames are "natural" for the formulation of physical laws. You can express the laws in other coordinate systems but these more general descriptions are clearly derived. You don't gain anything by e.g. adding the diffeomorphism symmetry to classical mechanics. If you want to allow arbitrary four functions of x,y,z,t to be coordinates, you must still remember four functions of the new coordinates in which the space is flat. Because there is essentially a unique way to gauge-fix the new gauge symmetry you introduced - and to return back to the diff-non-invariant description - it is fair to say that the new symmetry you added was completely fake.

General relativity goes even further. Even in the absence of any matter, empty space can contain things such as gravitational waves. The geometry of spacetime in general relativity is very real, it can wiggle and fluctuate, and you surely cannot attribute all these phenomena to material objects in spacetime. A related example is the aether: people have assumed that there had to be "matter" made out of atoms in empty space because electromagnetic waves couldn't otherwise propagate.

The reality is very different: the empty space has (non-atomic) fields in it, both gravitational and electromagnetic, that make the gravitational and electromagnetic waves possible. Whether it agrees with your philosophical assumptions and beliefs about the beauty is your psychological problem. Science gives an unequivocal answer to these basic questions. The empty space has a huge amount of structure in it and the structure looks nothing like the real "atoms".

And if you look at the real laws of physics in detail, you will find out that they are more beautiful than whatever you could construct out of the naive assumptions about beauty.

More generally, I want to emphasize that many people have misunderstood and still misunderstand the essence of the scientific method, at least in certain contexts. As long as you behave as a scientist, you must accept that similar assumptions about the empty space and the existence or non-existence of waves or geometry in the empty space are scientific hypotheses that can either be confirmed or rejected. And be sure that all these basic questions have already been decided.

Various fields

Before I return to the question of separating the realms of philosophy and science, let me mention a couple of Leibniz's activities that make him a polymath.

In 1677, Leibniz proposed the creation of the European Union. ;-) He expected the confederation to respect the same religion. In politics, he wanted the princes to be ready for the people's revolt and the people to be obedient to their leaders. However, when he summarized all arguments, he realized that revolutions were worse than the problems they were meant to solve. Leibniz was also an economic adviser to the Austrian monarchy.

Leibniz wanted various Christian churches to be reconciled: he was an ecumenist.

As a historical linguist, he didn't believe that Hebrew was the primary language, like his contemporaries did. And he was clearly right: the opinion of his contemporaries was due to an irrational focus on the Judeo-Christian anthropology. He thought that Germanic languages evolved from proto-Swedish but he had no idea about the origin of Slavic languages. He knew about the existence of Sanskrit and was fascinated by Chinese. As a Sinophile, he was primarily amazed by the Chinese knowledge of binary numbers, a system that he promoted in Europe.

He also wanted to make breakthroughs in paleontology, life sciences, psychology (analyses of conscious and unconscious states), epidemiological policy, tax reforms (and the concept of balance of trade), and communication theory. With Denis Papin, he is claimed to have invented steam engine. He speculated about programming languages - concepts constructed much later by Babbage and Lovelace. And Leibniz also worked on indexing systems for libraries which made him the first systematic librarian in the world. He advocated national scientific societies, too.

Although he probably stole many of these concepts and babbled about many others, there's just so much stuff that I am sure that many of these things had to be useful for the people who knew how to filter them. Nevertheless, Leibniz only became revered a long time after his death.

Philosophy vs science

But let me return to one of the main topics of this article, the conflict between philosophical prejudices and scientific evidence.

Leibniz is well-known for his "weak optimism": our world is the best world that is a priori possible. Now, this is a great comment that can make you feel happy or dignified. But what does it actually mean? If there is no independent way to define how "good" a world is, it is a vacuous and emotional statement.

Can we define the adjective in some way? Well, in classical physics, you may define the "goodness" as the negative action, "-S". In the "optimal" world, the action will be minimized, so you will derive the Euler-Lagrange equations. That's nice except that Leibniz obviously didn't have the right formulae so you can't credit him for this discovery. Moreover, the "minimization of the action" principle is rejected by quantum mechanics that instructs us to sum over all histories, the optimal one as well as the less optimal ones.

Is there another sense in which our world is optimal? Well, it would be very interesting if true except that the statement looks obviously false. Our world is sometimes good and it sometimes sucks. ;-) You can get excited or stimulated (or radicalized) by various beliefs in the optimal world but that doesn't yet mean that you have discovered something about the real world. All these things are philosophical prejudices or mantras. In other words, I agree with Voltaire who lampooned Leibniz (renamed as Dr Pangloss) in his comic novella Candide.

Leibniz's principles

Let me analyze the validity of seven principles due to Leibniz.

1. Identity/contradiction
2. Identity of discernibles
3. Sufficient reason
4. Pre-established harmony
5. Continuity
6. Optimism
7. Plenitude

1. Fine. The first principle about contradictions says that if a proposition is true, then its negation is false and vice versa. I fully agree with that.

It is a basic rule of logic that is necessary both in mathematics and in sciences (and other rational enterprises). But I don't think that Leibniz was the first one to think in this way. Nevertheless, this principle is important and many people don't appreciate it. Whenever people want to have things go "both ways", they are neglecting the basic principle. Other people don't know how to correctly construct a negation of proposition.

2. The second principle says that two things are identical iff all of their properties coincide. Now, you must be careful what exactly counts as the properties. And even if you are careful, you must be careful before you decide to believe the principle. In most axiomatic systems of set theory, the principle is simply true and the properties are arbitrary syntactically correct propositions that you can create out of the quantifiers, symbols, and the basic relations such as "is an element of".

If you reduce the spectrum of "properties" a little bit and you care about "shapes" of structures only, Leibniz's "identity" will actually define something slightly different, namely an "isomorphism". Now, two isomorphic structures are "effectively" the same but you can still distinguish them. If you reduce the set of "properties" even more than that, you will clearly get too rough a picture of the things and "manifestly different" objects will end up being identified which you don't want. And if you add too many unphysical properties, including the time when you're thinking about an object, then copies of the same objects will behave as different objects. You don't want that either.

