Happy New Year 2009

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Thanks to Rae Ann!

2008 will be over tonight. Don't forget about the extra leap second that will be added!

2009 is going to be the International Year of Astronomy and the International Year of Natural Fibres. Recall that strings in string theory are the ultimate natural fibres. The LHC will hopefully begin to generate real data.

Czech EU presidency will replace the old French-led progress towards the New European Soviet. See a new portrait of the Czech president by the Daily Mail and fresh, today's pictures from Klaus' skiing.

If you need to factorize or Romanize,

2009 = 7 * 7 * 41 = MMIX.

Happy New Year!

Feynman: The reason for antiparticles

1986 Dirac memorial lectures:

Playlist (click for 7x 10 minutes)

In the first video, Richard Feynman begins his talk at 4:00.

Klaus: Treaty of Lisbon: a tutorial for beginners

See also: Ireland surrenders: what will Klaus do?

Every single day, I am being surprised how many people ask me what that Treaty of Lisbon is. And how many of them admit that they couldn't say even a few simple words about it to their kids or grandparents. And all of them add: why don't you explain it to us in simple terms? The treaty is not simple but I will try to do it, anyway.



1. The European Union (EU, formerly the European Communities, EC, and the European Economic Community, EEC, before that) is defined by treaties signed by the member states. These treaties are commonly named after the place where they were signed. The first treaties were the so-called Treaties of Rome in 1957. So far the latest one is the Treaty of Nice from 2001.

2. All these treaties - except for the first one - elaborate upon and modify the previous treaties. In other words, they have no meaning if separated. It is not even possible to understand them unless we have access to the other treaties. Each treaty represents either a gradual or fundamental shift of the European integration process towards closer, tighter, and greater unification and centralization and towards the weakening of the positions and competences of the member states.

3. There used to be a special treaty that was supposed to be radically new and it was therefore named differently, too - it was the 2004 European Constitution (or the Constitutional Treaty). Former prime minister Mr Gross signed it on behalf of the Czech Republic. That treaty differed both by its scope as well its form (it was a comprehensive text that was replacing all the previous treaties). This fact led - together with the word "Constitution" included in its name as well as its text - to the need to organize referenda in many countries in order to approve it. We know the result: the 2005 referenda in France and the Netherlands have rejected it.

4. In the context of the German EU presidency in the first half of 2007, Chancellor Ms Merkel succeeded in convincing the member states (including the Czech Republic, represented by prime minister Mr Topolánek) that the only "defect" of the Constitutional Treaty was purely:

- its form, because the Constitution was written as a comprehensive text. Because of this form, it was possible both to read it and understand it;

- and a few flagrant things reminding the readers that the EU is becoming a country (flag, anthem, president, national holiday, etc.) and ceases to be an international organization.

That's why she proposed to rewrite the Constitutional Treaty as a completely different text, namely as a collection of appendices to the existing treaties. That approach was approved in June 2007 and because the text was being completed in the second half of the year during the Portuguese EU presidency, it was named the Treaty of Lisbon.

5. However, this "new" treaty is not a marginal, and certainly not a small addition (or amendment) to the existing treaties. It fundamentally transforms the currently valid treaties. Despite this fact, the political elites agreed that they would try to approve this treaty in the national parliaments (to make sure that simple voters wouldn't reject the treaty again). Moreover, the treaty was being ratified extremely quickly in most countries and it has been confirmed that a few countries ratified the treaty without having its translation into their local language. The Czech Republic, where the treaty is subject to intense political scrutiny, became an exception. That's why in the Czech Republic - the only EU member country - the treaty hasn't been ratified. In fact, it hasn't even been seriously negotiated. The Polish and German parliaments have approved the treaty but the respective presidents haven't yet signed it.

6. A specific case is Ireland whose constitution requires that a referendum must take place to approve a similar document. The referendum occurred in June 2008 and the result was NO. Because the existing EU treaties require unanimous approval, one country is enough to bury the document.

The EU is thus waiting for

- a possible new referendum in Ireland

- the results of the negotiations in the Czech Republic

- signatures of the Polish and German presidents.

The German president is waiting for the statement from the German Constitutional Court and the Polish president, who has his own objections against the document, doesn't want to be the man who pushes the Irish to a new poll.

7. By its essence, the Treaty of Lisbon is the rejected Constitutional Treaty because all important aspects have been kept. This observation was explicitly confirmed even by the original negotiator of the Constitutional Treaty, the former French president Giscard d'Estaing. "The proposed institutional reforms, the only ones which mattered to the drafting convention, are all to be found in the Treaty of Lisbon. They have merely been ordered differently and split up between previous treaties." (The Independent, October 30th, 2007)

8. What are the main changes of the status quo that the treaty wants to make?

a) The Treaty of Lisbon is extensively transferring the competences from the individual member states to the "Brussels" i.e. to the EU bodies. They also include very sensitive political questions concerned with social policies, energy policies, indirect taxation, justice, security, military policies, foreign policy, etc. (It is even planned that the European Police, allowed to act throughout the EU, should be created.)

b) The treaty introduces competences that are typical for a federal state (however without the usual guarantees - even the pledges included in the Czechoslovak federal constitution valid until the end of 1992 are absent). It creates a category of exclusive competences of the union that are put above the competences of the individual countries. While the "competence sharing" i.e. the sharing of sovereignty has been the defining characteristic so far, the treaty envisions a new "European" sovereignty. Also, the new so-called supportive EU competence is being created that allows the EU to carry out actions into resorts such as "protection and improvement of human health, industry, culture, tourism, education, vocational training, youth, and sport, civil protection, administrative cooperation...". In other words, the EU will be able to intefere with practically all aspects of the countries' life. This fact is all but amplified by the treaty's failure to mention any "exclusive competences" of the member countries, i.e. a list of policies that should never be controlled from the central EU level.

c) The treaty brings a majority voting to 50 types of decisions that have been requiring unanimous voting so far. The member countries are losing one of the aspects of their sovereignty (the ability to avoid initiatives that they don't like).

d) The EU is newly defined as a legal subject which is very close to the creation of a new country.

e) The strength of the smaller countries' voting power, including the Czech one, is reduced while the relative importance of the larger countries is being increased. The principle of the equality of the countries is being suppressed while the population becomes more important. That's why the relative strength of a German vote would roughly be going to double while the relative strength of a Czech vote would be cut in half.

f) The so-called passerelle allows the European Council (27 heads of governments or states) to decide that a majority voting may be adopted even in policies that are normally subject to unanimity voting.

g) The treaty includes a very broadly conceived Charter of fundamental rights of the EU. This charter would be as strong as the Treaty of Lisbon itself and it will therefore expect priority over the national constitutions such as ours.

9. The Treaty of Lisbon is a step back towards the rejected European Constitution. It is a document that represents a substantial shift from a Europe of countries to a Europe of one European state. It means a shift from a voluntary and repeatedly negotiated and confirmed collaboration of the European countries in thousands of particular questions towards a forever valid dominance of the union's institutions and bodies over the member countries' institutions and bodies. The treaty leads to a deepening of the democratic deficit.

10. So far, the Czech parliament has the right to decide about all these issues. If the treaty ever becomes valid, this ability of the parliament will cease to exist.

Václav Klaus, MF Dnes, December 27th, 2008
(translation: L.Motl)

See also: a German translation; a Polish translation

Richard Feynman, Mr X, and the arrow of time

As we have mentioned, on Christmas Eve, Sean Carroll began to understand that the previous 40 years of his thinking about the arrow of time had been plagued by elementary, childish mistakes. In his very recent text

Have a Thermodynamically Consistent Christmas,

he announced that he finally understood that subsystems with opposite arrows of time cannot co-exist and interact in the same Universe, i.e. that the arrow of time is and must be universal. That was a pretty radical departure from his previous writings that included "pearls" such as

Incompatible Arrows I
Incompatible Arrows II
Incompatible Arrows III
Incompatible Arrows IV
The Arrow of Time in Scientific American
Latest Declamations about the Arrow of Time

and dozens of similarly dumb articles - including bizarre fairy-tales about the Boltzmann Brains - that he has written over the years. In all these texts, Carroll had promoted the absurd opinion that incompatible arrows of time are a priori allowed to co-exist and the origin of the second law of thermodynamics lies in cosmology (wrong), and not in statistical physics (correct).

In the newest article at Cosmic Variance,

Richard Feynman on Boltzmann Brains,

Carroll mentions Feynman's attitude to the problem. Feynman thought the same thing about these issues as every sufficiently intelligent and independently thinking person does after having looked into the problem at least for a few days. 

For example, the hypothesis of the Boltzmann Brains - namely that we are just a low-entropy fluctuation in a high-entropy world - can be easily ruled out because it predicts that virtually everything in the Universe (that is unnecessary for our brains to exist) should be found in a disordered state without a consistent history - but the prediction is falsified as soon as you see that there seem to be other objects that apparently follow from an organized, meaningful past - an argument we have mentioned repeatedly at TRF.

It's really not a big deal. The Boltzmann Brain hypothesis can be falsified by any tiny amount of empirical evidence. Also, no physical or cosmological theory - as opposed to a philosophical theory - can ever predict that we should be Boltzmann Brains. If it could make such a prediction, that would make it inconsistent with the very basic observations. 

Obviously, no kind of cosmology - neither inflationary nor cyclic nor other cosmology - is inconsistent with the existence of objects of an increasing entropy and with their basic qualitative "local" behavior. It follows that no such theory can be predicting that we are the Boltzmann Brains, and everyone who thinks that such a prediction is generated is making a trivial logical mistake. Sadly, there are hundreds if not thousands of wrong papers built on this meme.

But Feynman's opinions about this issue were not only much closer to mine than Carroll wants you to believe. They were also much more militant. ;-) You may read a text by Stephen Hawking,

The No Boundary Condition And The Arrow Of Time

in a book called "Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry".

In this article, Hawking talks about what he considers the greatest scientific blunder of his life (rightfully, in my opinion): Hawking used to think (because of some arguments based on the imaginary time) that the logical arrow of time is bound to be aligned with the cosmological arrow of time given by the expansion of the Universe.

But at the beginning, he talks about a conference on the direction of time that took place at Cornell in 1963. A lot of nonsense, pretty much identical to the nonsense printed by Sean Carroll during his previous life, has been said on the conference. Stephen Hawking explains that Richard Feynman considered the proceedings so worthless - he was so disgusted - that he didn't want his name to be associated with them. So he was referred to as Mr X even though everyone has always known that Mr X was no one else than Richard Feynman.

You know, when Feynman was determining the right QED propagators, a work that was initiated by his and Wheeler's research of advanced and retarded waves, he has made some important insights about the direction of time in the fundamental formulation of the physical laws. He realized that the propagators must be half-advanced, half-retarded, a rule that is equivalent to the "i epsilon" prescription in the momentum space. This rule reflects one of the aspects of the microscopic time-reversal symmetry.

However, when it came to the observed time asymmetry, Richard Feynman realized what your humble correspondent and every sensible person does: the arrow of time is always a consequence of ordinary statistical mechanics. Read the bottom of page 346 in Hawking's article. 

In fact, the arrow of time always follows from ordinary statistical mechanics. QED is just an example but all these arrows of time - all thermodynamic and logical arrows of time associated with friction, heat transfers, decoherence, or memory of humans or computers or anything else - are always aligned with each other. 

Using the words of Mr X, matter is thermodynamically one-sided. It has the disposition to damp when you shake it. The hypothetical anti-thermodynamic matter is just an image of the normal matter, and the two arrows can't ever co-exist. The time-asymmetric logic or thermodynamics does not contradict the T- (or CPT-) symmetric microsopic laws in any way. And whatever words you identify as the "ultimate reason for the thermodynamic asymmetry", it is a basic and true fact about the real world. A very important one.

It's of course fair to say that we don't understand the very origin of the Universe and the beginning of the Universe is connected with a very low-entropy state. But it is an entirely different thing to say that the very ordinary phenomena that we observe today are not properly understood by the physical laws as we know them. The latter proposition is absurd and the misunderstanding is only a testimony of the incompetence of many cosmologists as physicists rather than a testimony of an incompleteness of the laws of physics as we know them.

Of course, the 1963 conference was not the first cosmological conference that drove Feynman up the wall. :-) In 1962, he wrote a famous letter to his wife about another cosmological conference in Warsaw:

"I am not getting anything out of the meeting. I am learning nothing. Because there are no experiments, this field is not an active one, so few of the best men are doing work in it. The result is that there are hosts of dopes here (126) and it is not good for my blood pressure. Remind me not to come to any more gravity conferences!"

Well, not much has changed about similar conferences during the last 45+ years. There are still hosts of dopes over there who discuss nonsense. But maybe, once Sean Carroll realized that he's been saying nonsense about similar issues for years and as soon as he starts to pretend that he has been saying the very opposite thing than what he was ;-), rational reasoning could perhaps return to these debates.

La Niña conditions are back

According to the newest, today's weekly ENSO status report, La Niña conditions are back and they are likely to continue at least for a few months.



Video 1: Twelve days of global warming: compare with the Xmas versions. Thanks to Anthony Watts & Minnesotans for Global Warming. ;-)

Commercial: Dr Roy Spencer (UAH) has a new, more professional website dedicated to the climate than ever before.

Bob McElrath, gravitons are not made out of dust

Attempts to "construct" gravity out of easy-to-imagine ingredients have become a modern counterpart of medieval alchemy.

The alchemists believed that by "cooking" the ordinary metals just a little bit differently from their predecessors, they could have produced gold, silver, or the elixir of life. 

A mostly unrelated commercial break: N. Sriram has sent me a beautiful essay by Paul Graham about heresies and taboos now and then, "What You Can't Say"

The contemporary gravitational alchemists believe that by combining random ordinary particles and mathematical indices just a little bit differently than their predecessors, they can explain the gravitational force in layman's terms. They're probably driven by the laymen's desire to make gravity look closer to our everyday life: see Feynman's comments about LeSage's theory of gravity at 5:20 of his Messenger 2 Lecture for a similar sociological example.

Needless to say, both beliefs are equally scientifically ludicrous and unsupportable. The difference between gold and iron is more profound than the question how much time you spend by "cooking" the iron. Analogously, the difference between gravitons and random composite states of random particles is more profound than the shape of mathematical indices or the percentage of different kinds of condensed matter papers that are being cited.

John Conway has promoted another paper about this new alchemy,

Emergent electroweak gravity

by Bob McElrath. Gravitons are bound states of neutrinos, the author boldly claims. I know that Prof Conway is able to do all kinds of things but his excitement about this type of manifest nonsense represents such a complete failure of judgment about so many fundamental questions of physics that I am simply unable to fully respect Prof Conway as a physicist. 

At the same moment, I realize that similar papers represent the kind of crap that the laymen and semi-laymen want to hear which means that any talk about serious physics in front of the broader public becomes casting pearls before swines: most people are just very stupid. Like hundreds of similar papers about the "subject", McElrath's preprint is based on the following sequence of seven steps:

• the author has to convince himself that his paper will be better than the previous hundreds of analogous papers even though it is pretty much isomorphic garbage
• a new favorite and surprising condensed matter phenomenon has to be picked and promoted 
• it must be argued that this effect has something to do with gravity and its special features even though it obviously hasn't
• spinors must appear somewhere in the story and because they are more mysterious for the laymen (and the author) than other representations, they play an important role in the self-brainwashing procedure
• the meaning of the mathematical indices must be sufficiently obscured so that the author himself forgets what they mean and what is the actual spin of various particles in his construction
• the no-go theorems are claimed to be "circumvented" because the "new" construction avoids an assumption; this assumption is either paramount for the inner workings of gravity (especially the diffeomorphism symmetry, linked to the equivalence principle, and the Lorentz symmetry), or it can easily be dropped or replaced in order to prove a morally equivalent no-go theorem (e.g. by adding a small cosmological constant)
• because the "new" construction makes it necessary to replace pretty much all of cosmology by something else, the author must deny that he has ever heard anything about cosmology.

Let us now look at these steps one by one. At the very end, I will discuss why gravitons can "emerge" out of something else in string theory (e.g. a string) and why it is easy to see that this property of string theory can't be shared by any other idea that has ever been considered.

Fake originality

The first step needed to write a similar paper is for the author to convince himself that he has some original ideas - which should also explain why everyone else has previously failed. So McElrath also says that "no workable theory has been yet constructed". If he honestly looked at what he has, he would realize that no workable theory can be constructed by his methods, either. But he simply doesn't give a damn.

There are hundreds of people who are profoundly confused by the basic features of gravity and they have argued that gravity can "emerge" out of dozens of unrelated (but mutually related) phenomena. These people differ in details but they share the key belief that there is nothing special about gravity. Much like gold in the medieval alchemy, it can surely be "constructed" out of ordinary metals and liquids. Their goal is really not to look at (and explain) the precise numbers and principles that every event in the world seems to respect. They prefer sloppy theories that produce random chaotic junk - the material they really enjoy - which is later claimed to be equivalent to Nature. Well, it's not.

The list of people who have "worked" on similar silly stuff is long and includes names like Garrett Lisi, Fabrizio Nesti, Roberto Percacci, Lee Smolin, Ingo Kirsch, and many others. All of these authors seem to be confused by basic representation theory, the difference between spacetime and internal symmetries, the meaning of the equivalence principle, and other things. None of these papers is qualitatively better than others - all of them are extremely sloppy about issues that are completely fundamental for the very character of gravity.

A new favorite condensed matter effect

The second step requires the author to pick a favorite effect by which "gravity" can "emerge". For no good reasons, McElrath chose neutrinos to be the fundamental building blocks of gravitons. Gravitons are supposed to be massless and because the Goldstone bosons are also massless, many of the contemporary alchemists are led to believe that gravitons are Goldstone bosons of some kind.

Because Goldstone bosons also appear in superconductivity, many authors like to argue that gravity is a kind of superconductivity. McElrath is one of them. So he wants gravity to arise from superconductivity of something like Cooper pairs of neutrinos of some kind. His favorite phenomenon is the Kohn-Luttinger effect, a mechanism as old as half a century that implies that Cooper pairs may arise from a strictly repulsive interaction, too.

Non-existent links between Cooper pairs and gravity

It's surely interesting that one can obtain a replacement for these "bound states" in a strictly repulsive condensed matter system. But does it have something to do with gravity and its defining characteristics? The answer is a resounding No. The only valid and transparent enough relationship between Cooper pairs and gravity is that Sheldon Cooper is a string theorist. ;-)

The defining characteristics of gravity is the equivalence principle, the masslessness of its carriers (the infinitely long range of the force, related to the well-known power-law decrease), and the gravitons' spin equal to two (its coupling to the stress-energy tensor that has two indices). None of these features has an explanation in terms of the neutrino Cooper pairs. In fact, all of these features directly contradict the superconducting picture, as we will see. The repulsive superconductivity may look "cool" but it has nothing to do with gravity. 

One may drink a lot of alcohol so that this obvious conclusion becomes fuzzy but the sober people may still realize that the conclusion is true and unchanged: there doesn't exist a single rational link between gravity and these condensed matter papers.

Mysterious spinors

Spinors are representations of orthogonal groups that are more surprising than more ordinary tensor representations with vectorial indices. I guess that at some moment of her life (perhaps as a college student), pretty much every physicist was surprised by the very existence of spinors. However, it is also important to make another step. At the end, spinors must become just another mundane representation, just another piece of basic knowledge that can be used as a building block for more advanced research.

Most people simply never become "adult physicists" in this sense. For example, Peter Woit wrote exactly one preprint during the last two decades that pretends to offer "positive material" rather than just hateful anti-scientific whining. The very idea of this nonsensical 0-citation paper is a mysterious role that the author attributes to spinors and the Dirac operator.

Once a student learns her representation theory, there is nothing mysterious about spinors whatsoever and one simply can't make a paper look more "cool" or "serious" or "promising" just by including spinors. Nevertheless, a divine task is associated with spinors in most of the "emergent" papers about gravity. McElrath's is no exception.

The spin of the graviton

The most widespread technical "trick" in these papers is a confusing notation concerning mathematical indices. The authors often convince themselves that objects have a different spin than they actually have. What do I mean?

Almost all of the alchemists introduce some kind of internal symmetry group whose meaning is being obscured until the authors themselves begin to think that the symmetry group geometrically acts on spacetime, after all. Well, there's still a huge difference between spacetime symmetries and internal symmetries but these alchemists simply fool themselves so that they don't see it.

There are many ways to see why this distinction cannot ever evaporate and why these people are just brainwashing themselves.

Begin with the spin of the messenger particles. If your force resembles gravity in general relativity, the messengers' spin must equal two. That's because they arise from perturbations of the metric, "h_{mn}", and this tensor has two indices because it must be coupled to the stress-energy tensor. The latter has two vectorial indices, too. It must be so because it determines the density-and-current vector (one index) of the energy-momentum vector (another index).

Now, the statement that the graviton's spin equals two is not just about some bureaucratic sleight-of-hand or a feature of your conventions how you write your indices. It is a very physical feature of the excitation. Take the minimum nonzero energy of the gravitational waves at a certain frequency. By basic rules of quantum mechanics, the energy must be quantized in units of "E=hf". 

The elementary quantum of energy carried by these waves, the physical graviton, will have the projection of the angular momentum to the direction of motion equal to "+-2 hbar". You may imagine that your graviton is composed out of neutrinos or dust or dirt. But if the physical spin won't be "+-2 hbar" once you're finished, it is easy to show that the induced interactions won't agree with general relativity. And the difference won't be small in any sense. The theory will be instantly falsified.

What is the spin of the Goldstone bosons arising from a broken symmetry? Well, inconveniently enough for the alchemists, the spin is equal to the spin of the conserved charge associated with the broken symmetry. Any theory qualitatively resembling the real world that has nontrivial interactions only admits conserved charges whose spin is one of these three numbers:

• 0
• 1/2
• 1

Most of the conserved charges, such as the electric charge, have spin zero. If the corresponding symmetry is spontaneously broken - like in superconductivity - the resulting massless Goldstone bosons will have spin zero, too. You will never construct spacetime tensors out of these objects. Ordinary Goldstone bosons, such as the phase of the Cooper pair "wave function", are massless spinless fields. Whenever the broken symmetry is a part of a local symmetry, the Goldstone bosons are eaten to become the longitudinal polarizations of the massive gauge bosons.

Supersymmetry is the only type of symmetry with nonzero spin that can come in many "flavors" - I am talking about the extended supersymmetry algebra with many spin-1/2 generators. If supersymmetry is spontaneously broken, one encounters Goldstone particles, too. In this case, the generators of the symmetry were fermionic, so the Goldstone particles are fermions rather than bosons: they are called the goldstinos and they have spin-1/2. In theories where the supersymmetry is local - which are inevitably supergravity theories (because the anticommutators of local supersymmetries involve local translations, thus including diffeomorphisms to the local algebra) - goldstinos are eaten to become new polarizations of massive gravitinos.

The only other conserved continuous quantity in Nature is the energy-momentum vector associated with the space-time (actually time-space, to match energy-momentum) translational symmetry. There can only exist one copy of such a conserved current. There can exist neither additional spin-1 conserved quantities nor higher-spin conserved quantities. If you assumed that such additional conservation laws exist, you could easily prove that the interactions would effectively have to vanish (as in the Coleman-Mandula theorem and its variations) because the required conservation laws for so many components of tensors would be far too constraining.

The rotational (and Lorentz) symmetries change the asymptotic location of points in spacetime so dramatically that the corresponding modes are not normalizable and one can't get any new "Goldstone bosons" out of them. So let me only mention what are the Goldstone bosons arising from the spontaneous breakdown of the spin-1 conserved (translational) symmetries. Indeed, these symmetries may be broken, too.

For example, if you place a brane at "z=0" in space, you break the SO(3,1) Lorentz symmetry (semidirectly multipled by R^4 of translations) down to SO(2,1) (semidirectly multiplied by R^3 of translations). Because of this breakdown, it makes sense to consider the SO(2,1) vector indices to be the only geometric ones. In this classification, the Goldstone boson is nothing else than the "z = z(x,y,t)" coordinate of the brane. Because of the translational symmetry of the laws of physics before we included the brane, the brane can be anywhere and it can wiggle: its height "z" is a massless scalar field in 2+1 dimensions.

None of these Goldstone particles can ever look like the graviton. Every single paper that claims that the author can obtain a spin-2 tensor out of similar Goldstone particles is fooling himself by assuming that an internal index is actually a geometrical one. For example, some other authors think that diffeomorphisms are related to SO(3,1) or GL(4,R) or something like that. Because the latter are similar groups to Yang-Mills gauge groups, these people think that it is pretty much the same thing.

But technically speaking, it is not the same thing at all. The Yang-Mills symmetry doesn't act on spacetime while the diffeomorphism symmetry does. The corresponding messenger particles have spin-1 or spin-2, respectively. These are technically different things and there exists no "duality" or "equivalence" between spin-1 fields and spin-2 fields in the same spacetime. Everyone who thinks that he has found such an equivalence is fooling himself by a mistake that is as obvious as the mistake in the identity "1=2" - if you look at it from the correct angle.

This particular alchemist, Bob McElrath, "proves" the "1=2" equation using his own trick. He argues that there is an enhanced symmetry of his neutrino dynamics, "SO(3,1)_{space} x SO(3,1)_{spin}". It is broken "only" by the kinetic terms, he says (and by most other physical phenomena, he doesn't say). If things were described by his theory and if objects couldn't move and interact ;-), there would be an enhanced symmetry. Well, but it's broken: there is only one set of independent rotations of space and boosts of spacetime in Nature. 

Because it's broken, we should classify the generic physical objects according to the unbroken SO(3,1) Lorentz group only. I am always free to classify things according to the unbroken group, in order to gain an insight. Other people may hide their eyes from such insights but that doesn't make these insights disappear. Under this real, physically meaningful group, one that actually has to exist, the gravitons have spin-2 while the Goldstone bosons have spin-0. There's simply no way to make the "1=2" or "0=2" identities valid. People may fool themselves by choosing confusing indices or confusing names for their groups and by combining these groups into half-internal, half-geometric symmetries but they can't fool Mother Nature: gravitons have different spins than Goldstone bosons and they will always have.

Circumventing no-go theorems

All these papers are safely killed by the Weinberg-Witten theorem, among others. Bob McElrath agrees with this assertion but he seems to suggest that his model can survive. The Weinberg-Witten theorem is an extremely powerful physical argument - a more valuable and robust result than all the alchemist papers combined. The theorem actually tells us how Nature can work or does work and how it cannot work - which is often a different thing from the laymen's desires how Nature should work. That's a fact that the alchemists generally misunderstand. They just find the theorem inconvenient so they just try to throw it away in one way or another.

But in physics, what matters are correct results, not convenient results.

Many alchemists find an assumption in the theorem that they claim not to be satisfied which - they believe - allows them to ignore the theorem completely. For example, Garrett Lisi has argued that the theorem assumed the cosmological constant to be zero. Because it is now believed to be nonzero - a fact that is supposed to be incorporated into Lisi's theory - the assumptions of the theorem don't apply and the theorem can be ignored, Lisi thinks.

Of course, if someone is both lazy and stupid, he can say that the rigorous proof no longer applies. But if he were somewhat more intelligent and if he understood the essence of the Weinberg-Witten argument, he would know that the logic still kills the theories: it is easy to construct a variation of the Weinberg-Witten proof that is still doing the same job. 

Local physics of our Universe agrees with a theory with a vanishing cosmological constant up to small corrections of order 10^{-123} in Planck units. So any conclusion about the local physics based on the assumption of a vanishing cosmological constant is going to be correct up to small errors of order 10^{-123} (or its reasonable positive power), too. 

An effect that is as tiny as the cosmological constant in the real world simply can't "qualitatively" change these conclusions. Composite gravity remains impossible. In fact, variations of the theorem hold exactly for spacetimes with a nonzero cosmological constant even though my argument only guaranteed that they must hold almost exactly.

However, McElrath chooses another assumption of the Weinberg-Witten theorem that is invalid in his model which is why he thinks that he can ignore the theorem. Because of the presence of a physical background, the diffeomorphism symmetry is broken and the theorem ... doesn't apply. 

But if the diffeomorphism symmetry is broken, it is a huge problem for any model of gravity. In fact, even if it is broken, one can reformulate any theory as a diffeomorphism-invariant one by adding some auxiliary fields. If the symmetry is broken, there will be symmetry-breaking terms. It can be shown that these diffeomorphism symmetry breaking terms will violate the equivalence principle, too (unless they can be absorbed to field redefinitions). Because the latter holds - either completely accurately or almost accurately - these terms must be extremely tiny.

Unless someone claims to have a theory that explains all the dimensionless parameters in Nature, including the very tiny ones, in terms of fixed and calculable constants, his theory must allow a "simplified" limit where the diff-breaking terms are set to zero (much like the cosmological constant). That's really the zeroth approximation he should be talking about in the first plcae because it is surely much more relevant as a description of reality than a theory where the diff-symmetry is broken by terms of order one. If he can't construct any diff-symmetric theory, it pretty much proves that he can't possibly have any theory that agrees with the observed effects of gravity.

The diffeomorphism symmetry plays a completely crucial role in the inner workings of gravity. It is the actual gold inside the gravitational jewel. The equivalence principle is the "miracle", the feature of gravity that is actually both experimentally supported (with an impressive accuracy) and theoretically far-reaching. McElrath throws this gold into trash bin in order to replace it with some superconducting crap. Other champions of "spinor gravity", "superconducting gravity", "graviweak gravity", "surfer dude gravity", and their siblings are doing the same thing.

Ignoring cosmology

McElrath et al. ignores the equivalence principle and other essential features of gravity. But of course, he has to ignore much more. For example, he wants you to believe that gravity as we know it only works at distances longer than the neutrino length scale. This meme has been marketed as the "fat graviton" in the past in order to explain the smallness of the cosmological constant. There was at least some motivation - one that McElrath seems to be unfamiliar with.

Instead, McElrath tells you that gravity didn't work in the way it does today when the energy density was much higher than it is today. In fact, with his particular version of a "fat graviton", the gravity would be modified almost instantly - whenever the density is higher than today. However, the Big Bang cosmology has been verified at least up to the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis - when the energy density approached the QCD values - about 50 orders of magnitude higher than it is today (i.e. 50 orders of magnitude higher than what McElrath's theory could explain even if you ignored all the trouble with the wrong spins and the equivalence principle).

McElrath is silent about these issues. Does he care? Does he think that anyone who denies the modern relativistic description of gravity has to give his own, completely new explanation for the equivalence principle as well as all the observed aspects of cosmology? An explanation that must surprisingly lead to pretty much the same results - otherwise it is experimentally ruled out - even though the essence of his theory seems completely different? There seems to be absolutely nothing about these alchemist theories that works. What is driving its champions? Is it a rational driver?

Emergent gravity in string theory

Gravitons can't emerge out of neutrinos, dust, bottles of beer, or any other "random" ingredients, as argued above. Gravity is very "universal" and it is inevitably associated with the only spin-1 conserved charge (energy-momentum) that can exist in an interacting world. It couples to all forms of energy and momentum, as checked by the tests of the equivalence principle.

However, you could be puzzled why there are gravitons in string theory. For example, in perturbative string theory, gravitons are identified with a particular energy eigenstate of a vibrating string. A string is just another object. Shouldn't all the anti-neutrino arguments apply?

Well, they don't because a string is not "just another random object". In fact, everything in a stringy world is made out of strings (or their nonperturbative "generalization", M, if you wish). The real difference between strings and neutrinos is that one can actually prove that the equivalence principle and/or diffeomorphism symmetry is exactly satisfied in string theory while it is certainly violated in the case of neutrino bound states.

In perturbative string theory, it is the state-operator correspondence that saves the day. There exists a one-to-one map between the states of a single string and the local operators on the string world sheet. According to this map, the state of a closed string identified as the "graviton" is mapped to a local operator that equals the variation of the world sheet Lagrangian with respect to the external geometry (metric tensor).

It follows that if you add closed strings in the particular graviton internal vibrational mode in your spacetime, the effect on other strings will be exactly identical as if you instruct all other strings in the world to propagate on a modified geometric background. And because everything is made out of strings, the equivalence principle will hold for everyone. All strings will accelerate equally in the gravitational field - in the field with a condensate of the particular closed strings.

But this argument hasn't changed anything about the precious value of the equivalence principle and its ability to kill almost every wrong idea instantly. Instead, it has replaced this jewel by its perturbative stringy counterpart - by the state-operator correspondence. We can actually show that the equivalence principle is going to be respected if the particular closed strings fill the space. If we couldn't prove such a thing, we would have no right to say that string theory is a theory of gravity.

Analogously important but surprisingly different arguments exist in other approaches to string theory, including Matrix theory (where gravitons are made out of D0-branes or noncommutative membranes) and AdS-CFT (where they're represented by the stress-energy tensor of the boundary theory). All these mechanisms how gravity may "emerge" are connected - we may say that the unifying principle is the existence of string theory itself.

But if your theory ignores the equivalence principle, doesn't guarantee that the principle is valid, and doesn't replace the principle by any other effectively equivalent principle, it simply makes no sense to argue that your theory is a theory of gravity. As a theory of gravity, your theory is instantly and safely dead: it is ruled out by very accurate measurements that it has no chance to agree with. If you say that you have a theory of gravity nevertheless, you are a crackpot, and if you promote such "theories of gravity" in your articles, you can't distinguish crap and gold.

And that's the memo.

Windows Movie Maker: unspecified error

I couldn't run Movie Maker 2.1. It immediately gave me an "Unspecified Error" popup message. Movie Maker 2.6 behaved in the same way. I learned that it worked fine for other users.

It turned out that the temporary directory got wrong read-only file permissions - who knows why. 

A fix: Go to Start / Accessories / Command Prompt, right-click this program, Run [it] as administrator. Get to your user directory and change the attributes by the attrib command:

cd c:\users\lubos\appdata\local
attrib -r +a -s -h Temp

The path is designed for Vista: replace "lubos" by your user name. For XP, "Users" becomes "Documents and Settings" while "Local" becomes "Local Settings". If the tip works for you, leave a comment here.

Czech EU presidency: January 2009 program

In six days, the Czech Republic will take over the EU presidency. 

A leader with Napoleon complex who loves the financial crisis, irrational fears of a changing weather, and wars in the Caucasus because they are tools to "prove" his own greatness will be replaced by a tall, pragmatic, down-to-earth prime minister of a country with a brilliant president.



We will show Europe the sweet taste of its own medicine...

It may be a good time to buy things like the European stocks right now because the Czech government is likely to adopt a more rational attitude towards the turmoil in the economy. They will not emphasize the "catastrophic crisis" every day in order to increase their importance and they won't try to intervene everywhere. After a dramatic drop during the counterproductive French presidency, it may be reasonable to expect a Czech bounce, not to be confused with a bouncing cheque.

You shouldn't expect much from the EU presidency because it is mostly an administrative job. However, as a climate skeptic who is located in Europe, you should be able to resist attempts of your environment to marginalize you during H1 of 2009. Don't forget that the continent is officially led by some of the world's most prominent climate skeptics, to the dismay of all the liars and fraudsters in the world's politically correct media.

See a new, unusually neutral BBC portrait of Václav Klaus.

Czech ministers are in charge

However, what the presidency actually means is that the Czech ministers will become the "leaders" of groups of their colleagues from the EU countries. They will invite them to Prague and other places in Czechia to chat and to have a lunch, coffee, and tea. As hosts, they may be more visible, but because they must also cook, they may actually have less time for more serious work. ;-) 

Once again, don't expect miracles: try to do them yourself.

Here is the program for January 2009:

• 07 Jan, Prague: Czech government meets the European Commission (government EU) in the Lobkowicz palace: chat about energy security and transatlantic relations
• 07 Jan, Prague: European year of creativity and innovation (2009) starts: expect a lot of nice clichés about the importance of creativity and innovation that will probably lead nowhere
• 08 Jan, Prague: General Affairs Council: a gala opening in the National Theater plus a dinner in the Municipal House, followed by talks about energy security and transatlantic relations
• 08-09 Jan, Prague: Gender Mainstreaming: eurofeminists will meet at a "high level working group meeting" to prepare new plans to phase out men out of the society: the Czech presidency can't change anything about the existence of this movement
• 15-16 Jan, Prague: Justice and Home Affairs: the ministers of these two resorts will discuss safe technologies, technology helping security, mutual recognition of crime matters, and future of the family law
• 22-23 Jan, Prague: Ministers of innovation: INCOM, a conference of ministers for innovation, creativity, and development
• 22-24 Jan, Luhačovice (spa): Employment and social affairs: EU ministers chat about their social bullshit
• 29-30 Jan, Prague: Development ministers: discussions about the financial crisis will include some people from the EU commission
• 29-30 Jan, Ostrava (Northeast coal capital of the country): Energy security and common electricity market: a conferenec about the harmonization of the laws, transmission

Merry Christmas

Below this Christmas posting, you can find newer non-Christmas postings, too!



TRF wishes the readers, including atheists, pagans, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and last but not least Christians, Merry Christmas! ;-)

White Christmas with Bing Crosby (written by Irving Berlin) remains the best-selling single in any music category ever. By the way, Marjorie Reynolds' 1942 looks, haircut, and fashion remains pretty hot in my eyes: not much "progress" for the last 66 years.

Emergent spacetime from modular motives

Once again, I believe that the best hep-th article today is the first one. Rolf Schimmrigk wrote about

Emergent spacetime from modular motives (PDF)

Schimmrigk's work may sound as hardcore mathematics - and it arguably is - but don't forget that there are millions of people who are familiar with his name: the readers of "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene. ;-)

The term "motive" sounds very mysterious, mathematically obscure, and these papers contain a lot of other jargon of category theory (also known as "general abstract nonsense"), too. However, the goal of all of these fancy things is to actually make things more physical, not less physical. For example, there are all kinds of homologies that are morally equivalent - including de Rham cohomology, Betti cohomology, and Čech cohomology (yes, the last name of Eduard Čech is a Czech name and it means Czech).

While a physicist would simply adopt these notions as being equivalent, mathematicians can't do so. Instead, Alexander Grothendieck had to visualize an enigmatic object, the motive, that unifies all the moral and morally equivalent ideas underlying various kinds of homology. The motive is supposed to unify all essential features of a manifold. You can see the "very big picture", quasi-religious sentiments penetrating all these words that make the situation analogous to M-theory before it was demystified.

After all, "motives" begin with an "M", too, so M-theory could be a M(otive) theory, too. :-)

However, many of these notions in the theory of motives have been given rigorous definitions and exact results have been proven. Schimmrigk is now using the spiritual flavor of motives ;-) to reconstruct spacetime geometry from a conformal field theory. So you should immediately notice that his emergent geometry is linked to perturbative string theory, not necessarily to "all of string theory", and as we know, the geometry that emerges from a particular CFT is not unique (due to mirror symmetry and related dualities).

It turns out that the world sheet modular invariance, despite its being superficially unrelated to any spacetime geometry because of its "internal world sheet character", is actually the key tool to reconstruct a spacetime geometry from an abstract CFT. So far this stuff looks like babbling so get ready for a cultural shock, an example. 

Take a degree-twelve hypersurface in the weighted projective space CP_(2,2,2,3,3). Note that this projective space is complex four-dimensional, so the hypersurface is a complex three-dimensional manifold. Schimmrigk's story associates an Omega-motivic L-function described by the series

L_Omega(X₃¹²,s) = 1 + 6/13^s - 150/25^s + 94/37^s - 497/49^s - 1210/61^s + 582/73^s + ...

as seen in equation 87. That's a pretty shocking generalization of the Riemann zeta function with seemingly random mutations of all the numerical coefficients. (The denominators jump by 12 so they're not quite random.) ;-) Nevertheless, this function seems to know about the generic K3 fibers of this Calabi-Yau three-fold (the hypersurface) and many other things, too. Besides integers, you may also find "i" and "sqrt(3)" in many formulae.

This branch of mathematics connects number theory and geometry and you can see that it is full of seemingly numerological links between random numbers and homological features of a manifold. There's a lot of theorems in this line of reasoning whose purpose may look unclear at the beginning, but if you master all of it, you will learn the properties of specific integers so intimately that you will become able to reconstruct any kind of higher-dimensional geometry allowed by string theory from these properties. ;-)

In other words, our ideas about the continuous geometries are flooded by a lot of intuitive stuff that obscures the true essence of geometry. If these big ideas are correct and if we look carefully enough, everything boils down to number theory and algebra. While these constructions are perturbative in nature (in terms of the string coupling), it is plausible that they already capture most of the essential processes by which the Calabi-Yau geometry emerges non-perturbatively, too.

Note that monstrous moonshine and its generalizations link number theory and group theory on one side and complex analysis on the other side. All these a priori isolated branches of mathematics are going to unify more tightly than ever before. These links belong among the deepest insights of mathematics and it is very conceivable that a proper understanding of their origin as well as implications will be needed for a truly complete demystification of string theory as a theory of everything - all of natural sciences as well as all of mathematics.

And that's the memo.

Bonus: incompatible arrows of time

As a Christmas gift, Sean Carroll is finally beginning to understand why everything he has written about the arrow of time before December 2008 was complete rubbish: he just understood that one can't have incompatible arrows of time coexisting in the same Universe (and carried by subsystems that interact with each other). See e.g. this article in which your humble correspondent was trying to explain the very same elementary point to Sean Carroll and others exactly a year ago.