So from the viewpoint of mathematics, you want the "identity" to be defined as something in between the true "identity" and an "isomorphism". You should be careful what is your definition of the word "identity" and the symbol "=" but this is clearly a terminological, not a scientific question. You will clearly need the symbol "=" or its equivalent to do any kind of maths. Is SU(2) really the "same" thing as spin(3)? Well, it's up to you. But they're similar enough that you should notice! If you're a mathematician, continue to distinguish "=" and isomorphism. As a physicist, if you know that no confusions will follow, there's no reason not to write SU(2) = spin(3).

The principle becomes an entirely new question in particle physics. Are two electrons identical? Today we know that they are. They are completely identical. If you collide two electrons arriving from the North and from the South and they recoil to the West and the East, you can't say whether the electron on the Western side came from the North or from the South. In fact, you can't say it even in principle. Not even God has this information. This information doesn't exist. Why?

Because the correct way to predict how the collision will proceed is to add (subtract, in fact, because of the Dirac-Fermi statistics) the amplitudes of both processes (from North to West and from South to East; and from North to East and from South to West) and square the absolute value of the sum (or difference) to get the probability. Only the probability is observable but it is a complicated function of expressions in which each of the two possible histories is taken into account. The two histories interfere with each other and they cannot possibly be separated from one another. It's amazing but elementary particles of the same type have no driving licenses and they cannot be distinguished, not even in principle.

However, that doesn't mean that this philosophical principle will always hold in this way and produce correct physical conclusions of this "flavor". Two up-quarks always have the same mass, charge, and other properties, too. However, a red up-quark is different from a green up-quark. They are not different in Leibniz's sense because there always exists a gauge transformation mapping a red up-quark to a green up-quark or vice versa, proving that all of their measurable properties must be exactly identical. Nevertheless, there still exist three different colors of such a quark - red, green, and blue - that must be treated as different states.

The interference between two histories of two electrons on one hand and the three colors of quarks (that make the interference pattern between two quarks of different colors disappear) on the other hand are insights that one couldn't predict before he actually studied some particle physics phenomena and the laws summarizing their properties.

Much like the ancient Greek philosophers, Leibniz still wanted to figure out all these things by "pure thought". Pure thought could perhaps be enough to find these things without making any experiments but Leibniz's childish reasoning was demonstrably not enough and the equally childish reasoning of Leibniz's contemporary followers (who have made no progress since the 17th century) is not enough, either. Leibniz was not a real natural scientist - in Galileo's sense - because he wanted all these arbitrary (and usually incorrect) assumptions to be treated as dogmas. And he treated them as dogmas, indeed.

3. The third principle says that every event has a rational reason. Unlike the fatalists, however, Leibniz admitted that some of these reasons can only be accessible to God. In modern language, there can exist hidden variables that are inaccessible to humans, at least in practice.

But when you take hidden variables into account, a rational reason behind any event exists, he thought. Obviously, quantum mechanics rejects this third principle of Leibniz. The outcomes of experiments in quantum mechanics are chosen genuinely randomly and have no rational reason that could be traced to the past light cone of the event. See e.g. the proof of the free-will theorem due to John Conway et al.

Again, the principle was a belief that may perhaps "look rational" but because Leibniz treated it as another dogma, he behaved very irrationally. In fact, the dogma is incorrect, as we can prove today. Aside from quantum mechanics, there are other ways to look at the question. But because Leibniz didn't claim that humans will actually be able to find the reason behind every event (or at least a macroscopic event), I don't have to explain why such an assumption would be even more incorrect than his own.

4. The fourth principle is an amusingly confusing game about causation. Leibniz believed that all objects were only influencing themselves but in such a way that they remain in "pre-established harmony" with other objects.

For example, it means that if you get angry and your hand gives a well-deserved, proper thrashing to a nasty jerk and liar at Columbia University, the hand acted "independently" because it was pre-determined to remain in harmony with your mind. The mind is not a direct cause of the incident. In the same way, the jerk's mouth gets split into pieces because it was pre-determined to behave in this way, in order to remain in harmony with you and the external world. You're innocent.

What do I think about Leibniz's interpretation? Well, while the conclusion is intriguing, the reasoning is surely unusual. But can it be disproved? The answer is essentially Yes, at least if you treat the concept of a "cause" operationally.

The purpose of science is to predict the observable characteristics of events. And scientifically speaking, you will observe a huge correlation between the broken mouths and the certain kind of anger of a nearby person that occurred a few minutes earlier. If such a correlation is repeatable and there is no other conceivable cause of the broken mouth, it makes sense to conjecture that the earlier event was the cause of the later event. This assumption may be supported by nontrivial evidence, especially if we understand the process of breaking of the mouth microscopically.

You might also postulate a new contrived mechanism inside the jerk that breaks his own mouth in a way that responds to the anger of the people around. ;-) However, because this event is correlated with the people around, it is better to imagine that the new mechanism that you have added to your explanation of the world is at least "partially" associated with the other people. Because it wouldn't work without them, they are at least a part of the cause.

To summarize, I have no idea what Leibniz's point was. Pre-established harmony looks like manifest nonsense to me, despite the nice and attractive name.

5. The fifth principle is continuity. His statement, Natura non saltum facit, and its clarifications look very similar to some basic mathematically provable (and thus indisputable) lemmas about continuous functions. The domain and range of continuous functions must be dense sets. But because Leibniz wasn't really doing any rigorous mathematics and he hasn't given a full rigorous proof of the principle, it is clear that what he meant was not pure mathematics.

Again, it was implicitly a statement about the real world - the same real world that Leibniz could never quite separate from his philosophical guesses about "anything". Now, it is true that all objects in classical physics are continuous and the quantities can always change infinitesimally, leading to an infinitesimal change of other quantities that depend on the first ones. After all, that's because the laws of physics are based on continuous functions and differential equations. Maybe, Leibniz was only describing these basic features of classical physics in a very vague way.

However, we must be careful before we extrapolate these assumptions outside classical physics. In quantum physics, observables become operators that often have a discrete (or mixed) spectrum for which the Leibniz's principle breaks down. We can still describe all of dynamics in terms of continuous fundamental objects and equations (such as wave functions or functionals and Schrödinger's equations they obey) but it would be wrong to say that "everything" is continuous. The energy of the quantum harmonic oscillator is not. Again, the fuzziness and excessive generality of Leibniz's proposition makes it partially true, partially false, and generally useless.