Every Universe that at least qualitatively resembles ours inevitably has a universal arrow of time (the thermodynamical arrow of time also inevitably coincides with the decoherence arrow and other logical arrows of time, by similar arguments), and by a conventional definition of the past and the future, we may always guarantee that the entropy is low in the past and high in the future. I am not sure whether Sean Carroll has already gotten *that* far ;-) but he is already reaching the previous paragraph which is encouraging.

Joe Polchinski: String Theory: problem solutions

 

Matt Headrick has finally released his old solutions to the problems in "String Theory" by Joe Polchinski:

A solution manual for Polchinski's "String Theory" (PDF)

It's 114 pages of rather impressive stuff. Lazy students no longer have to torture their branes ;-) and parroting and plagiarizing will be enough - but it's not Matt's fault!

Peak oilers' mental meltdown

Although the oil price returned to $40.00 or so, it has already seen prices below $34.00 which is less than 23% of the peak price ($147.50) in July 2008, just five months ago. The decrease we have witnessed was by a factor of 4.5 which is a pretty amazing change for such a short interval.

Most peak oilers have gone silent but there exists at least one peak oiler whom we know well and who used the recent events as evidence that the world will run out of oil soon, that the price will diverge, and that we need the leadership of messiahs like himself. Yes, his name is Alexander Ač.

In his newest posting, he asks whether the Slovak government will revise its energy strategic plans. Their government plans the Slovak oil imports in 2030 to be twice as large as the current figures which sounds reasonable because Slovakia is exactly the kind of a country that may expect such an increase.

Alexander's hysterical rant is composed of three sections:

• Oil production will plummet and the depletion will accelerate
• We need a global energy revolution
• We have to increase the investment

In the first section, he writes that the output is going to shrink dramatically. In the second section, he emphasizes that all energy in the world must be replaced by the ludicrous sources of energy.

In the final section, he uses the recent drop of the oil price to argue that there will be no oil in the future because the investment will drop, and the price will therefore drift towards infinity.

What Alexander Ač is able to write is just stunning and it shows that there is no meritocracy left in our society. In the 10th posting below the newest one, Alexander Ač writes that the oil price is soon going to surpass $500 per barrel. 

The real prices are smaller by a factor of twelve or so. His forecasts has failed so miserably that if his life depended on these forecasts, he would have been dead for quite some time. If he had made substantial investments, he would be broke by now.

However, Alexander is just an irrelevant grad student whose skull is full of dirt. But there are many similar people who are equally uncapable to evaluate the reality and their own miserable failures who are controlling all kinds of official institutions, including the hacks who have been named as members of Barack Obama's presidential team.

For any real application, the essential question is the future price of oil. Anyone who makes any decision or investment - a medium-term one or a long-term one - depends on this unknown piece of information.

Power-thirsty, mentally sick pseudointellectuals similar to Alexander Ač are completely unable to predict absolutely anything, their predictions systematically differ from reality by many orders of magnitude, but they constantly want their influence to increase. Alexander, could you please try to imagine the deep lake of excrements into which the world would immerse if you had any influence on it?

Do you understand the difference between gold and shit? It's been established beyond any reasonable doubts that your thinking and writing belongs squarely to the latter category.

Of course, the price oscillates because no one really knows how the supply and demand will compare next year or in 2015. But these oscillations are not a way to show that ultracommunist fanatics who want to regulate the world should be listened to because the world can't survive without them. Quite on the contrary, these price fluctuations are natural processes by which the invisible hand of the free markets regulates the situation.

Indeed, the investment into new oil fields (and alternative energy sourecs) is going to decrease markedly is oil price stays below $50. But that's exactly the right thing that should happen because if the price is low, it means that oil is not that valuable - a tautology that the communist freaks simply can't ever understand - and it's simply not a good idea to invest much to obtain much more of this stuff.

Roughly speaking, a liter of oil is as cheap as a liter of bottled water. Whoever assumes that oil must be treated on par with gold is simply a moron, if he makes investments based on his theory, he should quickly become broke, and everyone should let the laws of Nature to remove such a failed life form from the visible surface of the Earth, in order to free space for others.

If oil ever gets more scarce, the investment into new oil fields and other energy sources will naturally increase once again and help to lower the oil price. At any rate, the last thing that the system needs are the hands of power-thirsty regulating fanatics, especially not those who have failed in all the predictions they have ever made in their lives and who don't even realize the relationships between the price and the value, the supply and the demand.

Finally, I want people to be responsible for their bad predictions and counterproductive interventions which means that I want someone to give failed people like Alexander Ač a proper thrashing.

And that's the memo.

Czech American keyboard

If you essentially prefer the U.S. keyboard but you still need all the Czech characters with diacritical signs, you are recommended

Czech LUMO keyboard

for Windows. Download the ZIP file above, unpack it, and run the layout01 for i386 installation package (or the corresponding files for 64-bit systems based on Intel or AMD). It will add the "Czech LUMO" keyboard as an additional choice for the Czech language.

Whenever possible, all the special characters are arranged just like on the U.S. keyboard. 

However, all the special Czech characters that don't exist on the U.S. keyboard (+ěščřžýáíé úů) appear at the expected locations. AltGr restores English keys whenever they are superseded by Czech characters. For special accents, try the "equals" key (čárka, acute), "shift/equals" key (háček), and "backslash" key (umlautung). Try various combinations to learn the rest.

Czech keywords: Čechoamerická klávesnice pro systém Microsoft Windows.

Harebrained theorist John Holdren will become Obama's science adviser

Science magazine has reported that John Holdren, a professional environmental judgment day doomsayer, was going to become Barack Obama's top science adviser. Indeed, on Saturday, Barack Obama announced that Holdren was tapped.

See also NY Times Tierney Lab: Flawed science advice for Obama?

John Holdren is the ultimate example of the pseudointellectual impurities that have recently flooded universities and academies throughout the Western world.

Population growth means death

Do you want to know what is his specialization? The easiest path to the answer is to look at his publication list at scholar.google.com. No, he hasn't found anything about laser cooling, like Steven Chu, despite his PhD in plasma physics. Instead, he has only written 3 very well-known texts - with at least 100 citations - and all of them were concerned with the "catastrophic" population growth. A few additional, newer articles with 50 citations or so are about the "catastrophic" climate change.

By far the most famous article (400+ citations) is his and Paul Ehrlich's 1971 text in Science magazine,

Impact of Population Growth.

The subtitle says that "complacency concerning this component of man's predicament is unjustified and counterproductive". In other words, it is an unforgivable crime not to be hysterical about the population growth. Wow. They study the "interlocking crises" in population, resources, and environment that have been the "focus of countless papers, dozens of prestigious symposia, and a growing avalanche of books".

Recall that the second author, Paul Ehrlich, had predicted that 4 billions of people (90% of the 1980 total population), including 65 million Americans (28% of the 1980 figure), would perish of hunger in "Great Die-Off" in the 1980s. Well, Holdren and Ehrlich may have narcissistically talked about "prestigious symposia" but it's hard to change the fact that events where people compete who is going to propose a more absurd die-off scenario are just gatherings of pompous loons.

Do I really have to argue that their forecasts have been proven remarkably wrong? Do I have to argue that all similar papers are likely to be wrong because the "arguments" in them are simply not rational? They're clearly no science and all sane readers must see it.

In the particular Ehrlich-Holdren paper, they discussed five "theorems", as they boldly call this retarded stuff. For example, the first "theorem" says that "population growth causes a disproportionate negative impact on the environment". The last one argues that "theoretical solutions to the problem are often not operational and sometimes they are not solutions". 

These are great theorems! They're so accurate, well-defined, rigorously proven, and universally valid! I am pretty sure that in insane asylums, the physicians would use different words than "theorems" to describe these manifestations of their anxiety disorders. The paper then studies variations of the I=PAT formula which is either completely vacuous or completely wrong, depending on your interpretation of the letters.

CO2 emissions mean death

The old predicted catastrophes about the "lethal population growth" have largely evaporated from the public discourse - "population growth" is no longer equated with "great die-off" and the world's population is currently twice as high as the doomsayers found possible while its growth has decelerated naturally - but people like Holdren have simply found a new kind of a catastrophe that apparently hasn't been fully discredited yet, the "climate change".

Nowadays, they equate "CO2 emissions" with a "great die-off". Details have changed but the dishonest, unscientific, extremely ideological, and political essence of their movement hasn't. These people evolve just like the RNA viruses of flu. You may think that you have already gained immunity against this intellectual trap but instead, the viruses have mutated just a little bit and they're back. They will probably always be with us. 

These days, his main weapon is to articulate more radical and more scary forecasts about the climate than (almost) anyone else who uses a proper English grammar. ;-) And he is always careful to be called "Professor" and "big guy" by all the journalists, see for example this BBC piece where he blames President Bush for a 7-meter rise of the sea level (?) and his recent op-ed in the Boston Globe where he attacks the climate skeptics, again without a glimpse of a rational argument. There is absolutely no valuable content in anything that Holdren has ever produced. It's just plain nonsense sold in such a way that gullible people happily swallow it and smack their lips.

I simply can't stand pompous fools like that. Because of his Harvard affiliation, I may have talked to him during a Society of Fellows dinner and I may have forgotten: it's hard to imagine that I could smile with the knowledge I have today. You may also see Richard Lindzen's essay to learn more about the methods how John Holdren and others have elected themselves to the National Academy of Sciences and similar bodies. It's plain disgusting.

Summary

It's very bad that people whose approach to the world is the exact opposite of science - because they prefer irrational phobias, "prestige" of symposia, and visible jobs paid by gullible manipulated folks over rational, humble, careful, and ever more refined, accurate, and justified scientific arguments and findings - are being linked to science, and it is bad that President-elect Obama is helping to distort the definition of science and its proper role in the society in this way.

And that's the memo.

Dow Jones similarity graph

Besides WeatherData, Mathematica 7 has another function that is crowded with data, namely FinancialData.



If you ask what is Length[FinancialData[]], the result is 189,616. It means that Mathematica knows about the detailed history (and present status) of stock prices, exchange rates, and similar numbers from 189,616 companies, currency pairs, and their generalizations.

So I tried to change the "core function" of an algorithm to draw a similarity graph, a set of procedures that have already been applied to the picture of David Gross.

However, I was not connecting pieces of pictures but rather 30 companies in the Dow Jones index. This is the result for similaritygraph[2]:



Click the picture to get a larger screenshot that also contains similaritygraph[3] and some commands. Note the nice "supermarket/food" subgraph of 5 companies with Johnson & Johnson in the middle, surrounded by Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods Inc., and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. followed by McDonald's Corporation. It seems to make sense - probably more sense than the decoupling of IBM from the technological corner of Microsoft, Intel, etc.

I must tell you how I determined the "distance" between the companies. I took the daily stock prices since January 1st, 2007 through December 17th, 2008. The logarithm of all these prices were computed so that the overall scaling becomes irrelevant. All these graphs (lists of numbers) were supplemented with their mirror, anti-chronological  copies, in order to obtain an even periodic function for each company and to be ready for the simplest - complex/complex - Fourier transform function available in Mathematica.

I calculated the discrete Fourier transforms of these functions which are only composed out of cosines. The zero mode, i.e. the cos(0t) constant function, was dropped because this is exactly what encodes the unphysical overall scaling of each stock price. The first 20 or so nontrivial cosines' coefficients were taken seriously and interpreted as a 20-dimensional real vector linked to each company.

See the Mathematica notebook

The graphs above show the nearest and non-nearest neighbors in the 20-dimensional space.

By the way, when this sentence was being written, this blog's right sidebar was showing oil price at $36.56 per barrel which is less than 1/4 of the peak price just five months ago!

But for all those who are going to forget about prices, oil, blogs, and the Internet already today or tomorrow, Merry Christmas!

A giant breach in Earth's magnetic field

First, see:

NASA HTML, NASA video, Anthony Watts

They seem to be puzzled by a lot of things about the interactions between the Sun's and Earth's magnetic fields. Various changes differ from their expectations by an order of magnitude, and so on. At any rate, there seem to be a lot of effects that depend on the relative orientation of the magnetic fields.



One of five THEMIS probes that study these issues

We normally say that the solar activity has an 11-year periodicity but the even and odd cycles differ by the sign of the magnetic field and their effects on the Earth may differ due to the Earth's own magnetic field. So the underlying periodicity is 22 years. In fact, a 20+ year temperature (or related) signal has been observed in tree rings. It was puzzling because people thought that only the absolute value of the Sun's magnetic field should matter, and the latter had a 11-year periodicity.

However, already in 2007, we mentioned a paper about a possible role of interstellar dust as a climate driver: this dust was proposed to realize the 22-year cycles. Something of this sort is probably happening. It is not exactly clear which of the effects related to the magnetic fields and magnetic storms and auroras etc. are going to be crucial for the temperature. 

At any rate, I find it likely that a proper understanding of the flow of charged particles - not only cosmic rays - and their interactions with the magnetic fields is going to be important for a proper understanding of climate variability. And be sure that the periodic effects with the 22-year period are not the only ones that will exist and matter.

In closely related news, the Earth's ionosphere dropped to a new, unexpected low.

Via Solar Cycle 24 and Watts Up With That

Mafia II: Holiday confession trailer

Click the image to see the trailer. (YouTube.)

Mafia II is going to be released in 2009 and it is likely to become one of the relatively few PC games that your humble correspondent has ever bought. The graphics and the atmosphere look pretty amazing to me.

Klaus the knight

Last night, I was honored to be invited (with a friend) to an X-mas "party" of CEP (Center for Economics and Politics), a libertarian think tank of Czech president Václav Klaus and Petr Mach who may be just establishing a new political (libertarian euroskeptical) party (plus a finite set of others).

It was a pleasant experience. At least after some time, it is fun to see many of the very famous faces from the world of the Czech culture and politics again. Their number could have been slightly lower than a year ago but it was arguably above 50% of the last year's number, indicating that after the velvet Klaus-ODS divorce, you shouldn't underestimate the new party that could import lots of voters (and politicians) from ODS (and other places).

While I didn't have any gift for the president, I actually received one: what a painful combination. It was the new issue of Euro (euro.cz), a magazine targeting Czech managers. There's a lot of mainstream "gossip" from the world of these people: the managers like to read it. The magazine treats businessmen as rock stars and tells you stories from their (and the economy's) life.

You wouldn't be certain what they think about Klaus' struggle against the global warming religion, the Lisbon treaty, and similar fashionable tendencies. You might even guess that a magazine with such a Euro name is going to endorse the centralistic Euronaive position. Well, you would be wrong.

It turns out that the magazine totally supports Klaus, and there are many articles in this issue to demonstrate my assertion. The picture above - on the cover - shows Klaus as a knight who finds it "necessary to fight against everyone, if you own the truth" or simply "with truth against everybody", a slogan of a top Czechoslovak politician from the 1920s, Mr Karel Kramář, that I am currently unable to translate in a more faithful and readable way. The picture looks more respectful than the Prague Castle Batman in The Economist (or other places) and I assure you that the text of the articles shows a similar difference in the attitude.

That's pretty cute because the Western media that I normally hear about - including the business media - often like to join the irrational witch hunts and they endorse the "only" politically correct line. Well, it works differently here and if you're doing business in Czechia or a few other places of the New Europe, you may actually be expected to denounce some of the recent anti-business extempores of people like Nicolas Sarkozy!

(Incidentally, Sarkozy has attacked the Czech president for his refusal to fly the EU flag above the Prague Castle, the symbol of Czech statehood, which Klaus is known not to intend. It seems that Sarkozy is slowly losing his mind. Imagine that he asked the U.S. president to obediently fly the EU, French, or the U.N. flag above the White House. I can't believe Sarkozy is serious. Has he learned something about the history, the meaning of countries' sovereignty, and the wars that often erupt when it is breached? Mr Sarkozy, do you seriously think that according to the existing international law, it is the French president, and not the Czech president, who determines the flags flying above the historical home to the Czech kings?)



We love our EU royal pair, Carla and Nicolas.



Nicolas, you could find out that you're not only against the Czechs but also some Britons and many other nations.

Václav Klaus mentioned that I was slightly left-wing. Of course, I didn't have a sufficient level of testosterone at that moment to argue with the president that I was more right-wing than he was - even though I probably am! :-). Instead, I understood the criticism as a deserved one in the context of my newspaper article supporting the (then) $700 billion bailout. (If you're completely missing the rules of the game, let me explain that saying that someone is left-wing is surely not a compliment!) :-)

Funny but not realistic: latex Sarkozy conspires against latex Klaus during a dinner

You know, I surely didn't support any (or escalating) interventions to the economy. Also, I supported the bailout because

1. the value of the fiat money is a priori ill-defined and controllable by the central bank or the government. Because they can do many things, it is a question which approach is actually "market neutral", and as I explained in the thought experiment about the Dow Jones money, I think that the natural "non-interventionist" monetary politics is actually trying to keep the ratio of money and equities nearly constant. The bailout is a slightly different procedure but it has similar consequences. If you find this enough to associate me with Keynes - whom I don't like - OK, then I will accept it: I may be agreeing with some of the Keynesian arguments, after all.
2. capitalism should be sustainable. There is some trade-off and some (or many) market players (or politicians) have surely made some recent errors in their estimates of the value of assets and risks. When I say that I completely believe the markets, I mean that I believe the principle of markets. I surely don't believe that every immediate decision or opinions of the market players - their weighted average - is guaranteed to be correct (or even accurate) and confirmed as wise in the future. When things fluctuate wildly, it is simply impossible to declare that the market was correctly quantifying the prices and values at both moments because the values are vastly different while the "objective" reality (as opposed to the "subjective" one) hasn't changed much. I think it should be admitted that the people are and have always been imperfect and a sufficient yet "small" number of "corrections" should be done so that people lose their desire (and power) to remove much more fundamental features of the market economy which is always a threat during an economic downturn.

But again, I understand where the statements (by Václav Klaus or some beloved members of the TRF community) that my comments about this issue were Keynesian or left-wing in character come from, and I am not going to be insulted. ;-)

Snorkeling in Nebraska

Another person proves that the catastrophic acceleration of the global warming isn't slowing down.



Alcohol may have been involved. Thanks to Bob Ferguson! ;-)

Schmidt and the cool year 2008

By the way, as it is becoming increasingly more likely that 2008 is going to be the coldest year since 2000, Gavin Schmidt is scared to death that people could realize that the years of the 21st century saw mostly cooling. So he has emitted a huge amount of fog and emphasized that the new century began after December 31th, 1999 (and not on January 1st, 2001), because that was the only time when he was drunk like a pig (a statement that I, frankly speaking, don't believe).

Does global warming increase variations?

But there is something more important in the discussion thread of this article by Schmidt. Many GW alarmists who come to this blog (and others) - such as Alexander Ač - like to say that global warming is going to increase temperature variations. Well, if you really love consensus science as you understand it - i.e. a blind parroting of the most left-wing hacks and cranks pretending to be top scientists - you should realize that the consensus science actually says something completely different than you think. 

As you know, Gavin Schmidt of NASA defines the consensus because he is the spokesperson for the very holy James Hansen - the Prophet who received $250,000 from Theresa Ketchup Heinz Kerry herself. And he says the following about the variations:

[Response: I’m not quite sure where the idea that AGW implies more “varied” climate comes from. It certainly isn’t a general rule, and I’m not really sure that I know it to be a fact even in specific cases. There is certainly no indication from the models that variability (about the trend) in global mean temperature should change. - gavin]

You have heard the holy word. Amen!

Of course, Schmidt is right about this point, after a very long time. Because warming, if it existed, would be faster near the poles, largely because the ice-albedo feedback, the spatial pole-equator differences would shrink rather than expand. And there is no reason for daily or annual variations to increase because the greenhouse effect works throughout the day and throughout the year - because the Earth always emits the IR radiation and the atmosphere can always absorb it.

Gavin Schmidt has provided his readers with some sophisticated but mysterious religious tricks to explain that his holy words don't contradict the words from another Holy Prophet, namely al-Gore, who said that weather would be more extreme. In Schmidt's opinion, extremes have nothing to do with variations. Who could have thought! :-) Unless you expect very non-monotonic changes to the statistical distributions (changes with many wiggles), that would seem unjustifiable, increasing extremes of any quantity Y(t) inevitably means that the variations of Y must increase, too.

These crackpots are getting so entangled in their exploding and increasing lies that they are bound to be suffocated by them pretty soon.

The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis

Episode 2x11 of The Big Bang Theory:

Watch at Megavideo (fullscreen)

With 11.42 million viewers, this great episode was, for the first time, the #1 in ratings.

CKM matrix from F-theory

See these related articles:

F-theory GUTs
F-theory and experiments
Sweet SUSY from F-theory
Strings 2008: Tuesday (Vafa's talk)

Less than a month ago, I forgot to highlight the following cute paper:

Heckman, Vafa: Flavor hierarchy from F-theory

There exists a nice large collection of unexplained numbers in the Standard Model: the fermion masses or the Yukawa couplings, if you wish. They are pretty hierarchical, vastly different from each other, and have a lot of unexplained detailed features.