6. The sixth principle is optimism that has already been discussed. God always chooses the best. Leibniz was able to remove his rosy glasses, at least sometimes, to see that this proposition was very naive. There are way too many cases in which God chooses something that is not the best. So what did Leibniz do with this observation showing that the simplest principle is clearly bogus?

Well, he weakened the original "local" statement to a "global" one: the whole world, when viewed as one object, is the best possible world. If something bad is going on here, it is overcompensated by something good that is happening elsewhere in the world. In this way, he "solved" the problem of "theodicy" - why there is any evil in the world governed by a good God - by this "global" proposition. We have already discussed the possible interpretation of this paradigm in terms of the principle of the least action. But is this "globalization" of the principle an improvement?

As Penny would say, does one door open when another door closes? ;-)

Well, it is not the case because the laws of physics are really local. So whatever happens in one region, whether it is good or not, has nothing to do with the events that occur in another, spatially separated or disconnected region. Regardless of the definition of the "goodness", the compensation between two spatially separated regions is exactly something that cannot happen as long as the "goodness" is a functional of the local degrees of freedom and their derivatives.

Sheldon would surely agree. ;-)

So only the local interpretation, in terms of the least action (that is an integral of the Lagrangian over spacetime), can be defended. Moreover, the action has no similarity to any natural "human" interpretation of "goodness". And the principle of the least action breaks in quantum mechanics, anyway.

7. The last, seventh principle is plenitude. It is a special would-be corollary of the previous principle. The best possible, perfect world - which Leibniz claimed to be ours - should realize all possibilities. The only reason why we don't experience all of them is our finite lifetime, he said. Now, this principle is very confusing, too.

We must first ask what is the set of "all possibilities" that should be realized in the perfect world. Clearly, if this set of all possibilities include events that violate the laws of physics - such as charge conservation - these possibilities will never be realized. Obviously, for the principle to have any chance to be true, the set of possibilities must be reduced a "little bit".

It must be reduced to the configuration space - or the space of histories - that are allowed according to the right theory of the Universe (which respects all conservation laws as well as many other laws). And Leibniz said nothing about the identity of the space, dramatically reducing the value of his last principle. Moreover, in the asymptotically de Sitter space that we inhabit, there are only exp(10^{120}) states in the Hilbert space - possibilities - so whatever the possibilities are, there only seems to be a finite number of them.

It doesn't look like "all of possibilities" in any meaningful sense.

Let me summarize. Leibniz was a very active guy who has worked in very many fields of human activity but most of his conclusions were wrong and given his extensive production and decent intelligence, it becomes less shocking that some of them were on the spot.

And that's the memo.

GR-like theory without black holes?

When I was reading the preprints today, I got upset by this one:

Alexander Torres-Gomez, Kirill Krasnov

so I must get some relief. They claim nothing less than having a theory that passes the same classical tests as general relativity (sensitive to first post-Newtonian corrections) but doesn't have any black holes.

So you have to look what is their action. In one form, equation 5, it is the Einstein-Hilbert action plus an action for a scalar field chi. Clearly, for the configurations where the scalar field is constant, the theory is nothing else than general relativity and shares all of its solutions. Fine. So a reader is surely still interested how they can possibly lose the black hole solutions such as Schwarzschild.

They write the equations of motion for the Schwarzschild problem and obtain a generalized Schwarzschild solution with two integration constants, K and R. The Schwarzschild solution is clearly there for K=0 which means constant chi. In order for the reader to get confused, they subsequently use different letters r, chi, x for the radial coordinate while they define a function kappa of the integration constants, K and R.

But with an infinitesimal attention, you will still know that K=0 corresponds to kappa=1/2 and the Schwarzschild black hole solution is still there. How can it evaporate? Well, finally, they list four possible values of the parameter kappa, and they are:

• kappa > 1/2
• 0 < kappa < 1/2
• kappa = i delta
• kappa = 0

Suddenly, kappa=1/2 is gone (although they briefly mention kappa=1/2 in the paragraph dedicated to the second option, however without realizing what this special choice means). They conclude that the theory doesn't have black holes. Well, this is what I call a genuinely dumb conclusion.

The black hole solution is still there, of course, for kappa=1/2. The other solutions for kappa different from 1/2 are, indeed, different from black holes. But general relativity doesn't mean that all solutions must be black holes. Non-vacuum solutions, such as solutions with a variable scalar field chi (the same thing as kappa different from 1/2 solutions), are not black holes. They are morally similar to "stars". General relativity doesn't imply and has never implied that stars couldn't exist.

More generally, I view the expectation in 2008 that black holes will evaporate from physics of gravity to reveal a stunning lack of knowledge and intuition. The emergence of black hole horizons is an inevitable consequence of the equivalence principle. Even in Newton's theory, one could see that the escape velocity could hypothetically exceed the speed of light for a sufficiently massive object. It may happen in relativity, too. Whenever it does, light cannot escape the gravitational field and an event horizon develops.

Moreover, we know that the black holes always follow from the correct microscopic description of quantum gravity whose range of validity goes much further than to these trivial classical problems such as "do black hole exist?", namely string theory. I assure you that every single compactification in the proverbial landscape of 10^{500} semi-realistic choices - as well as any other compactification of string theory - implies the existence of black holes. You may be amazed by the unprecedented predictivity of string theory in this respect but that's how the world works. All these basic things are settled.

The existence of black hole solutions could have been open in 1917 and, at a more academic level, in the 1960s. But not today. Sorry, Alexander and Kirill, but your text is dumb beyond imagination.

Learning as a refinement of exceptions

I was recently tutoring my 15-year-old half-half-nephew Kuba (James). They have to simplify rational expressions all the time. For example, they must figure out that

8(c²-4d²) / 12(c²+4d²-4cd) = ...
... = 2(c+2d) / 3(c-2d)

Did I get it right? ;-) Now, if he's another Lagrange, it's not quite obvious because his talent must be profoundly hidden, so he would have "F" all the time. This grade has been recently brought to the "C/D" range but that's probably it. ;-)

You know, such lessons are not about the simplification of rational expressions only. We had to deal with many gaps that are more elementary - the difference between addition and multiplication (especially when numbers are substituted for variables), priorities of mathematical operations and the question which parentheses may be forgotten, the difference between 2(c) and 2(c+1) when "+1" is left after pulling a factor out, the difference between "u" and "1/u" when "nothing" is left in the numerator, the difference between "mn^2" and "(mn)^2", the reason why "1/5" is equal to "0.2", and so on, and so on.



Off-topic: Sonic boom visualized. See also genus one bubbles and other slow motion videos including popcorn pop. Hat tip: Rae Ann

I am confident that many of these idiosyncrasies are rather generic among children and teenagers and they should be taken into account when these things are being taught. More generally, I am convinced that the existing process of teaching doesn't sufficiently reflect the "natural" expectations of children (and adults).

What do I mean? Most people build and increase their knowledge using some kind of generalized wavelets. You begin with a rather simple rule that may be adopted in a wide range of contexts. For example, when you begin to learn about the origin of species, you may start with the assumption that "all animals were created by God". Or if you are equally "sensible" as the creationists and learn something about physics, you may begin with "all of modern theoretical physics is not even wrong".

These are not the best examples. I should have started with some insights that are at least remotely correct, like "weather and life are changing all the time". Fine. Such insights resemble a big wavelet that covers a big portion of the JPEG picture. Once you know these things, you know more than the people who don't know "anything at all" - for example the people who believe that the climate shouldn't be naturally changing or that the animal species were created to be constant forever.

However, this knowledge is clearly not terribly refined and detailed. So we keep on adding smaller wavelets. We are learning which things are changing and which things are not changing, how quickly they're changing, what they're actually changing into, and so on. In each case, a new "blob" or "wavelet" is added into the JPEG picture (or MPEG movie) of our knowledge. It's important to notice that we rarely remember things in the same way as the BMP bitmap image - even though, in some cases, it should be acknowledged that pure memorization is the best approach.

On one hand, when a pupil constructs a "blob" or "wavelet" in her head that allows her to solve certain problems correctly without extra learning, she shouldn't spend too much time with learning the "new" stuff that is not quite "new". On the other hand, when previous, nearby "blobs" and "wavelets" are likely to influence her thinking and lead her to erroneous conclusions, some lessons should focus on these particular "frequent mistakes". It must be explained why the previous "blob" no longer works in the special context and why (and how) the new rules replace it.

The teaching should be organized in such a way that the (generalized) students are able to reproduce as much correct information as possible after a given amount of time and effort that has to be invested to the teaching process. In this sense, the architects of textbooks face a similar challenge as JPEG compressing algorithms.

Also, various "big" or "ideological" disputes are actually about the size of the wavelets - i.e. about the area covered by one "wavelet" or another one: such ideological "wavelets" describe the reality in a simplified (or oversimplified) way. Now, these "ideological" questions are partially about social conventions rather than objective reality: the exact image is more than the oversimplified "wavelet". Nevertheless, when the real picture includes a big and dark spot, the simplified picture with a "big wavelet" could be better than others: so these social conventions about the way how to present simplified (and oversimplified) rules are at least partially rooted in reality.

Dialectics

It brings me to another point. The facts presented in the classroom are almost always phrased in a "positive" way: children always hear what is true but they never hear what is not true. This fact makes most classes in the world both boring as well as inefficient as methods to transfer the information. Moreover, children often do not realize that two things contradict each other when they do.

For example, when it comes to creationism, children hear almost nothing about it at schools. Now, I am surely not going to defend a "positive" teaching of creationism because it's all crap. However, I do agree with the statements that the kids should be "taught the controversy". What do I mean?

While there is no controversy among sensible evolutionary biologists, there is surely a controversy in the society. It is unrealistic to think that every student will end up "believing" the evolutionary story about the origin of species. And in fact, there is even no good reason to dream about this uniformity. What would it be good for?

So children should naturally hear about these thought-provoking topics. Those who are getting it are likely to understand the structure of the ideas and arguments more properly and they will be more able to explain it to others, too. The other children who are not getting it will realize that there actually exist some arguments that the Darwinists honestly believe. And the "evolutionary" children will hear some "better" arguments from the creationists rather than the hateful and dishonest caricatures.

But the current situation in which the kids are taught complicated trees of hundreds of kingdoms, superclasses, classes, and species of animals and plants - and many (or most) of them end up believing that all this hierarchy is unphysical bogus unrelated to the origin of the life forms - shows that the current focus is unbalanced. Does it make sense to teach stunning details about evolutionary biology if you can't guarantee that most children will believe the very basic pillars of this very field, evolutionary biology?

Similar comments apply to other disciplines, too. For example, students learn how to do a lot of things correctly in quantum mechanics or quantum field theory. But they are almost never led to understand why wrong methods and opinions are wrong (not even the highly popular wrong methods and opinions). In principle, learning the correct answer is equivalent to learning all the wrong answers. However, in reality, it doesn't work in this way.

For example, if a graduate student is unable to see that and why virtually every paper by Lee Smolin about quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, or quantum gravity is wrong and scientifically ludicrous - i.e. why physicists refer to Lee Smolin as a crackpot - he or she has not learned quantum field theory and related subdisciplines well. If someone really knows the correct answer and why it is correct, he should also know why all the incompatible answers are incorrect. Much like in the case of biology discussed above, students are being taught much more detailed - and generally less important - things than the insights they need to have in order to see why a wrong paper about some "big questions" is wrong. In other words, students are often taught things that are less important than those that they should learn.

Although I have mentioned biology and particle physics only, the same comment applies to all of human knowledge.

CEZ: financial turmoil should euthanize EU climate package

ČEZ group (Wikipedia) is the most profitable Czech company at this moment: two billion euros a year is not a negligible amount of money. The Czech energy corporation is becoming a pillar of the Central and Eastern European energetic infrastructure. While its main future strategy is to build many new nuclear power plants across the continent, the current reality is that coal is extremely important.

ČEZ has to promote the nuclei, too: the number of weird atom-haters across Europe is pretty high.

AFP informed that its CEO, Martin Roman, is confident that the financial crisis is going to bury the insane "climate package" promoted by some crazy EU bureaucrats. The plan wants to rapidly increase the proportion of ludicrous sources of "renewable" energy by 2020, introduce trading with CO2 indulgences that would cost all these companies dearly already in 2013, and boost energy savings.



Roman explains that this plan would be an economic suicide.

Last week, Mirek Topolánek, the Czech PM, gave his full support to ČEZ. Now, you should understand that Topolánek is slightly weakened by the "orange tsunami", a devastatingly intense contamination of the Czech Senate and the regional bodies by the opposition socialists after the recent elections.