As far as the hierarchical character goes, people have been explaining them e.g. in terms of worldsheet instantons in string-theoretical braneworlds. The couplings are naturally exponentials of some negative areas (of triangular "disks"), and for reasonable distributions of the areas, you obtain an exponentially hierarchical distribution of the couplings.

In phenomenology, outside string theory, people often talked about Yukawa textures. These are guesses about the form of the mass terms in a particular basis where many elements of the matrices are strictly zero. Of course, in reality, they will never be strictly zero because they're not protected by any complete symmetries. But there might exist approximations in which they're zero and the structure of the couplings is then "qualitatively" explained.

The F-theory bottom-up phenomenology by Vafa et al. is a very new and cool sector of the "landscape" of phenomenologically viable string-theoretical models. While the gravity always lives in the "bulk" of the higher-dimensional space, the whole Standard Model is concentrated at some special places of the compactification manifolds - described by F-theory.

The gauge fields live on type IIB 7-branes, i.e. real codimension-two surfaces (del Pezzo...). The fermions live on intersections of similar 7-branes, i.e. real codimension-four surfaces. And the Yukawa couplings arise from double/triple intersections of such surfaces, i.e. real codimension-six points in the hidden manifolds.

In the new flavor hierarchy paper, they realize that this brane picture generates a new U(1) that is locally conserved, up to some point: it is literally the geometric rotation of the internal dimensions around the brane's locus, i.e. a phase added to some natural complex coordinates on the curves.

That restricts the Yukawa coupling matrices in the zeroth approximation to be rank-one matrices. There are corrections from pieces of the wave functions that depend on non-uniform background fields etc. When they estimate these things and calculate the CKM matrix (the unitary matrix relating the three lower-quark mass eigenstates and the low-quark SU(2) partners of the upper-quark mass eigenstates), they obtain the following Ansatz:

1	ε	ε³
ε	1	ε²
ε³	ε²	1

That's great because ε can be argued to be the square root of the GUT fine structure constant, about 0.2. So the matrix above is

1	0.2	0.008
0.2	1	0.04
0.008	0.04	1

That's called a prediction. For the CKM matrix, the prediction is more likely to be accurate than for the absolute fermion masses because several factors determining the "absolute normalization" may cancel in the CKM matrix.

This kind of a prediction that can be derived from more fundamental and more constrained principles would be unthinkable in the non-stringy models of particle physics. String theory is clearly the most predictive framework in high-energy physics - and the only framework whose predictions go beyond the general methods of ordinary quantum field theory where numbers such as the Yukawa couplings are inevitably adjustable, independent parameters.

You know, in quantum field theory, new matter fields and their couplings are cookies that may be thrown into a bag arbitrarily (or people who are only represented by some dull bureaucratic numbers written on a tax form for the IRS). In string theory, all these concepts are manifestations of real objects that must actually co-exist "somewhere" in the extra dimensions of space, according to well-defined laws. And their interactions are determined by the universal laws of string theory: all the diverse particles are ultimately made out of the same "stringy stuff". These laws still admit many solutions but locally in the hidden geometry, they determine "everything" which is why the allowed models are much more constrained (although not unique).

Some careful readers may also care whether the Heckman-Vafa prediction in this approximation is fine. Well, here's the real CKM matrix (with the CP-odd angle set to zero), originally invented by Kobayashi and Maskawa who extended the work by Cabibbo:

0.97	0.23	0.004
0.23	0.97	0.04
0.008	0.04	0.99

Incidentally, their model doesn't exclude a higher number of generations a priori: a "richer" version of the model can be constructed. However, they can calculate the CKM matrix for a four-generation model and the ε^3 entry disappears from the 3x3 block of the lightest three generations. That effectively means a disagreement with observations which means that their model, combined with the known data, directly predicts that there exist no additional generations. It is not yet known whether this prediction of F-theory is correct.

Well, we report, you decide. ;-)

You may also see an extensive, 138-page paper about IIB/F-theory GUTs that was released one day later: Blumenhagen et al. See also Cosmology of F-theory GUTs by Heckman, Tavanfar, and Vafa where all things seem to work!

Steven Chu vs a sane homeowner

A few days ago, Marc Morano received some credit from a Joe Romm - the cheerleader-in-chief at recent wild orgies celebrating the death of Michael Crichton - for having determined that Steven Chu, the future U.S. secretary of energy, is not quite psychiatrically OK (much like many similar participants of the Poznań conference) when it comes to warmophobia and related disorders. 

Well, your humble correspondent would like to modestly inform everyone that it is me, and not Marc Morano, who has figured it out. ;-) Thanks! 

To see why Steven Chu is psychiatrically impaired, let us look at his new talk about the

... electrical wiring.

After a small fire in your house, a woman comes to your house and tells you that you have to pay $20,000 to get a new wiring, otherwise your house will burn in a few years at the 50% confidence level.

Related: Veteran psychiatrist finds out that all left-wing people are mentally ill

Chu's opinion is that it would be foolish to "look for" an expert who says that the new wiring is not necessary. Clearly, you must trust the woman and her first friend who says the same thing, he says: you have to pay $20,000. In the same way, the United States of America (and perhaps other countries as well) must immediately sacrifice a part of the national economy, too, in order to avoid the burning house - a planet, in this case - in a few years. 

It's not his money, after all, so why wouldn't he sacrifice it? Why wouldn't he give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety?

How an actual homeowner would think?

Is that an argument worth a Nobel prize winner? Brian Josephson, Chu's Nobel colleague, might add that the future fire in your house would be started by telekinesis. Well, what a sane person would do in this context?

First of all, as the first commenter says, the owner would be puzzled why a structural engineer has such strong opinions about electrical wiring. ;-) Second of all, a sane person would try to determine - regardless of the "sign" of the expert's testimony - whether the structural engineer's opinion was trustworthy and based on objective expertise or whether it was driven by some other interests, for example the profit for his or her company.

Related: A fresh interview with Steven Chu about the Day After Tomorrow (in reality), how he wants things to be bad (but not awful) - talk about a wishful thinking, and why architects should paint roofs white so that air-conditioning may be reduced (much like the intensity of light bulbs) and the Earth is cooled down - wow! ;-) Thanks to Willie Soon.

Also, a sane person would pretty quickly discard the first recommendation because it came from a woman, as Chu proudly told us. Only about 15% of structural engineers are women and 70% of those got to the field because of affirmative action (before this movement began to be intense 15 years ago, there were about 5% of women in that field), so there is clearly something suspicious going on here, if the first catastrophic testimony comes from such an unexpected source. 

The homeowner would not only require the other experts to be men but also to have male, technical attitude to this technical question. 

And you know, her prediction was pretty extraordinary. The homeowner could easily find out that there are only 4 fires per 1000 existing houses per year (in Texas). Only 16.6 percent of these fires are caused by wiring - a similar percentage as fires caused by heating equipment (15.8 percent), cooking (11.4 percent), more than smoking (5.5 percent), children playing with fire (4.5 percent) but much less than fires caused by arson (25.5 percent). A future fire is very unlikely, it is very unlikely to be caused by wiring, and the expected damages are smaller than $20,000, anyway. So unless the homeowner can easily afford it, a $20,000 fee is a clear waste of money.

The second "expert" would be discarded soon afterwards because the sane homeowner would realize that this "expert" had predicted in "The Progressive" (1970) that during the 1980s, 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off" because of hunger. Fortunately, the homeowner knows a very good psychiatrist whom he could recommend to this "structural expert #2" who is still employed by the Stanford University. Let's hope that he will never have dreams about billions of people dying in hunger again.

The third, fourth, and fifth "experts" were less well-known than Paul Ehrlich but the homeowner would probably soon realize that they're going to the pub with the previous two and, it just happens, they have been both very active in promoting the same junk politicians. The sane guy would learn that this loosely connected gang is doing business in the whole world and is getting $2 billion a year just for "determining" that pretty much every house needs a new wiring. It seems to be a great business.

There are too many coincidences here that a sane homeowner wouldn't expect if the "experts" were real independent experts who were giving him a pure professional analysis.

Independent experts

After some time, the homeowner would decide to hire an independent, non-governmental agency with no obvious indications of a bias and no manifest links to the strange clique of nuts that were being sent to his house so far (and with no links to the companies that produce the new wiring). And it just happens that this new agency would determine that there can't be any big fire caused by wiring in the bulk of the building and there is only one wrong power outlet in the kitchen that should be replaced for $40, besides a $10 fuse in the living room. 

Of course, this agency would be fair. They would realize that it was trivial to see that the fire couldn't occur - because they were looking at hundreds of similar houses in the past and they knew the actual reason of the small recent fire. And the only reason why they had to see this house was that its owner was misled by a well-known group of fraudsters - and a fair agency doesn't want to charge people for such incidents because that would effectively be collaboration with the fraudsters. So they would only charge the homeowner $50. As you can see, the guy saved $19,900. He is insured and owns additional houses in other towns, anyway.

Climate: the expected warming

These are silly games - initiated by Chu - because we are not talking about any specific house so you can't be sure whether Chu or humble correspondent are correctly estimating the risk. (By looking at the statistics above, you can see that Chu's prediction is extremely unlikely to be accurate.) In the case of the global climate, the subject is more well-defined and something is actually known about the issue.

Well, in this case, the "experts" claim that not only one house, but the whole planet will "burn" in a few years. That's a much more extraordinary statement than the already bizarre warning by the female structural engineer.

Chu claims that there is a 50% probability "of disastrous social, economic and political risks" in a few decades. The catastrophe is supposed to be caused by the greenhouse effect that will heat the planet up by 5 °C.

A reader or a homeowner may lack the expertise to predict certain things about the climate but he surely understands what it means for the temperature to increase by 5 °C in a few decades - let's say 3 decades. He may quickly learn that the warming caused by the greenhouse effect should be most pronounced in the middle troposphere. After a few minutes, he finds the graph of the mid troposphere temperatures from 1978 to 2008: three decades of data.

He will learn that the temperature increase in these three decades - when the economy was kind of flourishing - is about 0 °C or 0.05 °C. It is completely indistinguishable from the (much higher) annual variations. Steven Chu talks about 5 °C in a few (three) decades which is an estimate that exceeds the reality by two orders of magnitude. That's just like if he is scared to death - and ready to pay $20,000 (or trillions of dollars, in this case) because he has confused a mouse on his garden with a tiger.

All actual data indicate that if there is an underlying trend beneath the noise of the weather data, it is currently less (and probably much less) than 1 °C per century, i.e. certainly much less than 0.5 °C in a "few decades".

A thought experiment: huge warming

But let us follow Steven Chu and confuse the mouse with the tiger, too. Imagine that in a century, the average temperature would jump by 5 °C - like in the most catastrophic projections by the hardcore alarmists (you won't find anything higher than that because with a finite amount of tricks and cheats, it is simply impossible to get your predictions above 5 °C per century: Steven Chu may randomly add additional orders of magnitude to his predictions but I think that above a certain threshold, he simply should be put in the insane asylum).

Would the great grandsons face a burning house? Steven Chu says that the new temperature would take them into an unknown territory. Well, every newborn baby - including our great grandsons - is taken into a new territory when it is born. The open world is so different from the womb! And the initial conditions for its life are defined by the moment of its birth, not by the moment of his great grandfather's birth, as some of the senile great grandparents incorrectly assume! Great grandparents are pretty much irrelevant, especially when it comes to your feelings about the weather today. Just think about your great grandparents. What would they think about the weather on December 15th, 2008?

Does Steven Chu offer a more specific threat in a warmer world? Well, he says the following:

A world average temperature change of 5 °C does not sound like much, but a 5 degree warmer world will be a very different world. In the last ice age, roughly one third of the United States was covered year-round in a glacier.

That sounds scary. There is only one subtle problem with the glacier. You would actually need a cooler weather, not a warmer weather, to re-create a big U.S. glacier. A few degrees of cooling could re-create some of the glaciers (it would surely take a long time!) but because the big glaciers are pretty much gone in today's world, a few degrees of warming simply don't have any comparably spectacular effect. The only "qualitative" threshold here is the freezing point of H2O and the bulk of the U.S. is above it.

But let's forgive Mr Chu this mistake - his field was laser optics, not the phase transitions of water. And incidentally, the ice age will eventually return. In a few dozens of thousands of years, there will be another one and the natural contribution to the dropping temperature will be over 5 °C. Why doesn't Steven Chu and others care about the people in the year 22008 who will be threatened by a new ice age? It's not as convenient for their goals as their worries aboutt the people who live in 2108, is it?

More seriously, let us academically ask: Would life and a prosperous economy be possible in the year 2108 if the temperature were 5 °C higher than today? Well, we happen to be familiar with different temperatures. Look at the average annual temperatures over the globe:



You see that the average annual temperature ranges from -50 °C to +30 °C, depending on the location. That's about 80 °C of temperature difference between the poles and the equator. Indeed, the idea that the world has a constant or uniform temperature is a wrong intuition forced upon you by your fancy air-conditioning system. ;-)

The difference between the poles and the equator - 80° C - corresponds to roughly 10,000 kilometers. Divide it by 16 and you will obtain 5 °C and 600 km.

So even if the temperature increase were as dramatic as the weirdest chicken little's can fabricate today - and these predictions are at least an order of magnitude above reality - even the most sensitive people and animals could compensate the warming by moving 600 km towards the poles (or cooler areas).

If you take the IPCC projections, the central prediction is about 3 °C only. That corresponds to 300 km or so. By moving from New York to Boston over 100 years, all local effects of the warming can be exactly compensated. Do you think that the difference between the weather in New York and Boston is unbearable? Is it a catastrophe to move from New York to Boston? Is the required speed too fast if you need to get from New York to Boston in 100 years?

The actual expected CO2-induced warming is close to 0.5 °C which corresponds to 60 km per century.

Do the people want warmer or cooler temperatures?

More importantly, would someone actually have to move because of the change of the weather? The answer is Almost no one. Most people live in the climate that is much cooler than the average temperature they enjoy most of the time. That's why e.g. the average Americans use more energy for heating bills than air-conditioning bills. In Canada or Norway, the difference is even higher. And they are used to much stronger weather fluctuations, anyway.

The difference between the average people's desired temperature and the average temperature of their environment is actually more than 5 °C. In the Czech Republic, the ultimate average country for many purposes, the average annual temperature is about 10 °C. Clearly, people would prefer a value around 20 °C. Give it up: we won't get enough desired warming by CO2 emissions, at least not in the next two centuries, not even if we assume the most brutal and "stretched" predictions of the future warming.

So you should understand that as long as Czechs approach this "problem" rationally, they are going to prefer warming over cooling and they are certainly not going to pay a lot of money just for a chance to avoid some warming - even if it were a few degrees. Instead, they are paying millions of dollars for their vacations in much warmer countries (by 15 °C). If you look at the map, you will understand that the same thing holds for the bulk of North America and Eurasia.

Would anyone care? You can see that there are warm places on the Earth, too: Sahara, Brazil, India, etc. But there are many other issues we should remember. First, the warming near the equator is going to be slower (the warming near the poles is amplified by the ice-albedo feedback effect). Second, the latitude is not the only coordinate that can compensate for the temperature changes. Altitude matters, too. The lapse rate is over 6 °C per kilometer, so if you move yourself into the hills, the maximum centennial warming may be fully eliminated, too.

If the radical predictions for a 5 °C warming in a century turned out to be correct, some regions such as Siberia could become more pleasant than others - like Australia. Agriculture - and people who depend on it - would probably be shifting correspondingly. Now, is it a catastrophe if some farms would move e.g. from Brazil to Siberia in 100 years? 

You know, Brazil has already been blessed, at least a little bit: Brazil is one of the world's greatest agricultural powerhouses, exactly because of its warm (and wet) weather. The country was even able to promote the biofuels to the dominant fuels for their cars at some point - which would be a silly dream in most other countries. Siberia hasn't been blessed in this way. Isn't it fair to simply allow the opportunities to change as time goes by? It is likely that 5 °C of warming would make many countries as hospitable to agriculture as Brazil is today.

Even if you thought that the only moral approach is to preserve the 2008 temperatures in every corner of the world forever, an assumption that Mike Griffin of NASA would call arrogant, your prejudices won't matter. What's much more important is that people in Russia are certainly going to think rationally about these issues. They "okay" various fashionable comments about the climate regulation today because it doesn't cost them anything and it's better for them to please zealots in other countries.

But if the Russian economy (and other economies) were at stake - and the only threat that would be averted by the "fight against climate change" were a few degrees of warming by 2108 which Russia badly needs, anyway - be sure that they won't join Steven Chu's stupid game. They will happily allow their economy to strengthen as the economies plagued by Steven Chu and his peers would weaken.

A lot of history occurs in 100 years

100 years is a pretty long time and many things about the world may change within a century. Some empires may be born or flourish, others may die or weaken. I don't personally believe that the climate change will become an important factor that will determine these changes in the 21st and 22nd century (the climate has had almost no effect on the patterns of mass migration in the 20th century). But even if climate change were one of the factors that will matter, there's nothing wrong about climate change. 

Climate change is just another legitimate factor that may or may not influence the life in the real world and the fate of empires, much like hundreds of other factors (such as breakthroughs in agriculture and industry, epidemics, meteorites, or over-reproduction of pests). Each of these factors may help someone and hurt someone else. Some of the factors are natural, others depend on the humans and their work. There is nothing "unacceptable" about either of them. It is completely irrational to single out climate change as the kind of change that is "not allowed to happen".

The world exists, it has a time coordinate, and things are therefore inevitably happening, changing, and evolving. Whoever is scared by these things - by change in general - should commit suicide because death is the only way to stop the time for him or her.

Recommendation

Mr Chu, I don't know what the second and third expert will tell you about your situation but I am telling you that you should try to medically treat your warmophobia, otherwise it can lead to serious problem for you and your country, whose secretary of energy you are going to become, in a couple of years. Many people with milder anxiety disorders - such as claustrophobia - are being medically treated, too.

The roots of environmentalism

Many environmentalists seem to think that their movement is cool, new, original, and thought-provoking. They think that their "modern" ideas were invented by their widely promoted icons. It is hard to believe that they think so but some of them probably do. Well, the reality is very different. Similar ideas have been around for centuries and their incorporation within the modern industrial society began roughly seven decades ago.

Let me begin with the following quote:

"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole... This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of ******** ********* thought."

Beautiful, isn't it? You may ask who wrote these sentences. Was it Jared Diamond in 2005? Or was it Al Gore in 1992? Or Rachel Carson in 1962? Or Alexander Ač in 2007? No, someone else was the author. It was Prof Ernst Lehmann, a leading German biologist.

You may also want to know that he was the leading biologist of the Nazi regime and the asterisks above replaced the words "National Socialist". The words were written as early as in 1934 and I borrowed them from Peter Staudenmaier's insightful essay, Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents. In Staudenmaier's text, you will see that the Nazis were centuries ahead of the contemporary environmentalists in their own discipline.

Of course, we're not talking about one biologist here. Like Rajendra Pachauri, Adolf Hitler was an avid vegetarian. His beloved German shepherd dogs had to become vegetarians, too. ;-) Organic farming in the Nazi Germany flourished and the country was the world's leader in this activity. SS leader Heinrich Himmler had his own organic farm and used the herbs to treat his favorite troops (Hitler preferred homeopathy to achieve the same goal). The national parks in Germany were expanding, especially in the "sacred forests".

Medical experiments on animals were banned by Hitler himself. Unfortunately, the Jewish children were exempt. Incidentally, the previous two sentences are not unrelated. One of the most important Nazis' problems with the Jews was that the Jews were promoting the alienation of man from nature: they were "anti-natural". What a sin! We know quite many ideologues who criticize the "alienation" (and its proponents) even today: these ideologues usually no longer use the word "Jews" for the "anti-natural" people.

You should also notice, as someone has quipped, that people who want to treat animals like humans also want to treat humans like animals - because these two assertions are logically equivalent.

Himmler, the regime's chief mass murderer, was actually a strict animal rights advocate, too. He considered shooting birds or animals as "pure murder" and waxed lyrical about the ancient Germanic "respect for animals" that they may have borrowed from Buddhism. Himmler was impressed by the ancient Germans who put rats on trial and gave them a chance to improve their behavior. :-)

The main person who prevented Hitler from imposing much more radical environmentalist regulations may have been Goering who liked fishing and shooting. Nevertheless, even Goering had to be politically "correct" in the 1930s so he assured Prussia that the years of maltreatment of animals under the democracy were over and anyone who flouted the Nazis' concern for animal rights would be imprisoned. Oh, he was so nice - almost as politically "correct" as Heidi Cullen.

At this moment, many green hearts among the readers must feel very jealous but let me assure you that you first have to take over the military, police, and courts, and only later, you will be able to do the "great" things that your predecessors did in the 1930s.

Hitler needed to abolish trade unions at the very beginning of his reign but there was one ban that was even more urgent and occurred earlier: in 1933, he passed the Enabling Act that regulated cooking of lobsters (this great friend of Nature hated their screams when tossed into boiling water). A few years later, hunting with dogs (and on horseback) was banned, too.

Another activity that kills many people - and that some of the "deniers" tried to justify - is second-hand smoking, right? Well, Adolf Hitler cared about it, too. In 1943, smoking was prohibited in the NSDAP offices. It was banned in streetcars in 1944. However, the great regulator realized that the ban in the Wehrmacht could weaken his military power so it was always allowed to smoke in their military offices.

Appraisal

Now, let me emphasize that the contemporary environmentalists haven't done the same set of bad things as Adolf Hitler and his comrades. On the other hand, it is equally important to notice that the contemporary greens also haven't invented any ideas or views that would be really new. Everything has been around for quite some time.

What many of these people share with Adolf Hitler - and all fundamentalists in the world - is the identification of their own views with the "perfect morality". This "perfect morality" must be imposed upon other people, too. This attitude to ethics is always dangerous. And it may become extremely dangerous if the proponents of the ideology are given the right opportunities.

In his book, The Green and the Brown: a History of Conservation in Nazi Germany, Frank Uekoetter analyzes many aspects of the tight symbiosis between the Nazi and the green movements. He also considers the ordinary greens in Nazi Germany to be opportunists.

Well, many of them have surely been opportunists and there are thousands of opportunists in the contemporary green movement, too. But you shouldn't forget that for the opportunists to exist and benefit, there must also be an opportunity. The desire of a regime, the Nazi regime in this case, to regulate human life and to prescribe everyone his or her values and behavior is an excellent opportunity for everyone whose basic goal can be described in the same words.

So it was not really a coincidence that the most environmentalist major regime in the world's history so far was the Nazi regime. If Adolf Hitler had avoided the war and the mass murder, if he had died in peace, and if the green movement began to contaminate the society in the late 20th century anyway, Adolf Hitler would surely be viewed as one of the classics of the environmentalist movement.

Unfortunately, he has also done other things which is why most contemporary greens are going to pretend that they have almost nothing to do with him, even though 90+ percent of their ideology has really been plagiarized.

And that's the memo.

Mathematica WeatherData: 17,168 stations

Click the picture to zoom in.



Would you recognize the pattern on this image? Well, yes, the axes are the longitude and latitude and you can see the continents, especially their industrialized subcontinents, on it.

The picture shows 17,168 weather stations across the world. You see that some regions are covered more densely than others. Mathematica 7 users have access to all the detailed current and historical weather data from these stations. 



For example, you can pick a station in Florida and determine when its managers started their barbecue party last Sunday (most U.S. weather stations are cleverly attached to a grill, see wattsupwiththat.com).

The colors on the picture above don't show any temperature - just random numbers associated with the individual weather station closest to a given point. It was actually pretty easy to draw the Voronoi diagram above:

Mathematica command drawing the picture

If you gain access to Mathematica, you will be able to calculate pretty much everything, find errors, fluctuations, discrepancies, urban heat effects, and any kind of statistics you want.

Sorry, the newest Mathematica 7 is needed.



Average temperature on Thursday (two days ago). Click to zoom in. Note that the Northern Hemisphere seems cooler. It's called "coming winter" (or "summer" in Australian English). You can see that this difference primarily affects the land.



The temperature difference between Dec 11th, 2008 minus Dec 11th, 2005. Note that it's not only the difference between the same seasons but the ENSO index was also identical at these two moments. Unfortunately, the transition to a cool PDO phase is not manifest on these land-based stations. At least, you see the Siberia getting friendlier and Canada freezing over. Click to zoom in. Globally, December 2008 is about 0.15 °C cooler than December 2005.

Obama is flooding NASA with annoying & incompetent women and men

Orlando Sentinel informed its readers about a subtle tension between the professionals at NASA on one side and members of Barack Obama's team who may have been sent to NASA to deliberately create problems on the other side.

Barack Obama doesn't find the U.S. space program important enough to talk to Mike Griffin in person. So instead, he has sent six people - led by Ms Lori Garver - to NASA to talk about the transition with Griffin.

Now, you should realize who Ms Lori Garver is. She has served as a lead space policy adviser to John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama but she clearly has no engineering qualification to talk about the issues.

She received her Bachelors degree in Political Science and Economics from the Colorado College in 1983 and her Master degree in Science, Technology, and Public Policy from the George Washington University in 1989. Imagine a lot of politicized bullshiting about science and technology by a typical political appointee.

On the other hand, Mike Griffin has received seven degrees, including a PhD, that cover physics, aerospace engineering, business administration, electrical engineering, and civil engineering. This is not quite a silly anomaly because NASA kind of needs the people with a similar expertise at the top. Although the competence and other skills are not directly proportional to the number of degrees, the difference between this paragraph and the previous one is statistically significant and surely means something.

Rocket science is no string theory but it is damn close. ;-)

Now, Griffin is presiding over a technologically difficult transition from the Space Shuttle program to the Constellation program, NASA's recent project to return to the Moon (and Mars) in a decade with a refreshed technology. Suddenly, he has to face Ms Lori Garver.

Is Mike Griffin supposed to pretend that he believes that Ms Lori Garver can tell him whether it is a good idea to replace some rockets by Ares I or by the Orion crew capsule? Isn't it a little bit over the edge?

I am fully supporting gentlemanly manners towards women but things have to have certain limits. When people are discussing the future of the world's premium space research agency and its multi-billion projects that depend on very subtle engineering questions, politeness must become secondary. 

In similar discussions, Ms Lori Garver is clearly just a piece of poultry and it is very disrespectful from Mr Barack Obama to subvert NASA's work by sending these incompetent people equipped with the aura of his fame and future power. 

I assure Mr Obama that it is a very doable job to screw the U.S. leadership in the space research program by a couple of very unfortunate disruptive interventions. More concretely, even if you find the Constellation program imperfect, you should realize that there exists no plan that could abruptly replace Constellation if it failed and there are no competent people who would be willing and able to quickly and reliably develop it. 

Moreover, the space program is one of the symbols of the U.S. technological leadership - the word "supremacy" could already be an exaggeration. There are a few other symbols. Let me tell you that the car industry is no longer one of them and once the LHC is running, experimental particle physics won't be in the list, either. If Mr Barack Obama et al. kills the NASA's cutting-edge programs and a few similar projects, the U.S. is on its way to become another Kenya within 50 years.

The brutal feminist arrorance manifested by these attempts to put a Ms Garver on the same level as Dr Griffin - in order for the Democrat Party to flex its muscles (an average woman with a brown shirt in the party can easily beat NASA's boss!) - should ring a bell. It is a reason to be deeply concerned. 



Obama's first decision. ;-)

Also, I am concerned by the strength of the intimidation, i.e. by the degree to which Griffin must flatter Obama and his people not to be fired. He probably can't afford to admit that Ms Garver is an arrogant bitch. Mike Griffin has always been an apolitical boss of NASA so if Obama's people have political problems with him, it shows that something is extremely wrong about their attitude to science.

And that's the memo.

Klaus: Climate issues are silly luxury good

Czech president hits at EU climate deal

PRAGUE, Dec 12 (AFP) - Czech President Václav Klaus hit out at the EU climate [20-20-2020-20-20] deal concluded Friday and described global climate issues as "a silly luxury."

"I do not like the way they forced it", Klaus said shortly after an agreement was announced in Brussels.

He also claimed that his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy had "pushed" the deal so that it would not be left when the Czech Republic takes over the EU presidency from France on January 1.

"This is scandalous," he said. "We should have been able to discuss it during our presidency, to force it now is not very good."

"Environmental issues are a luxury good," Klaus added. "Now we have to tighten our belt and to cut the luxury."

Related: Coldest start of winter in Britain since 1976
Related: Computers cause global warming (0.3 °C of it)

Global climate issues "are a silly luxury good," he repeated.

Czech environmentalists had expressed fears that an EU agreement on how to tackle global warming would never have been concluded during the six-month Czech presidency of the bloc because of Klaus's views.

But Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Vondra said this week that Klaus's opinions were not shared by the government and would not alter EU developments.

"It is a question of ideology: one believes more, one believes less... there are some commitments which we have agreed to in 2007 and nobody would seek to change that," he said.

---

By the way, President Klaus also criticized the attempts of the EU to revise the rules about the composition of the European Commissions until 2014 to attract the Irish voters: the ratifications in the other countries would become invalid and would have to start from the scratch if the treaty were modified in this way.

Cyclic cosmology: motivation still unknown

Cyclic cosmology remains one of the research directions whose motivation and value looks utterly incomprehensible to your humble correspondent. Originally, I only wanted to write about another very weak article in Nude Socialist about Abhay Ashtekar's cyclic loop quantum cosmology but then I decided to be more general after squeehunter asked a question about the infinite cyclic cosmology.

The purpose of theoretical work

Let me begin with an explanation of my perspective on the value of a theorist's work. Good results in theory resemble the key and the lock:



You see, something fits together. The lock may be a set of experimental and observational data and the key is a theory with its calculations for the given situation. They often lead to the same result. The patterns agree. The lock may be opened.

Alternatively, the key and the lock may be two assumptions in our previous successful theoretical understanding of the world that were thought to be independent. A new insight may show that they are not independent, after all. They may become two manifestations of a deeper logic, of a more fundamental starting point. Theoretical work may find out that they only looked independent because the people in the past didn't think about the consequences of their own theories carefully enough.

A good piece of theoretical work may discover and correct some mistakes in a previous work or add a missing solution to the previous equations or laws that eliminates a discrepancy or a puzzle. Again, the idea of the key and the lock comes to mind.

To summarize, good theoretical work has some well-defined goals, directly or indirectly motivated by the experiments, that are answered more correctly, more accurately, more rationally, more inevitably, with fewer independent assumptions, more controllably, or more completely in the new framework than in the old one.

Science is not about surreal stories that someone says just for the sake of themselves. Although some people may like a similar form of arts - I don't - it is certainly not good a template for science. In the text below, you will probably get more familiar with my feeling that cyclic cosmology belongs to this category.

Historical origins: Albert Einstein

For millenia, people used to think that the Universe lasted from minus infinity to plus infinity. 

The reason was completely analogous to the reason why they used to believe that the Earth was flat: when you observe a sufficiently small region of spacetime, both space (and the Earth's surface) and time (and the life of the Universe) simply look infinitely large and uniform. Newton's dynamics encapsulated this paradigm by treating time as a real number (while the latitude and longitude were already known to take values in a compact set): as other real numbers, it is between minus infinity and plus infinity.

However, many centuries ago, people became familiar with the compactness of the Earth's surface. And Albert Einstein found the right equations - general relativity - that implied, for the first time, that the broad structure and size of the Universe couldn't have been constant in time. Well, Alexander Friedmann realized that the size of the Universe behaved just like the height of Newton's apple: it couldn't sit at a fixed value because it was accelerating.

Einstein could have treated this result rationally. He could have realized that the static character of the Universe was just a prejudice that was unsupported at very long timescales while he had a theory - a rational argument - indicating that the Universe was not static. He could have predicted the expansion of the Universe. Well, he hasn't because he wasn't quite God. Even when he learned about the correct answer, he still wanted to preserve the wrong one.

For this purpose, he also invented the concept of a cosmological constant. Its value was chosen in such a way that the acceleration trying to shrink the Universe was compensated by a repulsing force distributed across the Universe - the negative pressure arising from a positive cosmological constant, if you allow me to use the modern terminology. Much later, in 1998, the cosmlogical constant was indeed found to exist, but the value was different than the value needed for the Einstein static Universe.

(It was also 60-123 orders of magnitude smaller than the most straightforward expectations based on explicit quantum calculations in field theories, a puzzle known as the cosmological constant problem.)

It was demonstrated by Einstein that one could arrange the cosmological constant for the acceleration to be zero at one moment. However, the arrangement was unstable: a small fluctuation was enough for the size of the Universe to exponentially fly away from the critical value, in one direction or the other. The Einstein static Universe was dead.

But I believe that it was still the same prejudice about the infinite life of the Universe (in both directions) that led Albert Einstein to propose one more theory in the 1930s: the cyclic cosmology. At every moment, the Universe may be expanding or contracting, but these two alternating phases may continue indefinitely, Einstein thought.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it is my understanding that the dogma about the infinite extent of time is the only justification of the cyclic cosmology at this point. And it is an irrational one, too. There's nothing wrong with a Universe whose time is bounded in one direction or both. As long as the lifetime is longer than the epochs of the cosmic life that have already been observed, the theory about a "beginning" is just fine.

However, the physicists used to be able to think about the basic consequences of their theories. The oldest cyclic cosmology predicted that the cycles can't have a constant duration. Why? Because of the second law of thermodynamics. The entropy of the Universe keeps on increasing. So at the beginning of the new cycle, it is larger than at the beginning of the previous cycle.

Something about the world is changing, anyway. The increasing entropy of the Universe will make the newer cycles longer than the older ones. If you move into the past, the cycles become shorter and shorter. You can actually sum their proper lifetimes and you obtain a finite answer, again. The Universe did have a beginning, anyway.

Big Bang and inflation

The prediction of general relativity was pretty much indisputable at the very first moment when Friedmann used Einstein's equations to analyze a uniform cosmology. Nevertheless, people needed many decades to settle the question. Hubble found the red shift proving that the galaxies were drifting away from each other. The Universe was expanding. Other people found the cosmic microwave background, the correct abundance of light elements predicted by nucleosynthesis, and other things that showed that the Universe used to be very small, indeed.

The Big Bang cosmology became an established piece of science. Nevertheless, the question whether there was anything outside our current "cycle" (that is probably bounded in the past only, because of the positive cosmological constant), remained open. Both answers are a priori equally good. However, I hope that we are already wiser today and we realize that there exists no rational argument indicating that "something must exist" outside the present cycle.

The Big Bang cosmology has some awkward features such as the horizon problem. Its causal structure doesn't make it possible for distant regions on the skies to communicate with each other. This fact makes it shocking that the temperature of the cosmic microwave background is so nicely constant in all directions. This problem, together with many other "surprises" such as the observed absence of magnetic monopoles and other exotic objects, motivates inflationary cosmology.

Inflation solves these problems in the good old lock-and-key fashion. It assumes a small number of assumptions that are consistent with the previous results of science, but it can actually solve some nontrivial problems - in fact many of them.

Modern cyclic cosmologies

Are the modern cyclic cosmologies (and I will choose a better name later) being studied for the same reasons? I have never had this feeling. Because of a chronological overlap, the cyclic cosmology is sometimes presented as a competitor to inflation. But it just doesn't look like the horizon problem and other problems are the driving forces that motivate the cyclic researchers.

Moreover, I don't think that the cyclic cosmology has a new solution to any of these problems. It seems that its champions sometimes say that the cyclic cosmology solves these problems but these statements look like hot air to me. They remind me of the loop quantum gravity people's assertions that they could calculate the black hole entropy. These proclamations began in the middle 1990s when string theory computed the correct microscopic entropy for the first time. The loop quantum gravity people wanted to be competitive except that they have never been. Their arguments never worked. The claims that "they could also do it" always remained a sociological issue, a wishful thinking.

In the same way, I haven't heard any convincing explanation of a new mechanism by which the cyclic cosmology solves the horizon problem. The most promising comments that came close to realizing these goals were methods to incorporate the idea of inflationary cosmology: there is an effective scalar field whose fate follows the same fate as the inflaton. It really is an inflaton.

But this is an idea of the inflationary cosmology, not an idea of the cyclic cosmology: inflationary cosmology doesn't tell you how you should call the inflaton or what is the shape of extra dimensions of space. Instead, it provides us with a working mechanism that explains certain observed features of the Universe. Any realization of this idea is an example of inflation. And, by the way, it is Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, and a few others - and not the cyclic community - that should get credit if this idea is correct.

So it is my understanding that the cyclic cosmology doesn't offer any new ideas to actually explain some puzzling features of the observed data. That's already too bad. On the other hand, the cyclic cosmology surely contains many ideas that go "beyond" their realization of the inflation. Unfortunately, these additional ideas have nothing to do with the observational and theoretical puzzles of the previous theories, as far as I can say.

It is very important to realize that these additional ideas can be freely separated from the inflationary ideas. And we should also realize that it is only the inflationary ideas, and not the additional cyclic ideas, that are supported by some evidence rooted in observations.

Motivation behind postmodern cyclic cosmology

In the context of cosmology, let me reserve the adjective "modern" for the standard Big Bang cosmology, including the cosmological constant, and the inflationary cosmology. "Postmodern" cosmology is composed out of newer theories that are meant to revoke some "modern" stuff. That's a purely chronological definition but let me admit that there are other reasons why I use the word "postmodern", too.

The motivation behind the postmodern cyclic cosmologies looks even more incomprehensible to me than the motivation behind Einstein's post-classic cyclic attempts. Einstein at least presented his assumptions about the everlasting character of the Universe explicitly enough for others to notice. I don't think that most of the contemporary proponents of the cyclic cosmology are doing the same thing.

So I think that the motivation is pretty much identical to Einstein's motivation - they are just hiding it. They have a problem with the Universe that is created at some point. Well, I, for one, have no problems with that. God comes and She says: "Let there be light, QCD, W,Z bosons, quantum gravity, and leptons and quarks." (Well, She actually said "Let the stringy world compactify on M(y) manifold" but that would be too abstract for too many readers.) What's wrong with that?

Do they think that the cyclic cosmology makes the Universe more well-behaved or more predictable?

Well, I don't see any of these things. For example, let us ask: Does the cyclic character make the Universe more well-behaved and "natural"? Well, that would be the case if the Universe were an ordinary classical manifold. Indeed, if you imagine that it is, any boundary or a singular point makes it "more awkward".

Fine. So why do I disagree that the cyclic cosmology improves things "aesthetically"? Simply because I realize that when the Universe becomes very dense and nearly singular, the intuition of classical geometry simply breaks down. And it is replaced by something that is not "just" classical geometry. From the viewpoint of long distances, the resulting physics that is fully compatible with the exact laws of physics may still look singular.

There are lots of similar examples in string theory. For example, you might think that Nature abhors A_N singularities (a quotient of C^2 by Z_{N+1} with a higher-dimensional conical singularity at the origin). You might think that M-theory or type IIA string theory will show their "muscles" and "new forces" that will prevent the Universe from developing an A_N singularity.

Except that they don't. Instead, they confirm that this singularity is perfectly fine and it occurs in physics. And they tell you what the degrees of freedom are. There is indeed a singular point in space that looks just like what you would expect from the singular classical geometry, if your space resolution were worse than the string/Planck length (and, in fact, even if the resolution were better). And they also tell you that there is an SU(N+1) supersymmetric gauge theory supported by the singular locus. It's perfectly fine. It's highly constrained by mathematics. It's beautiful but the truth is different from the most naive expectation based on non-singular manifolds. By the way, type IIB string theory has very different degrees of freedom living near the same singularity. There's a whole segment of science that studies what happens. It is determined in all cases but you can't guess the right answer without knowing the maths.

In a similar way, some people could expect that strings with boundaries shouldn't exist because they're ugly and singular. (I actually believed these things when I was a high school student.) Except that open strings do exist, after all. Whether you like it or not, theories with open strings - such as type I theory - are as perturbatively consistent as theories with closed strings. There is a higher number of topologies of diagrams at each order but it is an extra work for you, not a problem of the theory. And non-perturbatively, these objects (open strings) are still found as resonances in the spectrum (even if they're non-BPS, like in type I).

Spacetimes shouldn't have boundaries either, right? Except that it may bave boundaries. For example, boundaries in 11-dimensional M-theory exist and one can show that they carry a beautiful E_8 gauge supermultiplet (gluons and gluinos), the kind of beautiful structure whose infinitesimal portion is accessible to certain surfer dudes. The actual consistency in quantum gravity works in such a way that the boundaries are very constrained. But the constraint doesn't tell you that the boundaries can't exist or that they carry no physics: instead, they carry an E_8 gauge supermultiplet. It would be hard to guess the right answer but it can be demonstrated by profound calculations.

That's the whole point of theoretical physics that one often needs deep maths and calculations, rather than just common sense and emotions, to determine the right answers to many questions about the world.

So I believe that the "obvious" need to make the time continue - by the rules of beauty - is simply misguided because it makes very naive assumptions about the physics near singularities, assumptions that are almost certain to be incorrect because they have been shown incorrect in so many similar cases. But is the theory of a longer, cyclic, evolving Universe more predictive because the properties of our current cycle are being linked to a distant past?