Topolánek, a center-right, non-intellectual politician from the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), has done a lot for President Klaus's re-election and in my opinion, there's a lot that Klaus should be grateful for. But it is obvious that the relationships between Klaus and Topolánek were never quite idylic. In the most recent era, Topolánek's intent to okay Brussels' climate plans as well as the Lisbon treaty became an important point of Klaus' decent criticism directed against Topolánek. Klaus may be using subtle forces helping to replace Topolánek by another politician as the chair of ODS (and, perhaps, as the prime minister).

Now, I am kind of satisfied with Topolánek. And when we talked to each other during Klaus' inauguration, it was a pleasant experience. But yes, I agree that it is good if Klaus reminds him that similar steps may be controversial and may have some implications.



Logos of the EU2009.CZ presidency were revealed.

By the way, Václav Klaus has visited Ireland and presented a lot of balanced comments about democracy in Europe (see e.g. this speech). How did the euronaive politicians responded? Well, MEP Crowley said that Klaus was a silly little prick. That's not only highly impolite but also paradoxical because Crowley's homosexual pseudo-husband, alarmist Mick Crowley, is known to have a small penis optimized to rape small children, as confirmed by Crowley's reactions to Michael Crichton's novel, "Next". ;-)

The eurofanatics were mainly upset that Klaus met (and endorsed) the boss of Libertas, the anti-Lisbon-treaty movement. The Czech diplomacy (including Topolánek), while not necessarily copying every opinion of Klaus', emphasized that every EU citizen including Klaus has the right to voice his opinions and meet with opposition politicians in Ireland.

RSS MSU: 0.013 deg C month-on-month cooling

RSS MSU (a satellite-based team to measure the temperature on Earth) has switched from v3.1 of their dataset to v3.2 of their temperature listings.

The latter, newer version already contains the October 2008 figures. With its 0.181 °C anomaly, it was 0.013 °C cooler than September 2008 and 0.044 °C cooler than October 2007.

In the mid troposphere (graph), where the greenhouse theory predicts the fastest warming, the anomaly was negative (cooler than average October). Among 13 months in the 21st century when the anomaly was negative, 9 months occurred in 2008! ;-) (All of them except for September.)

Their competition at UAH MSU - John Christy et al. - claim to be more accurate and have released their October 2008 data, too, indicating a tiny 0.006 °C warming: see Anthony Watts.

See also the previous monthly report about September 2008.

Hansen: Russia's anomaly warms by 25 degrees F a month

While the satellite data indicate that the October anomaly was cooler than in the previous month, James Hansen's GISS (The Gore Institute for Swindle Science) claims that it was a whopping 0.28 °C warmer than in September 2008, reaching the third warmest temperature anomaly ever (after Jan 2007 and Feb 1998).

Because it seems somewhat surprising to accumulate a discrepancy of more than 0.3 °C between two methodologies in as little as one month, Steve McIntyre looked at more detailed data leading to the GISS's final figure.

What he and a reader found was that the GISS October absolute temperature reading from 10 Russian and post-Soviet stations coincided with the figure from the previous month, September 2008. That's quite shocking because October is almost always 12 °C cooler than the previous September. ;-)

Steve McIntyre quips (if you allow me to improve the story) that Hansen should have been Napoleon's minister of weather because that would surely help Sarkozy's predecessor's autumn fights in Russia. (Today, Obama should hire Hansen to publish monthly GDP growth numbers: Dow at 20,000 would be here soon.)



Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, October 1812, by Illarion Prianishnikov

These numbers from Olenek, Russia are particularly telling:

Year	JUL	AUG	SEP	OCT	NOV	DEC
2006	16.9	11.5	4.4	-14.6	-27.7	-29.1
2007	13.5	11.3	3.1	-9.0	-24.8	999.9
2008	13.1	12.1	3.1	3.1	999.9	999.9

Ignore the 999.9 °C temperature from December 2007 (even though Hansen's Al Gore Rhythm may count is as a real number) and check that October 2008 happened to be exactly as warm as September 2008 which happened to be exactly as warm as September 2007. October 2008 "was" 12.1 °C warmer than October 2007 and 17.7 °C warmer than October 2006. Not bad. If you ask whether it is a coincidence and suggest that the October was really hot in Olenek, let me tell you that 10 post-Soviet stations have the same "Sep=Oct" coincidence. Indeed, September 2008 is their hottest October on record. ;-)

The October temperature +3.1 °C in Olenek doesn't look quite consistent with the current temperature in Olenek which is -28 °C when I am writing this sentence. ;-) It is predicted to drop to -33 °C on the Day After Tomorrow. :-)

The confusing permutations of months in Russia are likely to continue during the following month, too. Recall that the Great October Revolution took place in November. ;-)

Russia is quite a piece of land: its 12 °C anomaly-wise fake regional warming (see Russia at this shocking wrong map; update: the colors have been removed, see how the map looked like: Daily Tech) easily transforms a slight real global cooling into a 0.28 °C of fake global warming. Well, you can calculate it pretty much exactly. Russia's land is 3% of the surface of the Earth, so its warming contributes a 30 times smaller warming to the globe. 12 °C/30 = 0.3 °C or so.

Now, you may dislike Russia. What about Ireland? It has seen its coldest October day since 1934. What does Hansen say about October in Ireland? Well, the same thing as he does about Russia: it had the same absolute temperature as September. Wow.

It's just an amazing mess. Hansen's results are weighted averages of numbers like plus infinity and minus infinity while Hansen likes the proportion of plus infinity to be increasing (even though NOAA's GHCN v2 data are probably the primary problem). This is his "global warming". Imagine that NASA uses the same sloppy dishonest charlatan as Hansen to launch space shuttles: the casualties would increase to 100% or so. This guy should clearly be arrested or executed, at least in the space shuttle case. See also John Goetz at Anthony Watts' blog.

Arctic sea ice

Today, the Arctic sea ice area is exactly at the normal level: see the NORSEX ice area graph. The Antarctic sea ice area continues to be slightly above the normal. So the ice indicates that the whole globe is actually cooler than normal which makes claims about a 12 °C temperature anomaly across Northern Siberia doubly absurd.