I don't see that either. If the size of the Universe ever shrinks close to the Planck length (or even much longer distances), all the observers and their experimental gadgets are destroyed. From an operational perspective, it is very questionable whether the "next epoch" should be considered a continuation of the previous epoch. From a purely experimental standpoint, it is a vacuous statement because no experimenter can ever measure both of them. In a certain sense, such a connection between the two cycles is equivalent to reincarnation. ;-) 

But even from a theoretical viewpoint, I think that the "merger" of the two cycles is a highly problematic procedure. Near the singularity, when the densities are huge, the "time" surely has very different characteristics than in the situations where things are almost constant and naturally extrapolated from one moment to the following moment. By the way, analogous reasons also make it difficult to identify the time in two different Universes that are connected by tunneling (bubble nucleation) on the landscape. Much like the "spatial geometry" refers to different degrees of freedom of different vacua, so does time.

The only way how you would convince me that it makes physical sense to connect the cycles of the cyclic cosmology (or to study the "pre-history" of our Universe before it was nucleated as a bubble in another Universe) would be for you to write down the rules to calculate (at least in principle) some features of the new Universe as a function of the features of the old Universe or Universes. Unless and until you will do it, I would consider the previous (and following) cycles to be unphysical. Observers and instruments are destroyed, time is redefined, and unitarity may break down. It is not clear whether you are allowed to use the same "time" to continue your story past the seemingly singular point.

Versions of postmodern cyclic cosmology

We have explained that the motivation behind the postmodern cyclic cosmology remains unknown. However, many of the old problems that make the picture unlikely are here with us to stay. Most importantly, the entropy is still increasing and the cycles still tend to evolve.

The braneworld pictures try to solve this entropy problem by throwing the extra new entropy away. They only "recycle" a small portion of the parent Universe. The entropy of this portion is pretty much equal to the entropy of the parent Universe. So if this portion becomes the new daughter Universe, the daughter may resemble its parent.

Still, I don't see what is good about this scenario. There is nothing I observe about the real world, directly or indirectly, which would indicate that our Universe or our cosmological cycle had to have a parent whose macroscopic characteristics were essentially identical to those of our Universe. Such an equality looks like a case of a huge fine-tuning - fine-tuning that is moreover unjustified by any observations I am aware of. The addition of such an unmotivated fine-tuning into a theoretical framework certainly makes it less attractive and less likely to be true. I just don't understand why anyone would believe such a hypothesis.

The fine-tuning becomes more plausible if the characteristics of the newly born Universe are based on special values, namely a vanishing entropy. I think it is probably correct to imagine that the entropy of a newly born Universe was zero almost by definition - a natural "strengthening" of the second law of thermodynamics (by a maximal extrapolation of time into the past) and a conceivable consequence of the Hartle-Hawking (pure) wave function of the Universe and similar pictures.

On the other hand, if the entropy were zero to start with, the inclusion of such a uniquely determined Universe into some Universe that had a nonzero entropy looks immensely futile. If the entropy of our newborn Universe were zero, it would have been described by a unique microstate. So it would be obvious that such a unique microstate couldn't depend on a previous high-entropy Universe because the latter were inevitably non-unique (much like all high-entropy objects).

The detailed knowledge about the parent Universe would be inevitably useless for learning anything about ours. And I think that even statistical predictions would be impossible because causally disconnected portions of the Universe can't share any statisticians (or reach the thermal equilibrium).

The braneworld and ekpyrotic versions of the cyclic cosmology assume certain types of collisions of branes. Well, I have no problem with a colliding space-filling brane. However, I think that it is impossible to "guess" what branes were colliding and what the details of these collisions were. It seems clear to me that we must use independent arguments to figure out what the branes in our world have to be - if there are any - and then to analyze their possible collisions. We don't have any other "direct" data about the collisions of the space-filling branes in our Cosmos so any attempt to guess any details of these collisions is a hopeless guesswork.

You simply can't guess these things. And I think that there exists no positive argument that such a collision had to occur. To assume that it didn't occur is at least as natural an approach as to assume that it did. I would prefer Occam's razor and I would only look at these hypothetical collisions at the moment when someone would present a reason why such a hypothetical event could be interesting or related to some known physics.

Two years ago, Lauris Baum and Paul Frampton (a celebrated TRF reader) proposed a new method to solve the "entropy problem" of the cyclic cosmologies. They have a captivating story with a Big Rip, ready for a Hollywood movie (the Universe shrinks or expands so brutally that it is torn to pieces), but the physics point of this story remains unclear to me, too. To clean their Universe, they also require pressure to be smaller than -rho, much like in the Big Rip pictures in general. That violates the dominant energy condition and is effectively equivalent to a bizarrely superluminal propagation of signals.

That's a pretty high price to pay for ... a movie and for the laws of physics (and continuous space) that disappear earlier than we expected (without being replaced by any other laws). Sorry, Paul, but I am simply not getting it! At least, I agree that your Big Rip story is fun and you seem to appreciate the actual problems of the cyclic cosmology (increasing entropy etc.).

Infinite in the past vs infinite in the future

It may be a good place to mention one important principle of rational reasoning - a kind of logical causality. Some people construct certain models that have a certain "desired" behavior in the far future. But you can never use an assumption about the future as your starting point because we don't know the future. The only way to determine whether our Universe will end up with a Big Crunch or whether it will expand indefinitely (yes!) or whether it will undergo infinitely many cycles is to calculate the future from the laws that have been determined by our observations and analyses of the past! 

The future is always determined by the past (plus quantum randomness). Even gnoseologically, our knowledge about the future is also determined by our knowledge of the past.

Please, leave the decision whether the world should live indefinitely to Nature. It is very clear that whatever Her answer is, She can realize it smoothly. Whatever the past is and whatever Her dynamical laws to evolve are, She always knows what to do with the world and your attempts to help Her by guaranteeing that the future will or will not look in one way or another are just plain ludicrous. So the only remotely logical constraints may refer to the past. Again, both temporally finite and infinite Universe in the past are conceivable. 

And the second law of thermodynamics surely favors a temporally finite Universe with a beginning in the past because the entropy is increasing and the "number of elementary macroevents" (where one elementary macroevent is defined to increase the entropy by one) has thus been finite. There's no good way to "throw away" the entropy. If you postulate that the entropy has macroscopically decreased at any moment, it either means that 

1. you assume a gigantically unlikely event (entropy drop) that makes your theory unlikely and unpredictive or that 
2. you follow an incomplete description of Nature because you are just overlooking many degrees of freedom that must still live somewhere

Cyclic loop quantum cosmology

Finally, let me say a few words about Ashtekar's version of this cyclic story, promoted by Nude Socialist. Well, this particular fairy-tale seems to unify pretty much all myths and silly naive assumptions about all these interrelated questions. And their work connects them in a fashion that looks utterly irrational to me.

First of all, they believe that "singularities are bad". As we have explained many times, singularities are points where older, approximate theories break down. But what happens after they break down is pretty much an open question, at least a priori. A deeper theory may try to protect the world against such singularities. (Einstein also used to believe that something would prevent the stars from a collapse into black holes because the latter looked ugly to him: but such a new force would violate the rules of GR and locality.) But more often, the detailed microscopic confirms that something like these singularities does exist - approximate theories are guaranteed to see them because at their level of approximations, singularities are real. 

But the more complete theories tell us more accurately what happens with the singularities. Unpredictability and foggy indeterminate forms are replaced by a new predictive picture with finite numbers.

It is simply not true that "everything looking like a singularity must be prohibited" is the only possible outcome of a more detailed analysis based on a deeper theory. The singularities may also be confirmed - and they often are. Also, the whole question may be shown vacuous because the degrees of freedom that exhibited a singular behavior in the approximate theory may be replaced by completely new, possibly nonlocal degrees of freedom that don't admit such a singular behavior at all.

Ashtekar et al. suffer from this irrational singularophobia.

More seriously, they also misunderstand what it means to give a rational argument for anything. When they play with the silly equations of loop quantum cosmology that lead to some outcomes, they already think that it is a physical result.

Well, it is definitely not. Loop quantum gravity is a dumb, Lorentz-breaking, flat-space-denying toy model. And loop quantum cosmology is not even derived from loop quantum gravity. It is an even more silly application of the same oversimplified naive rules of loop quantization to the framework of the oversimplified FRW equations of cosmology. It is clear that a discretized version of the FRW cosmology must exhibit one of the few possible kinds of behavior when the Universe becomes very small.

But neither of them is a priori better than others. The only way how one of them could become better is to find rational arguments that one answer is more correct - or more likely to be correct - than others. For example, you would have to show that the young Universe actually follows some particular discrete or other rules - or rules that are in the same "universality class" as your theory and give the same qualitative answer to a question.

Obviously, they have nothing that is even remotely close to that: there are no rational or independent arguments, directly or indirectly rooted in observations or in careful mathematical classification or analysis of theoretical possibilities, that would indicate that loop quantum cosmology has anything to do with reality. What they have is a ludicrously oversimplified and randomly chosen toy model (or many of them) which is an oversimplified version of another oversimplified theory that can already be seen to be naive enough to have nothing to do with this world. We are supposed to be excited when a character in a silly discrete game bounces off the corner of a chessboard. Wow, the bishop can walk back and forth, isn't it amazing?

Well, didn't we just define the rules of the game so that the bishop can walk back and forth? When the bishop can move in this way, does it really mean that our Universe is doing the same thing?

And they want to trust its answers in contexts that require a much more careful and accurate theoretical analysis than the contexts where their theory already fails brutally (because it fails to reproduce the very existence of smooth space, its rotational and Lorentz symmetries, the existence of particles and forces, and all low-energy field equations and other equations that summarize everything we know about Nature). In order to say something about quantum gravity near the Big Bang or the Big Crunch, you actually need a theory that is more accurate a description of reality than the established low-energy effective field equations, not less accurate!

There exists not a single check - direct or indirect experimental check or an internal consistency check - that would indicate that what they are doing is anything else than a meaningless and random pseudo-mathematical masturbation. On the other hand, there seem to exist many checks that show that what they are doing is simply wrong. 

What these people completely lack is a broader perspective, a separation from the problems they try to solve, or "levity". They can never look at the set of "a priori possible theories and answers" from the bird's perspective. They can never see that some theories would give some answers while others would give different answers and it is a priori not clear who is right. Instead, they eagerly, quickly, and irrationally adopt whatever random assumptions that become popular in their community at a given moment. They quickly parachute into a random unhospitable valley in their landscape (a desert), chew the sand, and spend most of their lives by arguing that it is the ultimate paradise.

This is just not a way to do science. It's just pure nonsense, Prof Ashtekar. And it is simply bad that the media are promoting this nonsense. Cyclic cosmology is a highly ill-motivated, controversial, unjustified, and mathematically shallow sub-discipline of contemporary cosmology. But the cyclic loop quantum cosmology is worse: it is a really shameful corner of the cyclic cosmology where the rules of science, logic, and even ethics break down because its proponents seem to pretend that rational arguments exist where they don't exist and they claim priority in (not established) ideas that have been discussed in a similar fuzzy way for 75 years or more.

And that's the memo.

Hippies want another IPCC to control the world's economy

Rafa has brought my attention to this text:

Can science help solve the economic crisis?

Four authors write a lot of neutral comments about the economy. However, the text escalates and at some moment, they announce that their goal is nothing less than to control the world's economy:

If this research succeeds then a discussion of whether a given financial instrument should be allowed or how it should be regulated should not be a matter of opinion or ideology. It should be based on detailed modeling and data taken from real world experiment and treated with the scrutiny brought to the introduction of a new airplane.

In the longterm, there needs to be an independent, non-partisan methodology for economic and financial modeling which involves globally agreed upon standards, as in the world of climate modeling. As in that world, one can imagine an international commission of economic scientists who develop, test and benchmark economic models against each other, and against past data, so that there is a reliable understanding of what the best models are and how reliable they are for studying different kinds of problems and predicting the impacts of proposed new economic and financial regulation. This will allow new proposals for innovative financial instruments or changes in trading rules or accounting rules to be tested in an open environment using best practices to understand their results.

Wow. This is just stunning. Make no mistake about it. People like Mr Lee Smolin, a hippie who is known by every physicist to be a crackpot, claim to own "models" that will "objectively" decide whether a financial instrument should be allowed. Opinions - except for theirs - will become obsolete. A new IPCC-like body is supposed to run these "models" and tell everyone what to do. I am simply speechless.

The IPCC has been one of the worst scandals in the history of the political manipulation of science. It is predominantly composed out of opportunists - who were attracted by an increasing funding of the pseudoscientific discipline of "climate change" - and by far-left political hacks who dream about abolishing the market economy and the industrial society in the world. 

It is composed out of dishonest jerks such as Michael Mann who always prefer to expand their lies and frauds by another order of magnitude over admitting them and fixing them. It is led by people like Rajendra Pachauri who just said in the Guardian:

I refuse to accept that a few papers are in any way going to influence the long-term projections the IPCC has come up with.

In other words, Pachauri is saying that he is and his comrades are fanatical blinded religious zealots who will pay no attention to any new evidence and who will allow no progress in science - just like the Inquisition did not - until someone will remove them. (Thanks, Willie.)

The IPCC is a body whose predictions have been universally falsified by the evidence (they predicted a huge warming in the last 10 years, there's been no warming at all), an institution that has played a key role in developing the tumor in the society that has swallowed roughly 2% of the world's economy it covers by this moment. They have planned the prices of the carbon indulgences but these prices unexpectedly for them dropped by 3 orders of magnitude at some moment. These people are dangerous imbeciles. Make no mistake about it: the IPCC is a gigantic piece of collective biological waste, a group of power-thirsty sub-par pseudoscientists, and the main exponents of this organization should be put in jail.

And now, you have four self-confident revolutionaries - one of them has been unable to learn the undergraduate quantum mechanics for 55 years even though he's been paid as a physicist - who claim to have everything they need to control not the 2% of the world's economy, like the IPCC, but 100% of the world's economy, without paying any attention to the opinions of other people on this planet. I am telling you: it is impossible to control the world economy without paying attention to other people unless you want to become another group of dictators who are completely legitimate targets for assassination.

Even if it were possible to write down computer models that could predict anything about the economy - and it is clearly impossible (and it will always be) - it would still not be enough to decide which policy is actually the right one because such decisions always depend on subjective moral judgment of what is good and what is bad. Moreover, any kind of "insider information" always means an opportunity for a dirty profit (via actions that would make the predictions inaccurate, anyway).

You're playing far too dangerous a game, Ladies and Gentlemen. It's a game about the very fate of democracy in this world. What I am amazed by is the breathtaking arrogance with which they use various words. For example, they think that their efforts are "non-partisan". If you're non-partisan, why are you proposing plans about the central regulation of the world that would make even Karl Marx's dreams look like modest centrist policies in comparison? Why are so many of you hippies all the time?

The recent financial turmoil was partly caused by overly self-confident "intellectuals"employed as traders and bankers who thought that they could predict anything just because they were "intellectuals" who could use "computer models", but in reality, they were not even able to reproduce basic common sense of ordinary traders because, as it turns out, being an "intellectual" actually isn't enough for being any good. At this moment, I would expect these people to ask their parents or wives for a proper spank rather than trying to inflate their crazy desire to control the world to unprecedented proportions.

Steven Chu, a new energy secretary

Steven Chu, the 1997 physics Nobel prize winner for laser cooling, is likely to be picked by Barack Obama as the new secretary of energy: CNN, Google News.

This is surely a bold - or crazy - experimental move because Chu's political experience is probably negligibly small. It may backfire.

But I admit, picking a famous experimental physicist in politics is the kind of experiments that I find intriguing. Expect lasers everywhere. And the guys from AMO physics may perhaps expect increasing grants from the Department of Energy (DoE). ;-)

Google Chrome just came from the beta epoch today. Click the name to download it.

When it comes to climate change, Steven Chu is a nutcase just like everyone else who could have been considered by Obama. If you ask me whether I am surprised that the new energy secretary is going to be an alarmist nutcase, the answer is No, I am not surprised. ;-) Still, I wish America that he will be forced to realize that this insane postmodern religion is not the bulk of things he needs to do his job.

Useful wisdom for readers-schoolkids: Homework causes global warming

Hat tip: Gordon W.

Eichler et al.: Half of recent warming was solar

In this dose of peer-reviewed skeptical climatological literature, we follow Climate Research News. The blog was intrigued by a new article in Geophysical Research Letters that was accepted on Friday, December 5th.

Eichler, A., S. Olivier, K. Henderson, A. Laube, J. Beer, T. Papina, H. W. Gäggeler, and M. Schwikowski: Temperature response in the Altai region lags solar forcing

Recall that the Siberian Altai Mountains are found at the intersection of Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan.



The authors looked at 750 years worth of the local ice core, especially the oxygen isotope. They claim to have found a very strong correlation between the concentration of this isotope (i.e. temperature) on one side and the known solar activity in the epoch 1250-1850. Their data seem to be precise enough to determine the lag, about 10-30 years. It takes some time for the climate to respond to the solar changes.

It seems that they also have data to claim that the correlation gets less precise after 1850. They attribute the deviation to CO2 and by comparing the magnitude of the forcings, they conclude that "Our results are in agreement with studies based on NH temperature reconstructions [Scafetta et al., 2007] revealing that only up to approximately 50% of the observed global warming in the last 100 years can be explained by the Sun."

Well, the word "only" is somewhat cute in comparison with the "mainstream" fashionable ideology. The IPCC said that they saw a 90% probability that "most" of the recent warming was man-made. The present paper would reduce this figure, 90%, to less than 50% because the Sun itself is responsible for 1/2 of the warming and not the whole 50% of the warming could have been caused by CO2 because there are other effects, too.

Note that if 0.3 °C or 0.4 °C of warming in the 20th century was due to the increasing CO2 levels, the climate sensitivity is decisively smaller than 1 °C. At any rate, the expected 21st century warming due to CO2 would be another 0.3-0.4 °C (the effect of newer CO2 molecules is slowing down for higher concentrations), and this time, if the solar activity contributes with the opposite sign, these two effects could cancel. Even if you try to stretch these numbers a little bit - but not unrealistically - you have to become sure that the participants of the Poznań conference are lunatics. By the way, the participants just heard that air-conditioners cause global warming: another trace gas that is 15,000 times more potent than CO2. Well, be sure, once you start to study trace gases, you will have to deal with millions of similar things.

Finally, I didn't go there: the transportation would be too difficult for the infinitesimal effect that my presence would probably have.

Bonus: candle protectionism

I just read the November 2008 issue of the Laissez Faire magazine. It has this funny story about the European candle manufacturers. They sent the European Commission a petition, originally penned by Frédéric Bastiat in 1845:

... We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly ...

Of course, the European Union agreed and imposed a new tax on the big competitor. ;-)

Well, it is true that China is not a full-fledged market economy. But if you don't care about its internal flows of money, and the candle subsidies, China is "just another company" and "just another competitor". Obviously, the subsidies must be compensated by some other, profitable products. The right solution to deal with such competitors is not to become a protectionist socialist economy ourselves!

Fast comment transition: HaloScan to JS-Kit

The provider of the fast comments on this blog, HaloScan, has been acquired by JS-Kit a few months ago. This transaction will force all HaloScan users to switch their comment systems into JS-Kit. I have just clicked at "Upgrade Me Now".

The new threads, such as one below this article, should already be using the new system even though at the moment when this sentence was being written, I had no idea whether it would work. The older threads would be upgraded later.

I have no experience with the new system but if some of the issues about the system are counter-intuitive, your humble correspondent and the more skillful readers will try to help others in making things work. The JS-Kit people should help, too.

Only once the old fast comments are transferred to the new JS-Kit platform, we will regain the tools to reconfigure the styles. Also, some donations may be needed to cover some fees because TRF will probably (significantly?) exceed the limit of 25,000 fast comment impressions per month.

The Vartabedian Conundrum

Episode 2x10 of The Big Bang Theory:

Watch at Megavideo (fullscreen)

Zuzana Norisová: Š Š Š Šepotám (I Whisper)

Original: Nancy Sinatra: Sugar Town, 1967 (lyrics)
Source: "Rebelové" (Rebels), a Czech 2001 retro-movie
Actress/singer: Ms Zuzana Norisová (*1979), Slovakia

English lyrics (a reverse translation of the retro-movie lyrics by a reactionary physicist L. Motl): "I Whisper":

[I don't know, girls. It seems we'll never fall in love.
... Speak on behalf of yourself only, OK? Because I, I may fall in love, after all. (Really?) And maybe even very soon.
... Look, girls, it's raining like mad. So I must already go. See you! Bye!]

Locusts are rustling when rain falls down.
It falls into my hair, it wants to braid them.
It doesn't know that I want love to twist them.

That's why I'm
W W W
W W W
W W W W W W
whispering [to it].

He has come quietly into my silence.
He set our love swinging like a big bell.
In front of temple of love there was a mess.

Everyone's
W W W
W W W
W W W W W W
whispering.

[Music.]

However, the day is already yesterday.
Everyone's soothing me, I don't know why.
Since I'm not the only one
who wanders,
who's the prayer
W W W
W W W
W W W W W W
whispering.

He who's trickling in every night and day.
I know that someone will color my black nightmare.
A dream that's drenched just like the day today,
after which I'm
W W W
W W W
W W W W W W
whispering.

Pararararararamptum.........

---

Czech lyrics: "Š Š Š":

[Já nevím, holky. My se snad nikdy nezamilujem.
... Mluv za sebe, jo? Protože já, já se možná zamiluju. (Jó?) A možná už brzo.
... Hele, holky, to je slejvák. Tak já už musím. Čau. (Ahoj.)]

Akáty šumí, když padá déšť.
Padá mi do vlasů, chce mi je splést.
Neví, že láskou chci hlavu si plést.

Tak mu to
Š Š Š
Š Š Š
Š Š Š Š Š Š
Šepotám.

Do mého ticha tiše vkročil on.
Lásku rozhoupal jak velkej zvon.
Před chrámem lásky byl bláznivej shon.

Každej si
Š Š Š
Š Š Š
Š Š Š Š Š Š
Šepotá.

[Hudba.]

Jenže ten den je už včerejší.
Já nevím, proč mě všichni konejší.
Vždyť nejsem jediná,
co bloudí,
co modlitbu
Š Š Š
Š Š Š
Š Š Š Š Š Š
Šepotá.

Ten kdo v noci vtéká jako každej den.
Vím, že někdo zbarví černej sen.
Sen zmoklej jako dnešní den,
po kterém
Š Š Š
Š Š Š
Š Š Š Š Š Š
Šepotám.

Pararararararamptam.........

Similar posts: Rebels: At 5 p.m., Gummi Bear Song, Back Your Car Out Of Here, Ewa Farna: Silence, Lucie Vondráčková: Fear

Relativistic and particle-physics cultures

Recently, I've heard many people talking about the "cultures" in theoretical physics and quantum gravity. The two most important "cultures" in the field of quantum gravity are the "relativists" and the "particle physicists". The assumption is that the "relativists" consider the Einsteinian tradition of classical general relativistic theories to be more important and want to add the quantum features as a "detail" while the "particle physicists" build on quantum field theory - that's been very useful to describe particle physics - and want to properly add gravity to it.

But people also tend to assume that the two groups should naturally have different answers to well-defined questions. For example, if someone belongs to the "relativistic culture", he or she is allowed to "think" that it is the singularity, not the horizon, where the solution to the information loss paradox must start.

What intoxicating vanity!

The scientist's task is not to live in a culture or grow a culture. His or her task is to find out how the world works. To do so, he or she must properly and scientifically evaluate all the relevant available observational and rational evidence.

It is very clear that if someone starts to talk about "cultures" instead of talking about the actual scientific arguments, he is just hiding behind the group-think of his or her "culture" and he or she doesn't want to hear about the actual evidence concerning certain "inconvenient" questions. The whole groups that are approaching the questions in this way are simply not being scientifically creative, rational, and honest.

You might ask why they're creating these gaps. Well, they're doing it for several reasons. Most importantly, it is

• laziness
• fear that some of the dogmas held by a group of people that included them could be shown wrong if they look more carefully at the existing evidence

In both cases, we must say: Too bad. I am confident that virtually no string theorist is trying to hide into a "culture". String theorists are reading all kinds of papers that might be interesting or useful for their work, regardless of the "culture" in which the papers were written. For example, there are relativists who have found some solutions to Einstein's equations that string theorists find useful. If that happens, they use them, of course. There is absolutely no problem here. There is only one science. In the core of this science, you can only find one physics, and it is very clear that any relevant paper should be read regardless of different "cultures".

The following paragraph is surely pretty typical among people who "believe" string theory or the particle-physics approach to physics in general. I have personally studied special and general relativity on one side and quantum mechanics and quantum field theory on the other side pretty much on equal footing as a college student. Sociologically speaking, I was never educated to be a part of one "culture" or another. The only reason why I agree with pretty much all the "particle-physics culture's" answers to the controversial questions is that these answers seem robust and consistent while the "relativistic culture's" answers to these questions don't make sense and show that the people simply haven't looked at the issues carefully enough.

Unfortunately, the relativistic "culture" is not thinking in this way. I have already mentioned one example (there are hundreds of others). Some people want to believe that the singularity is the key to the mysteries of the black holes - even though it is obvious that the mysteries already begin at the black hole horizon. Moreover, what is more paradoxical is that the arguments showing that the horizon is the place where the complementarity and other interesting properties have to start are essentially (semi)classical relativistic arguments based on the Riemannian geometry that require no special advanced tools of quantum field theory.

Why do so many relativists hide their heads into the sand and and why don't they want to hear the obviously correct answers to these basic questions? I am afraid that it is because of one of the two reasons listed above. Although I feel that the percentage of wrong and uninteresting papers in the "relativistic culture" is higher than in the "particle-physics culture", I have never rejected to read a paper just because it belonged to one culture or another. 

More generally, I feel that physicists shouldn't use any of these filters because they contradict the unity of science and the principles of scientific integrity. Theories should never hide from the risk of falsification or from competition by presenting themselves as "parts of a different culture" that should be preserved for the sake of "diversity". That would not be the method how science works. There are only correct theories and less correct theories in real physics, not incompatible theories from different "cultures".

I am convinced that some people who advocate "diversity" in science are advocating nothing else than this harmful concept of "cultures". There's no room for "cultures" in real science. "Cultures" are just tools to expand group-think, to inflate the percentage of people who believe certain paradigms well above the figures justifiable by the available evidence.

The isolation from other "cultures" may become extreme in scientific disciplines that get severely damaged. Of course, the climate science is the most catastrophic example because the "tumor" of the wrong "culture" has grown to become a majority of the field. This discipline has been pretty much overrun by quasi-religious hacks whose main idea is to protect themselves from the "contrarians", a term that they explicitly use as a negative label. After I wrote this sentence, I randomly opened realclimate.org where Gavin Schmidt just wrote a new rant about the contrarians and consensus. Oh my God. What the hell is wrong with "contrarians"? A "contrarian" is comparably likely to be right as a "non-contrarian", whatever the method to distinguish and separate these two normally ill-defined categories is supposed to be, and when a person called a "contrarian" is right, it is usually more important than when a "non-contrarian" is right. Our civilization is based on insights of many people who used to be "contrarians", and the same thing will surely be true about the future.

But I don't really want to spend much time with the climate science because in the present form, most of the stuff done in the discipline is simply not science but rather a selective filtering of not too important partial data meant to confirm a pre-existing prejudice whose main motivation is political (to promote certain eco-socialist policies) rather than scientific (to learn how the world works and to construct convincing, comprehensive, and detailed theories explaining and predicting the data).

Let me say that the problem of "isolated cultures" is not just about their being right or wrong. It is also about the question whether some work is important or not. Even if scientists write correct papers, it's not guaranteed that they're important. There must exist a market of ideas that motivates people to do important stuff and those who are doing things that are both correct and important must be allowed to flourish. In this context, competition must exist between adjacent disciplines and it must be possible for people to move from one place to another so that the efficiency and importance of the scientific process is optimized by the invisible hand of the free markets (of ideas, in this case).

This principle is being affected by the "cultures", too. People in a separated culture often don't know - and can't say - why their research is "important" (because in many cases, they feel that it is not). But they hope that some other people, often in different "cultures", will eventually find their work important. However, they leave it to pure chance. They rely on the "need to preserve a culture" or "diversity" as the main justification of their existence and their funding.

I think that this is a fundamentally wrong approach, too. If the only motivation to do certain research (XY) is the belief that it could be important for someone else (UV), I think that the researcher of XY should systematically learn what UV is/are doing so that the research of XY can be directed in such a way that it will be more useful for UV. It is his or her responsibility and duty. In other words, people should always try to know enough about the adjacent disciplines if these disciplines serve as the main motivation of their own work. These gaps between the different interrelated disciplines and "cultures" simply shouldn't exist. And when they do exist, it is always the fault of the person who refuses to study the important work of the people "behind the gap".

And that's the memo.

Václav Klaus resigns as the ODS honorary chairman

This Friday was a nice day. I went to Prague to see an enthusiastic talk of a former colleague of mine, MG, and to spend some pleasant time with him or her, but if you allow, we will keep the private and public things separated.

Among the public events, amusingly enough, I met a Czech X Factor finalist, Ms Kamila Nývltová (search), in the subway. Some regular readers will surely remember this young woman.

I didn't want to create a scandal so I didn't talk to her in the crowded wagon: no one else did either - the privacy of stars and starlets seems to be protected much more than I expected. 

But I followed her on Florenc, another station, to be sure it was her, and asked her whether she was Miss Kleopatra. She smiled, answered Yes with her voice that made the question about her identity indisputable. I told her I was Tutankhamun, not realizing that he was born 1,300 (rather than 17) years before Kleopatra :-), and she didn't need any help with her luggage. Fun encounter.

Klaus vs a red green French revolutionary

Czech president Václav Klaus's meetings on Friday were less pleasant. His team made a substantial mistake of inviting Danny the Red, a far-left French-German provocateur and revolutionary from the 1968 student barricades, to the Prague Castle.



The Economist's article and picture about Václav Klaus suggests that the paper is addressed to the fans of Harry Potter and to younger fans of Batman rather than adults.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit has prepared a multi-level provocation: see Monster and Critics. He gave the European flag to Klaus as a gift - it's a well-known fact that Klaus won't fly it above the Prague Castle. Then he said that he was not interested in the host's (Klaus's) opinions but he cared what he would do to satisfy folks like the Cohn-Bandit.

See a longer transcript

More aggressively, he asked who was paying for Declan Ganley, suggesting mysterious financial links with Klaus himself etc. Well, comrade Bandit, the fact that you are a green parasite paid from our (European citizens') taxes doesn't mean that other people have to belong to the same class. Ganley is a self-made businessman (telecommunications for the military, forests, aluminum, and other sectors).

President Klaus asked Hans-Gert Poettering for the right not to answer these would-be questions from Danny the Red but Poettering rejected the request. Let me tell you, if the European Union meant that some far-left idiots who have been voted by no one in the Czech Republic should get the right to freely oxidate and insult the head of our state at the very symbol of the Czech statehood, a castle that has enjoyed a very special and serious status for many centuries, I would prefer to leave the EU as soon as possible. 

You know, the Prague Castle doesn't belong to some screwed French communist revolutionaries and it never will: it is not a Paris barricade. And what the Czech president's acts will look like will always depend on his opinions, not the opinions of some green imbeciles, because this is how it works in democracy and this is why we have a president in the first place.

Honorary chairman

Finally, today, Václav Klaus resigned as the honorary chairman of ODS, the Civic Democratic Party that he founded in the early 1990s, because the centrist and ideologically vacuous, lobbyists-oriented politics that the current leadership is doing - including Merkel-like support for the global warming socialism and other fashionable policies - became too big a liability for the head of the state (and probably for the party, too): The Earth Times, video in Czech. By the way, later, Václav Klaus congratulated prime minister Topolánek to his renewed mandate as the ODS chairman. The ODS-Klaus split was way more elegant and peaceful than the otherwise analogous social democratic ČSSD-Zeman split years earlier: the difference is probably arising from different players.

Incidentally, RSS MSU released their November data - almost no change of the global temperature anomaly, so I decided that a special article would be too boring in this case. The year 2008 is set to become the coldest year in the 21st century so far and in one month, we will definitely return to the question how the year 2008 looked like.

Black hole singularities in AdS/CFT

Moshe Rozali wrote an innocent article about the "hometown" of the gauge theory in the AdS/CFT correspondence. Where does it live?

We think of gravity as being defined in the bulk of the space - by variables such as g_{mn}(t,w,x,y,z) - while the gauge theory is living on the lower-dimensional boundary, being made out of fields like F_{mn}(t,x,y,z). But as Moshe explains, this is just an artifact of a choice of variables. Both theories are physically equivalent so we should say that they "live" on the same space.

When the bulk is large enough, it is better to imagine that both (equivalent) theories live in the bulk. When the gauge theory is weakly coupled, it is more natural to imagine that both (equivalent) theories live on the boundary and there is no bulk. However, this comment by Moshe became just a boundary of a more extensive discussion whose bulk focused on something different, namely a question by Bee:

What happens with black hole singularities in the AdS/CFT correspondence?

A detailed terminological convention: on this blog and all the threads, "anti de Sitter space" means the covering space of the hyperboloid shape - a toilet paper that is wound around the hyperboloid infinitely many times. This AdS space has no closed time-like curves. Moderating police will enforce that you use a different word for the hyperboloid with closed CTCs.

Bee is convinced that the singularities are the culprits responsible for the black hole information loss and they must be locally "repaired" to conserve the information. It is easy to see that this is a misguided notion. Look at this Penrose diagram that we recently used to explain why anything ever falls into a black hole.



The time goes up. The observers who escape from the black hole have world lines similar to the orange line (where the internal sphere has the Schwarzschild radius). On the other hand, the observers who fall into a black hole follow world lines similar to the yellow one (the surface of the collapsing star): they inevitably hit the singularity and are destroyed.

The yellow guys may carry some information - e.g. books - and this information is destroyed at the singularity (the horizontal purple teeth). So the bytes from these books can never reach the upper end of the orange worldline (or the upper tip of the whole diagram): they are lost for the external world. That's a classical conclusion following from the rules of causality: this information loss holds to all orders in the semiclassical expansion. Let me say in advance that in quantum gravity, the information manages to tunnel out superluminally even though the decoding is a hopeless task in practice.

Now, Bee thinks that the singularity should be blamed for the loss and it must be "fixed" to preserve the information. But as long as you imagine ordinary Riemannian geometry, it can't be the case. Try to cut a finite but small neighborhood of the singularity (a horizontal strip near the teeth) and replace it by something else. Will it help you to save the precious books?

The answer is No. For example, the parts of the singularity near the left end are spatially separated from the infinite future (or the extreme upper end of the orange line). Moreover, you can't really connect the singularity to the empty portion of the Minkowski space that reappears after the black hole evaporates. For example, the vertical line on the right side from "y" in "singularity" in the picture above has the same geometry as in ordinary empty Minkowski space and can't be connected to anything else. It's just the r=0 point of an empty space in some random spherical coordinates - a generic point (a world line, in fact).

Whether you like it or not, the only way for the information to escape from the vicinity of the singularity is to surpass the speed of light and to violate the classical causality. This violation is arguably small and innocent - it is exponentially suppressed much like other types of the quantum tunneling - but it is necessary, too.

In the text above, it was explained that it doesn't help if you just "repair" a small vicinity of the singularity. In fact, even if you replace the whole purple triangular black hole interior by something else, you won't solve the paradox. The moment (or locus in spacetime) where it is already guaranteed that the information is lost is at the event horizon.

What happens with the books after they cross the horizon is irrelevant. It is the very moment when the book crossed the horizon when it was decided that there was a new puzzle that quantum gravity has to smoothly resolve. It is the horizon, not the singularity, where you have to start to solve the information loss paradox if you want to have any chance to solve it: when you're approaching the singularity, it's already too late. The whole black hole interior has to allow a subtle form of nonlocality for the paradox to go away.

(The discussions about singularity vs event horizons are a part of a broader problem. The public is often confused about the very definition of a black hole. It is the event horizon, and not the singularity, that defines a black hole. The singular character of the singularity may be an artifact of the classical theory but the existence of the horizon - and a causally disconnected region of spacetime - is the actual revolutionary and robust consequence of general relativity. The hole is "black" because light can't classically ever get out of the hole and it can't get out because of the horizon.)

What does the AdS/CFT picture say about it?

In the AdS/CFT, there is a dual description, in terms of a gauge theory, of this process - an evaporating black hole. In the picture above, I used the 4D Schwarzschild black hole. The qualitatively analogous black hole in the AdS5 case is a "small" AdS5 Schwarzschild black hole.

This black hole may form and evaporate, too. This process may be captured by the conformal field theory living on the boundary. And it is guaranteed to be unitary and the information is guaranteed to be preserved - because the gauge theory has a nice Hilbert space and a Hermitian Hamiltonian. The price you pay is that it is harder to decode "where" the things are happening in the bulk.

So how does this unitary picture agree with the Penrose diagram that seems to imply that the information has to be lost, by the very rules of causality? Well, it agrees because the rules of causality are not strict in this case. The black hole is a finite object and particles can surpass the speed of light for a finite period of time. You shouldn't think that this proposition allows you to send the information superluminally in ordinary flat space (not even a little bit of information!): in infinite spacetime, the causality is kind of exact (because there is nothing to tunnel through except the whole spacetime which is infinite).

But in the context of the black hole spacetime, you should trust me: particles have an exponentially small probability to create correlations between the interior and the exterior, despite the naive space-like separation of the two. The quantum tunneling is how the information is preserved, and the term tunneling can be used to explain the very Hawking radiation, too.

Can the CFT tell you whether the singularities are there and whether they destroy the information?

Not really. The gauge theory makes many phenomena in the bulk look obscure. All their evolution probabilities are surely encoded in the gauge theory. But the further you go from the boundary of the AdS space, the more difficult transformation must be applied to the "simple" gauge theory variables to find the right ones and to find out what's going on in the bulk.

This difficulty becomes extreme in the presence of horizons. In fact, it is only the black hole exterior that is "simply" (causally, in both directions) connected with the boundary. Only if the particles stay outside the black hole horizons, their interactions can be easily calculated from the boundary correlators, in the same way as if the black hole were absent.

Uncovering the horizon by the CFT

It doesn't mean that brave minds haven't tried to look below the horizon in the AdS/CFT. They have. The most famous group were Fidkowski, Hubeny, Kleban, and Shenker. Their analysis had a lot of subtleties, especially with the inevitable complexification of the spacetime, the confusing choice of contours in various complex spaces, and the conditions which complexified solutions of Einstein's and/or geodesic equations should be considered physical contributions to the observables (correlators). As far as I can say, these questions have never been quite resolved (so far) even though some people clearly know the rules of the game much more than your humble correspondent does.

Initially, Shenker et al. didn't see a signal from the singularity that they may have expected. But they saw something after they changed the rules of the game a bit. But no one knows the full picture. Moreover, the black hole interior could be more properly described in terms of fuzzballs, horizon-less classical configurations corresponding to individual microstates.

If that's the case, the empty interior (with the singularity) should reoccur by tracing over the black hole microstates but not earlier. This picture should exist in a very explicit form in the AdS/CFT case, too. Some things are known but the complete picture is not. So it is fair to say that what happens to the infalling observer remains a mystery, even in the AdS/CFT case, although we are certain that the information will be preserved for the observer at infinity and we suspect that some classical intuition of general relativity about the black hole interior will approximately hold, too.

But the precise quantum gravitational "corrections" to the causality rules - and why they agree with everything we know in all limits - have not been fully understood yet. The black hole exterior is understood in much more detail.

The tunneling picture and holography seem to imply - heuristically - that the number of degrees of freedom simply won't be enough to describe "arbitrary physical phenomena" very close to the singularity. The degrees of freedom describing these highly curved regions will generate a phase space of a pretty small volume which is why you won't have a sufficient number of microstates to do whatever you want.

However, you may increase the volume of the phase space by adding new degrees of freedom from the black hole exterior. Then you will have enough phase space to arrange the black hole interior degrees of freedom almost in any way you want: but the price you pay is that you have to arrange the black hole exterior degrees of freedom in a correlated fashion: by finding physically allowed microstates, you inevitably create correlations between the interior and the exterior.

Complementarity

The degrees of freedom in the black hole interior and the black hole exterior are not quite independent - a paradigm that is referred to as the black hole complementarity. The Hilbert space is not a tensor product of two infinite-dimensional and essentially unrestricted Hilbert spaces. Instead, the details of the black hole interior physics are subtly encoded in the information that stays outside the black hole. And if you managed to define the actual field-like degrees of freedom inside the black hole (and be ready: field-theoretical degrees of freedom could simply be inadequate), they wouldn't quite commute with the degrees of freedom outside, not even at spatial separations.

I may have said these things in a more refined way than (some) others but it is a picture that the real experts who have looked into these questions have essentially adopted and they would subscribe to it in one way or another. Still, the detailed microscopic formulae and the identity of the constraints and the relationships between the degrees of freedom etc. remains fuzzy even though it is very likely that this problem could be fully solvable e.g. in the famous AdS5/CFT4 N=4 case.

Besides the small black holes that resemble the ordinary 4D Schwarzschild black holes, the AdS space also admits "large" AdS black holes. They are so large that they don't evaporate: they're eternal. Still, one can see a counterpart of the information loss paradox here. Juan Maldacena tried to solve it by a brave paper with two copies of the boundary conformal field theory. It is very intriguing but whether it fully solves these puzzles remains unclear.

While the black hole interior has been sufficiently "localized" by pure thought for us to be certain that it doesn't destroy physics or information, what actually happens there and what degrees of freedom should be used to describe it exactly (if it is possible at all) remains a mystery. So does the singularity. But I think you shouldn't expect these spacelike singularities to follow the fate of timelike singularities similar to the conifold - whose fate has been almost completely cracked. At the center of black holes, something bad is happening to time which is much more drastic an event than when space shrinks: death is more serious than claustrophobia.