Frankly speaking, I don't believe that this was just a mistake. I don't believe that a scientist could fail to notice that Russia on the temperature map looks manifestly wrong: the huge territories with such a gigantic anomaly could occur after the explosion of 5,000 thermonuclear bombs in Russia but you would have heard about them from FoxNews is they actually detonated. ;-)

Someone - perhaps many people - are deliberately trying to promote complete nonsense as long as it supports "global warming", the greatest hoax ever perpetrated not only on the American people.

Felix Hausdorff: 140th birthday

Felix Hausdorff was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) on November 8th, 1868, to a rich family of a Jewish textile retailer. Therefore, he never had to work because of superficial things such as money.

The family soon moved to Leipzig. Being interested both in literature and music, Felix was keen on becoming a composer. But his parents convinced him not to become one. So he went to study mathematics. His 1891 PhD thesis was focusing on the effect of the atmosphere on astronomical observations.

Commercial break:

I recommend you a new book on quantum field theory by my (former) adviser, Tom Banks. There's a lot of wisdom that I have learned from, too. Many things are presented in a similar way as I would do so, and others are done differently. A nice summary of LSZ formalism, gauge invariance and its roles, the fate of different types of symmetries, phases of gauge theories, renormalization and the logic of effective field theory, instantons, and monopoles, among other things.

But recall what his interests were. Because he couldn't have become a composer, there was still literature. Felix published many books, including poetry and philosophy (the latter books were usually argued against the transcendental world). Even when he was getting married with Charlotte Sara Goldschmidt in 1999 - a Jew-turned-Lutheran - he clearly preferred literature. He wrote his last farce in 1904 and it became successful in 1912 when he was already an outsider in that field.

Mathematics

Since 1904, when he was 36, he focused on topology. He studied ordered sets and generalized Cantor's continuum hypothesis by inventing new ordinal numbers: yes, aleph was all over the place. The Hausdorff spaces are those in which different points may have non-overlapping neighborhoods. Did you like this concept at the college? I didn't, being convinced that non-Hausdorff spaces are so pathological that I would have never found them interesting, which is why it was annoying to repeat that a space had to be Hausdorff all the time. ;-) I have kind of kept this opinion although the adjective "Hausdorff" fortunately evaporated.

Hausdorff measures unify counting, the measurements of lengths, areas, and volumes into one concept. The axiom of choice played a role in some of his more formal investigations, especially in his construction of crazy (pathological) decompositions of spheres into unmeasurable sets. The Banach-Tarski paradox is a newer three-dimensional improvement of his decomposition: a three-dimensional ball is decomposed into many sets and the pieces are put together in a different way so that we get two balls. ;-)

Recall that without the axiom of choice, it is pretty much possible to accept an alternative axiom, namely that all sets are measurable and these particular pathological constructions can be avoided. I kind of prefer this setup - but it's important to know that none of these choices influences the portion of mathematics that is relevant for physics as we know it because we surely can't make any of these decompositions in practice, not even in principle :-). They don't exist in theoretical physics.

In mathematics, we can choose any collections of axioms as long as they are consistent. But I always believed that the right axioms one should postulate and study are those that lead to the most interesting, regular, and natural systems - as viewed from a theoretical physicist's viewpoint - which are also those where certain natural mathematical rules (such as the additivity of measure) continue to hold.

But let us return to Felix Hausdorff's discoveries. Most famously, the Hausdorff dimension allows one to define the dimensionality of a set that works for fractional dimensionalities (of the fractals), too. It is the exponent in the power law that determines the minimal number of small balls of radius "r" that can completely cover the set.

In 1935, his abstract mathematics was declared Jewish, useless, and un-German by the politically correct people of his time. He was forced to retire. The terror against the Jews escalated by the Crystal Night (of Broken Glass) in 1938: tomorrow it will be its 70th anniversary so Hausdorff was exactly 70 years old (plus one day). When it was clear that he couldn't avoid the transfer to a concentration camp in 1942, he commited suicide together with his wife and sister-in-law on the 26th of January.

Smartkit: Pitch black game

Can you arrange the 16 comic strip pictures correctly?

Full screen (click)

Christopher Horner: Red Hot Lies

I just received my copy of Chris Horner's new book, Red Hot Lies. I am just getting started with it but it is a powerful reading about the anatomy and physiology of the global warming propaganda machine.

The Preface is subtitled "How Greenpeace Steals My Trash".

Here is a rough table of contents:

1. Media on a mission: lies, distortions, cover-ups, and the reporters who push them
2. Fear and loathing: alarmist scare tactics, demonization, and threats
3. The establishment attacks: woe to dissenters
4. Stifling everyone's speech: even their own
5. Poisoning the little ones: propagandizing your children
6. Big government: how government, politicians, and alarmists abuse power in the pursuit of power
7. Stupid science tricks: keeping that gravy train chugging
8. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: the UN's four-alarm liar

Conclusions: heretics, speak out

End notes and index follow. Click the icon on the left side to get to the amazon.com page of the book. Chris Horner is the author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming.

Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

I learned about this very sad news from you - from the commenters at TRF.

It's doubly shocking for me because my respect for Michael Crichton has been tremendous - and sometime in late 2006, when we were in e-mail contact, he was a "constant reader" of this blog. For example, here he had to reject an offer communicated through Bob F.:

From mcrichton@ear****nk.net Sat Nov 18 22:15:57 2006

Subj: Hi, Lubos
I am a constant reader of your blog.

I appreciate your offer to run the fantasy commentary but I am trying, for the next few weeks, not to talk about global warming so that I can have a window to talk about something else, ie genetics, when I do my press for the book right after Thanksgiving. I don't want to inflame the situation just now.

Regards,
Michael

One month later, a kid asked him what Crichton was reading for inspiration. As you can guess, he didn't read any fiction because he didn't have time to do so. He was doing serious research most of the time. That was his style.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday, he lost his courageous and private battle against [throat] cancer, as his website, michaelcrichton.net, puts it.

Crichton graduated summa cum laude from the Harvard College and later from the Harvard Medical School. I believe that physicians tend to be extremely pro-science. There have been quite a few doctors enthusiastic about string theory, too - which is not the best description of Michael Crichton.

At any rate, he began to write his famous novels in the late 1960s. At the beginning, he chose pen names that encoded his height (206 cm or 6 feet 9 inches in 1997): John Lange (from German, "long one") and Jeffery Hudson (a famous dwarf of a 17th century English queen).

There are many stories about his writing. For example, as a college student at Harvard, he decided that a professor was giving him bad grades. Is this hypothesis testable? You bet. Crichton plagiarized George Orwell and received "B-" for the text. ;-)

Although the scientists in his novels are not the best examples of ethics, Crichton was in no way anti-technology. He viewed the scientific and technological progress as a fact that he wanted to understand and whose worst-case implications he wanted to warn against. His attitude to answering the questions about the world was as scientific as you can get - see e.g. the video below. Among novelists, he was definitely a scientist par excellence.

Everyone knows the Jurassic Park and a couple of similar novels (and movies) where Crichton shows what can arise out of bioengineering. However, I think it is fair to say that since 2002 or so when he began to write the State of Fear, he was more worried about the climate alarmism and the recent trend of media's selling of superstitious speculations that are convenient for someone as the scientific truth.



Could you tell us why you count environmentalism as a religion? Sure.

Remarkably enough, Crichton has also written a textbook of programming in BASIC (Electronic Life) and a text graphical adventure computer game (Amazon, with John Wells). Crichton is also the unwilling father of RealClimate.ORG: this loony website was created by far-left NGOs specifically to fight against Crichton's book on global warming. His last novel will be published posthumously in May 2009. The title is not yet known to the public. At any rate, Michael Crichton will be missed...

Crichton on TRF

There are 34 pages that mention his name here but let me mention The State of Fear (see a Language of Fear video), Environmentalism as Religion, Skeptics beat alarmists 46:42 (see his main speech in the IQ2 debate), and Aliens Cause Global Warming (about consensus science). See an hour of Crichton with Charlie Rose: climate begins at 22:00.

If you have strong enough a stomach to see how the far-left climate alarmists celebrate the news, see e.g. Climate Progress. Yes, these individuals are scum.

Ethanol industry goes bust

Vitalik has pointed out that Goldman Sachs will no longer employ analysts to follow the ethanol fuel industry. Also, on Friday, VeraSun Energy, a major player in the industry, went bankrupt:

Public radio

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is likely to be elected the U.S. president today. His plan is to create the environment in which the coal power plants will go bust and, using his own words, electricity prices will skyrocket:

Anthony Watts

Barack Obama also finds the current nuclear technologies unsatisfactory. It's kind of amazing that a majority of America is ready to choose this kind of future. Welcome to the third world, America (or Western Kenya or whatever the new name will be).



Update

Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. Congratulations to his greatest achievement and more importantly, I wish a lot of nerves, smile, and optimism to those who are expected to suffer under the new leadership.

The Cooper-Nowitzki Theorem

More really is the same thing

A previous article about the same topic:

Laughlin vs reductionism

In September 2008, Mile Gu et al. posted a preprint called

More really is different

which is an updated version of the 1972 article by Phil W. Anderson,

More is different.

In the new paper, they declare that it is possible to create a physical system that mimics a Turing machine. And because there are many difficult and undecidable statements about the Turing machines, the physical system they design also hides a lot of questions that cannot be decided by pure thought applied to the fundamental laws of physics, they say.

I have never understood why people like to amuse themselves with similarly bizarre statements.

Gödel's incompleteness theorem

My countrymate Kurt Gödel has shown that every axiomatic system that is at least as powerful as set theory including integers admits a proposition that can be neither proved nor disproved within the system itself. But it seems to me that what many people don't understand is the fact that at the very same moment when the proposition is shown to be unprovable, it is also proved to be correct - within a slightly extended system of logical methods.

The proposition is a refined version of the sentence "this proposition cannot be proved within the given axiomatic system". It's clear that this statement cannot be proved - because provable statements have to be correct which would mean that it cannot be proved (because that's what the sentence says): a contradiction. Also, the statement cannot be disproved because it would be false which would mean that it can be proven - another contradiction.

So the statement can be neither proven nor disproved within the system. But because the statement says nothing else - it says that it cannot be proven - the statement is clearly true. ;-) Gödel's theorem only shows the inevitable limitations of a fixed axiomatic system. It doesn't prove the limits of rational thinking. And I am confident that it is not possible to prove limits of rational thinking because there are no such limits.

Languages and particular "technologies" and "methods" may have limitations but rational thinking per se cannot have any limitations.

You know, some people thought that Fermat's Last Theorem (FLT) would never be proven or disproven because it is analogous to one of those undecidable propositions due to Gödel. I think that such expectations have always been completely irrational and unsubstantiated. FLT is a very well-defined proposition about integers that is clearly either correct or wrong. If it is wrong, there must exist a counterexample. It must be possible to write it down, at least if you forget that our Universe cannot contain more than 10^{120} digits (de Sitter entropy bound) - a fact that hopefully has nothing to do with universal limitations of mathematics. If the theorem is correct, and you bet it is, there may exist a proof and laziness is the only well-understood reason to think that the proof would never be found. Of course, today we know that a proof of FLT exists but some people will only move their statements about the limitations of rational thinking by a few meters.

All the undecidable statements in the context of Gödel's theorems are constructed to exploit a weakness of a particular system of axioms (or language). But there can always exist complementary logical methods that make it possible - and often very easy - to decide about the validity of such statements.

Unknown properties of ground states

Mile Gu et al. argue that some of the systems they consider have ground states whose properties cannot be determined. That's a very strange comment. If a system (a Hilbert space and a Hamiltonian) is fully well-defined, the question about the ground state has an answer. It may be difficult to find it out but it clearly can't be impossible in principle. If formal calculations are too hard and if smart tricks and dualities are unavailable, one may always try numerical calculations or an experiment.

The ground state may either be unique or degenerate. Both options are possible and potentially interesting. None of them makes the questions about the system "undecidable". Materials may behave as Fermi liquids, Bose-Einstein condensates, crystals, or quasicrystals. There's no problem in either. And several different "regimes" may want to co-exist. In that case, we usually deal with phase transitions. They are a part of theoretical physics that is close to condensed matter physics but that doesn't mean that they can't be studied fully rationally, by an application of mathematical methods to the elementary laws.

Quite on the contrary: a major goal of a fundamental physicist's thinking is to determine the different kinds of behavior that a physical system may exhibit. These new phenomena often deserve new concepts, new vocabulary, new (often approximate) equations. They might be called "emergent" by some people. But if they're emergent, that doesn't mean that they can't be derived from a more fundamental theory. Quite on the contrary: the word "emergent" is essentially equivalent to "derived" in this context.

In fact, when Anderson says "more is different", he wants you to believe that "more is more difficult". But in fact, a key insight of modern theoretical physics is that "many is usually easier". If we consider a new limit where something goes to infinity, there typically exists a new dual description of the situation that drastically simplifies. In many cases, the validity of this new description can be proved rigorously. In others, the proof is not yet available but we are basically certain that the dual description is correct. Thermodynamics as a large N limit of statistical physics is an example of the first group; the AdS/CFT correspondence for a large N is an example of the latter group even though a complete proof of the equivalence could emerge soon.

In the reductionist scheme of the world, we are not really aware of a major "gap" that would allow us to confidently say that life cannot be derived from the basic equations of quantum mechanics. Our understanding is not perfect but it is good enough to make the existence of a big gap with dragons very unlikely.

Sociology and the role of history and initial conditions

Even though the complicated effects may be reduced to the elementary processes in principle, it is obvious that different scientists are specialized to understand the world at different levels. Some people care about the fundamental questions; others are interested in numerous composite, usually approximate notions that are independent of the underlying microscopic details. Some people are good at something, others are good are something else.

But none of these things implies that there is something wrong with reductionism.

When we study a class of questions, we need to know several things that can be, roughly speaking, categorized to

• basic objects and concepts
• basic relationships and forces between them and other laws
• history or initial conditions
  
• conventions and terminology
  

Now, a physicist - especially a fundamental physicist - will discard the last entry, conventions and terminology. Almost by definition, they're not a part of physics. They're still needed for people to communicate with others but they're the part that belongs to sociology, not a part of the truth about a natural science. On the other hand, the first category - basic objects - are meant to be essentially mathematical concepts. They're whatever is needed to create a mathematically rigorous framework.

People in other disciplines won't view the difference between the "basic objects" and "terminology" so sharply. Why? It's because they're more sloppy. A part of the sloppiness is justified by the inevitably sloppy character of the questions they're interested in; a part of the sloppiness is not justified by anything.

If you go from fundamental physics all the way to humanities, the importance of the fourth category, "conventions and terminology", will increase. Once you get to the literary criticism, the importance of the latter group will be so huge that, in fact, many of the people will tell you that it is impossible for science to have any meat at all; by "meat", I mean the objective and rigorous "basic concepts". Well, they have never seen any "meat", certainly not in their own discipline, so they suppose that no one else has seen it either. This is a completely opposite attitude to that of fundamental physicists because the latter folks completely dismiss "conventions and terminology" as not being a part of science.

But even if we talk about more serious disciplines such as condensed matter physics, it is true that the difference between the "basic concepts" and "terminology" gets obfuscated a bit. The more "emergent" discipline we consider, the more obfuscated these differences are.

We have spent some time with "basic objects" and "conventions". What about the other categories?

The "basic laws" exist in all disciplines except that the more "emergent" disciplines usually talk about less rigorous, less reliable, and less regular "basic laws" than the laws of fundamental physics. But again, the laws can be derived from more fundamental levels of knowledge i.e. from more "microscopic" disciplines. Even the laws of thermodynamics can be derived from statistical physics even though people like Sean Carroll will never understand how is that possible. Quite typically, what we want to derive is not even accurately formulated so it is not surprising that there is no rigorous proof, either. But this fuzziness of the proofs is due to the inherent fuzziness of the very questions that the emergent disciplines study, not due to a failure of reductionism.

Finally, I haven't discussed the "history and initial conditions" yet.

Once again, it is supposed to play almost no role in particle physics. Experiments are repeatable and the physical laws we're interested in are universally valid. However, the more emergent discipline we consider, the more important "history and initial conditions" typically become.

Physicians study the human body (and do much more material things with it, but we don't want to go in this direction here). Can we derive the approximate DNA of humans from the elementary laws of physics? The answer is obviously No. The humans only evolved the way they did because of millions of coincidences in the evolution of life. Most of them were unpredictable due to the inherent probabilistic character of quantum mechanics.

Nevertheless, whenever you want to predict or retrodict something about the humans, you should better know what the humans are - what is their anatomy, physiology, psychology, and DNA code. This information about the human characteristics may be sold as history or as the information about the world at a particular moment (initial conditions). This important information about the human character will never be derived from the fundamental laws of physics because, as we can prove, the probabilistic nature of the relevant quantum events is indisputable.

Different disciplines need "history" to different extents but I would say that condensed matter physics doesn't need much of it. The more "repeatable" the evidence in a discipline is, the less the discipline depends on the "history". Both particle physics and condensed matter physics are supposed to be "fully repeatable" so they're not about the history.

On the other hand, evolution of animals is not quite "reproducible" in practice which is why the historical component is rather important - although evolutionary biology is surely not just about the history. This component will never be derived from the fundamental laws but there's nothing shocking or disappointing about this fact, either. Random events are not supposed to be predictable.

I could continue up to the history of the civilization where the relative importance of the historical component is even higher. Nevertheless, even this discipline needs to understand some laws (of human behavior etc.). Many of them may be (approximately) derived from more fundamental disciplines.

Fundamental physics itself may depend on the "history", too. The more the anthropic people are correct, the more important a role the "history" played in the selection of the Universe around us from the landscape of the full theory. The more important the "history" was, including its details, the less explainable various crucial features of the world will be.

Let's not forget that the world can also be much more explainable than what almost anyone thinks: the initial conditions of the Universe, normally understood as the information added on top of the laws of physics, can actually be another law of physics (Hartle-Hawking state etc.). However, even this state only tells us about the probabilities and we're not quite sure how essential the probabilistic character of such predictions is.

Summary

If you allow me to summarize, all the accurate results of a discipline can be reduced to mathematical procedures applied to the basic laws of more fundamental disciplines (i.e. to fundamental physics). However, the conventions, terminology (including the useful emergent concepts), and history (including random events that turned out to be important) cannot be derived from the more fundamental disciplines and they play increasingly important roles in increasingly "emergent" disciplines.

But none of these things is an equally good "supplement" of the basic laws of physics. Indeed, the basic laws of physics are supposed to be "complete". In principle, they answer all questions that can be answered. Any independent additional law that would be just "added" would make the union logically inconsistent. The freedom to play this game that avoids contradictions is limited to the conventions, terminology, and history.