CCNet: Eight articles about the climate socialism

Benny Peiser is sending us interesting stuff. Send an e-mail to listserver@livjm.ac.uk with "subscribe cambridge-conference" or "unsubscribe cambridge-conference" in the body.

1. China View: Ten thousand EU workers protest in Brussels against the "climate" plans to cripple Europe's steel industry
2. PhysOrg: German carmakers denounce the EU "compromise" on CO2 emissions
3. World Climate Report: Will one of the 10,000 participants of the Poznan climate conference notice that there hasn't been any warming for 10 years?

4. Deutsche Welle: Václav Klaus, a leading AGW "doubter", will become more visible during the Czech EU presidency
5. Investor's Business Daily: Cooling down: people will realize that there exist serious issues, too
6. Climate Progress: Maybe, Obama is not the ultimate green messiah, after all
7. WSJ blog: Analysts are scrabling to dampen already low expectations in the Poznan summit
8. Orange Punch: The Terminator and friends have edited their warming books to make his heroic struggle to terminate climate change look much cheaper

Bonus from your humble correspondent: Michael Mann's hockey stick from Brownian noise

As a part of the refreshing of my basic Mathematica skills, I've created this simple self-explanatory Mathematica notebook explaining why Michael Mann gets the hockey stick even from random data - Brownian noise.

In order to make the effect really nice and obvious, I first prepare 5,000 random Brownian temperature proxies, obtained by a resummation of random independent numbers between -0.5 and +0.5 over time. Click the picture below to zoom in.



In the second step, I create "instrumental" 20th century data. To simplify a bit and extract the qualitative message of this whole homework, I assume that the temperature was increasing linearly. At this moment, I am ready to compute the correlation coefficients of each of the 5,000 proxies with the "instrumental" temperature data. The average temperature of the proxies, weighted by the correlation coefficients - telling you how "good" the proxy is according to Michael Mann - is drawn below: click to zoom in.



What we're doing is completely obvious. We're choosing the "good" and "important" proxies by their having an unusual 20th century trend, without paying any attention to their behavior in the previous centuries. It follows that the behavior of the random proxies before 1900 averages to zero while the selection criterion for the 20th century survives. The result is inevitably a hockey stick.

Let me emphasize that we have entered random data from a virtual world where the temperature in the 20th century had the same variability as the temperature in the previous centuries. Nevertheless, the Mannian method has transformed the random data into a hockey stick. That's the simplest way, due to M&M, to prove that Mann's methodology is complete rubbish.

If you're worried about the linear 20th century, it doesn't really matter because the 20th century trend was pretty similar to the linear function and with the exactly measured 20th century temperatures, we would obtain (and Mann obtained) qualitatively similar data. Still, the appearance of the hockey-like graph clearly doesn't mean that the 20th century was any special: in our world, we were very careful to guarantee that the 20th century was generic and ordinary.

Using Mann's method, you get the hockey stick if the data are random and unrelated to the temperature. But even if the data are correlated with the temperature, it is easy to see that the resulting hockey stick doesn't imply that the real temperatures looked like a hockey stick. In fact, the temperatures could have been linearly increasing from the year 1000 to 2000 - imagine that you add this "real" linear function to all the proxies. The result, using Mann's method, would still have the hockey stick, superimposed onto a negligible linear trend. You can play with the program yourself. If you add any "real temperature profile" to the Brownian motion, Mann's method still gives you the "real temperature profile" plus (superimposed on) the hockey stick (that comes from the random contribution to the proxies, more precisely from the bad proxies that were overrepresented because they agreed with a warming trend "by chance").

To put it simply, Mann misinterprets the 20th century warming as a proof that the warming was unprecedented, uses this misinterpretation to select proxies, and "surprisingly" derives his assumptions back. If you have Mathematica, you may download the notebook here:

mann-hockey-fun.nb

Dyson spheres and Fermi paradox

Let me postpone the serious part of this posting. ;-)

As you know, we are surrounded by extraterrestrial aliens. The Drake equation proves that the intelligent life must arise almost everywhere. However, we haven't seen any extraterrestrial friends yet. The question "where are they?" is known as the Fermi paradox.

Clearly, they must be hiding. Why?

Well, as you know, the fossil fuels are a global problem. All extraterrestrial civilizations realize that it is a problem they must wrestle with. Moreover, they need the optimum kind of energy. Most of them choose solar panels and they surround their whole star by solar panels, to capture all the emitted energy.



Still, the large artificial sphere surrounding the star - a Dyson sphere - is eventually heated to a new temperature. Its thermal radiation emits the same total energy (from the whole surface) as the star. You can see that the total power emitted per unit time

T⁴ R² = const.

The fourth power of temperature comes from the well-known black body laws and the squared radius is the surface area. Note that the temperature goes like the inverse square root of the radius.

For example, the surface of the Sun has temperature around 5,000 K and it is 2 light seconds from the center. However, the Earth is around 500 light seconds from the Sun, about 250 times further than the surface. The corresponding temperature is therefore sqrt(250) = 15+epsilon times lower than the Sun's surface temperature. Numerically, 5000 K/15 = 300+epsilon K, close to the observed average temperature on the Earth. (You would have to deal with the albedo and the absorption by the atmosphere to get more accurate results.)

Let me use the figure 0 °C = 273.15 K for the temperature at the Earth's distance from the Sun to simplify the numbers. ;-)

What is the temperature of the Dyson spheres?

Now, the best civilizations realize that 300 K is still too warm. They only want to lose their energy at much lower temperatures, close to the LHC temperature of 1.9 K, relevant for the superconducting materials, in order to save the energy for cooling. So they build the Dyson spheres 10,000 astronomical units away from their Sun, a few light months. The temperature of the black body radiation emitted by this large sphere is sqrt(10,000) = 100 times lower than the temperature on Earth, around 2.7 K.

Can we see some evidence of these large Dyson spheres that the omnipresent extraterrestrial civilizations use to effectively capture their stellar energy? To prove the existence of the extraterrestrial civilization, we would have to detect thermal radiation at temperature 2.7 K. Can we do it? :-)

Now, as Cosmic Variance reports, Fermilab is paying for a project trying to find the extraterrestrial aliens via the thermal radiation of their Dyson spheres. But they're not ingenious enough to realize that the right Dyson spheres have a radius of 10,000 astronomical units (or smaller for less powerful stars) so that the temperature is 2.7 K instead of hundreds of Kelvin degrees.

The correct ingenious explanation is that, of course, we see the extraterrestrial aliens everywhere through the thermal radiation at 2.7 K. It has been called "cosmic microwave background" by the scientists who wanted to hide that they had discovered the aliens so they invented the so-called Big Bang. ;-) Of course, the only Big Bang occurred when these scientists' heads were hit by an alien spaceship. :-) As you can see, this comment explains the cosmic microwave background radiation. It explains dark matter, too: 80% of the stars host advanced intelligent life and are surrounded by the Dyson spheres so we don't see them. Instead, we see their microwave radiation.



The density of energetically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in different directions of the skies, visualized as the deviation from the cosmic average.

As these civilizations are getting more powerful, they need more space, so they pay an energy tax to accelerate away from the other civilizations. This also explains the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, previously incorrectly attributed to the "cosmological constant". If you think for a while, the extraterrestrial aliens explain everything. :-)

Now seriously

Freeman Dyson's independence and unusual theories are cool and I admire him for lots of reasons but frankly speaking, I am sometimes surprised that he doesn't believe the catastrophic global warming theory because the latter theory is rather similar to some of his unlikely theories.

The artificial origin of the cosmic microwave background above may look intriguing or literally ingenious: as a crackpot, your humble correspondent could literally make a hole into the world. ;-) But if you think about the "theory", there exists not a single rational yet nontrivial argument supporting the hypothesis about the extraterrestrial aliens in the text above (or elsewhere, for that matter).

The numbers - such as the temperature - only agree because I have arranged other numbers so that the results agree. And if you calculate other numbers, such as the predicted intensity of the thermal radiation, be sure that you will obtain a much lower number of photons than what we observe, even if you assume that most stars are surrounded by Dyson spheres. You will also predict wrong properties of the dark matter (the Dyson spheres) and many other things.

How many civilizations are there?

Recall that the Drake equation was proposed by Frank Drake (UCSC) in 1960 to calculate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations. This number is presented as the product of many factors such as the number of stars, the average number of planets per star, the fraction of planets that are good enough for some life, the probability for life to become intelligent, and so forth. See also the more sophisticated 2005 edition of the Drake equation.

Clearly, as long as this identity is rationally justifiable and accurate, it tells us exactly nothing. We just replace one completely unknown quantity by many almost completely unknown quantities. It is clear that we don't have solid data or arguments about most of them so the factorization can't help us to determine the number of extraterrestrial civilization. The correctly calculated uncertainty that we have about both sides of the equation is obviously identical. We haven't incorporated any nontrivial, independently derived and verified physical law(s) into the construction of the equation, so it is obvious that the equation cannot tell us anything besides tautologies.

If common sense is not enough to make a sensible estimate of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations, I find it obvious that this equation can't do the job, either.

The most reliable method to determine the number of advanced, intelligent, extraterrestrial civilizations that we have at this moment are the observations. We haven't seen any. It follows that according to the best evidence we can have, the number of intelligent civilizations in this Universe is rather low. We may even be the only ones in the Milky Way and perhaps in the observable Universe.

Many people are bothered by this likely conclusion. I am not bothered at all.

First of all, I completely subscribe to late Michael Crichton's comments about this issue explained in his 2003 talk at Caltech, Aliens Cause Global Warming. The Drake equation was the first example of a pseudoscientific, meaningless relationship that was used to irrationally distort the people's opinions. This equation was later recycled into the equally meaningless (and less original) I=PAT equation and many others.

Psychological illusions of the Drake equation

In the Drake equation, you are led to believe that all the dimensionless factors on the right hand side (such as the probability for pre-existing life to evolve into higher forms) are rather close to one. Well, most of them may be close to one. But there are so many of these factors that it is very plausible that some of them are much smaller than one. If just one of these factors equals 10^{-20} or two of them equal 10^{-10} or so, you can already see that the Sun is the only intelligent star in the Universe.

If you construct the equation out of 20 factors and each of them is around 0.1, you will reach the same conclusion.

And it is damn possible. There are just too many weak links in the argument that life is inevitable. The first simple proteins or DNA molecules - or their survival - simply may be very unlikely and depend on rare reactions or a fine ratio of various elements in the environment. I am not claiming that all of these "evolutionary steps" require miracles.

But I am surely claiming that the belief that all of them - 20 out of 20 - are pretty much inevitable is just an unsubstantiated prejudice. It is on the very same footing as religions that claim that the man must be the only decent creation of God and that the creation was a true miracle. There is no scientific evidence for either - the uniqueness of human beings or their membership in a huge set of clever beings in this Universe. 

Some people think that by believing a scenario that is "opposite" to the conventional and popular religions, they must get closer to the truth. But it's just not the case. Neither of these ideologies is justified by scientific evidence.

The Drake equation leads some gullible people to believe that all the factors on the right hand side must have comparable values because they "look" similar and each of them is represented by one letter. And because the value for some of them may be argued to be close to one, the gullible people believe that all of them must be close to one, and the resulting number of civilizations is therefore high, too. But that's wrong. The factors are very different and only a full proof of a high value of each of them could make the factorization useful. Otherwise we're just dividing the (constant) ignorance into many baskets.

Much like the blonde woman who only wants her pizza to be cut to four slices because she couldn't eat as many as eight of them, and much like Zeno who was dividing the trajectory of an arrow into infinitely many pieces to prove that the arrow was always at rest, some people seem to think that if they divide an unknown number into many factors - or if they split a big mistake in an argument into many smaller errors :-) - the original ignorance or the mistake disappears. But it doesn't change at all.

Again, we don't know how many intelligent civilizations are there in this Galaxy (or the Universe) and the most solid currently available method to determine the answer, namely the observations, indicate that the number is low. There exists no paradox and no inconsistency of this conclusion with the known laws of physics and the term "Fermi paradox" is a misnomer.

Frankly speaking, I am equally unimpressed with the ideas such as the Dyson spheres. The project to surround the whole star by solar panels is surely about bad economics and management. But I think it is a case of bad fundamental physics, too. And I don't think that the discovery of a new thermal radiation in the Universe would prove the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization. It could also be a red-shifted thermal radiation of a different origin or e.g. the Hawking radiation from some black holes.

Criticism of Dyson spheres

It is clear that these spheres don't saturate any fundamental physical bound: they're ordinary pieces of low-energy, low-brow matter, after all. They're no black holes - objects that maximize the entropy in a volume and minimize the scrambling time, among many other things. And for low-energy, low-brow physics, it is the applications in everyday life - and economics - that decides which projects would be followed by a hypothetical extraterrestrial civilization.

And indeed, I don't think that the solar panels are the ultimate achievement of the technology that would dominate the millions of years in the future of mankind. In fact, I find this idea to be downright ludicrous. For example, artificial thermonuclear fusion is possible - and we may be just years (or decades) from a commercial realization of this technology. And better civilizations could get their energy from a catalyzed proton decay or microscopic black holes that radiate and violate the baryon number conservation. The energy obtained from the Sun is just "too slow", especially if you put the solar panels too far. The Sun is too ordinary and too slow.

So I also think that even if an intelligent civilization decided that it wants to use the solar panel paradigm and surround the whole star, it would try to put the solar panels closer to the star, not further, because it would need a smaller amount of the material and the energy per unit area of these solar panels would be higher. So I disagree that sensible civilizations would build this sphere 10,000 AU or 1 AU away from the star. It would be much closer. After all, what we usually want is concentrated energy.

By the way, the spherical shape of the sphere seems unlikely to me, too. Even if one assumes that the civilization would choose solar panels that are very distant from the star, the optimization problem that its wise economists would be solving would probably not result in a spherical shape. It would be irregular because parts of the structure would be easier to be built closer while others would be naturally constructed further from the star. There are many other points that seem completely arbitrary.

Let me conclude with this comment: the idea that such shields should be spherical was accepted because Freeman Dyson and others didn't want to do too much work and they picked the spherical solution that looked simple. In reality, the extraterrestrial engineers, managers, and politicians would be analyzing a very complicated engineering, logistical, and economical problem - it is not cheap to surround the Solar System by stuff - and they would almost certainly reach a completely different conclusion than the "simple" one.

The Dyson sphere, much like the idea of a dangerous greenhouse effect, is about the irrational overhyping of one completely random conceivable effect or plan or threat that is sociologically promoted to the most important paradigm in a whole quasi-scientific discipline - even though there are probably dozens or hundreds of (mostly unknown) effects that are more important and thousands of more reasonable explanations what may be going on. 

We should only say that a discipline is "all about one effect" (exobiology about Dyson spheres, climate science about the greenhouse effect) if we actually have some evidence for such an assumption. And if the discipline is full of seemingly complex phenomena that we simply can't predict and verify well, or if the observations even disagree with our existing hypotheses, we shouldn't assume that we know what the essential phenomena are.

I = PAT

Now, let me talk about an environmental sibling of the Drake equation, the I = PAT equation. It is a kindergarten stupidity developed in the 1970s by three prominent eco-socialist crackpots, Barry Commoner, Paul R. Ehrlich, and John Holdren. (All of them are still alive and two of them are still prominent in the far-left and even Academic circles.) You can see that their way of calculating such quantities wasn't original: it was copied from the 1960 Drake equation.

What does the equation say? It says that the human impact on the environment, I, is the product of three quantities. Now, it is important to decide whether you want to hear the correct (but inconsequential) version of the equation or the consequential (but incorrect) version of the equation. They're very different but the confusion of these two versions of these equations is the main reason why some people found this stupidity so useful for their ideology.

The correct version of the equation divides the total impact I - whatever it is exactly supposed to be - to individual people. So the total impact per capita is I/P where P is the population. Now, it is clear that the impact of different people is different. You may imagine or assume (a point to be discussed later) that the richer people's environmental footprint is larger: in some very simple model, the footprint (per year) is proportional to the consumption (in dollars per year).

So instead of dividing the impact I (per year) to the people, we divide it to the consumed dollars (per year). The number of consumed dollars (per year) may be written as the product PA where P is the population and A is the average consumption. Finally, we use the letter T for the coefficient, i.e. the impact per dollar consumed (per year). I=PAT becomes a tautology because T=I/PA is really a definition of T.

However, such a tautology wouldn't be terribly useful for the eco-socialist crackpots. What's more useful are the (wrong) assumptions needed to argue that the equation is useful and the misinterpretations of the letters. Why is it useful for them? Well, they say that the variable I measures something wrong. It is the most important measure of "wrongness" in their whole ideology. To reduce I, they must reduce either P or A or T or several of them. They want less people, poorer people, and more "silent" people in order to protect the environment.

When this equation is used in this practical way, A is interpreted as the "affluence" and T as "technology": that's where the letters come from. Affluence and technology is bad, they say!

Have they proven that population, affluence, and technology are bad?

But of course, such a conclusion doesn't follow from the tautological equation above. Recall that T in the correct equation was not technology in any sense. T was the environmental impact per unit dollar of consumption (per year). That's something different than "technology" and these things are actually often a decreasing, not increasing, function of one another.

The assumptions leading to the "derivation" of the I=PAT equation were contrived, too. The money were incorporated in a very unnatural way. It is not true that the environmental impact increases with consumption in dollars - which is what would make it natural to write this law as a proportionality law. Instead, there exists something like the environmental Kuznets curve. The impact increases for very poor people - because extremely poor people have a small impact, indeed.

But if the people become wealthy enough and they no longer have to work much for their bare survival, the environmental impact decreases again because they start to care about their healthy environment and the poor innocent animals and plants. The relationship between the average/expected impact and consumption is highly nonlinear (and context-dependent) and it is, in fact, not even a uniformly increasing function. Because of all these reasons, the coefficient "T" is nothing else than "I/PA", how it was defined, and it doesn't have any simple interpretation.

As long as misleading interpretations of the equation are avoided, it simply says that I/PA = I/PA.

There is no simple way to see whether "T" increases or decreases if a policy is adopted. There is no rational reason to assume that "T" is constant in a given situation because it's far too complicated a quantity. The value of "T" is not a universal, calculable constant in any sense. You can't independently adjust P, A, T. The I=PAT equation is a meaningless tautology that obviously cannot have any practical implications for the people who haven't lost their mind. The eco-socialists are nasty folks who want to treat the individuals as equal, gray, destructive pieces of protein whose all quantities follow proportionality laws. But the reality is fortunately very different.

We should stop using equations with (many) highly uncertain, unmeasurable, and uninterpretable factors whose only goal is to confuse the gullible people among us by dividing a big mistake into many smaller mistakes and by creating many new opportunities for deception and confusion. 

And that's the memo.

Mathematica 7

A very important person (VIP) has kindly allowed me to check the newly released Mathematica 7. See

Wolfram.COM.

It is a very impressive program (buy!). Happily enough, the notebooks from older versions of Mathematica seem to work. The new system offers you to upgrade certain obsolete commands in your old notebooks automatically but the new dialect is unlikely to affect simple enough "classical" mathematics, anyway.

To see some of the abilities of the new Mathematica, see

Demonstrations.Wolfram.COM 

• Search the previous web e.g. for surface and browse for a while

Reference.Wolfram.COM (standard help pages)
Screencasts (short educational videos, try this 2-minute one)
The Learning Center (screencasts, seminars, tutorials)
MathWorld (a Wikipedia-like math encyclopedia with lots of technical references and many Mathematica notebooks)
Blog.Wolfram.COM

From the last website I mentioned, let me recommend you e.g. this article about image processing - a new set of capabilities besides built-in parallel computing, geodesy & GIS, and other new things:

HTML version, screencast version

You may actually import images and treat them as general mathematical expressions or variables, compute polynomials out of your monkey photographs :-), put them into matrices, divide them into blocks of pixels, recalculate the RGB data of each pixel according to your own programs, and do many impressive types of image processing.



Truth to be told, I had to convert my images to BMP to be able to simply drag them to the Mathematica windows. But it was worth the hassle. (Update: the importing has been fixed after a very helpful, hard-working employee of Wolfram Research told me how to change a default directory so that the value doesn't contain "š" from "Luboš". Now, I can import JPG both locally and from the web easily.) The following screenshot (click to zoom in) shows a Nobel prize winner, including a spousal unit, partitioned into some matrices (besides some gamma matrix and quasinormal windows):



If you have any doubts that my copy of the program can evaluate the rest, here is the Dynkin diagram of David Gross's 10 x 10 matrix. Be sure he's neither simple nor compact as a group but he can remove a sword from your throat if you happen to eat it.

But it is still Mathematica, with its amazing abilities to formally and numerically manipulate with expressions, functions, matrices, factorize, simplify, integrate, differentiate, solve equations, draw functions etc. If your living standards are above the average of your country and you are into maths, you should seriously buy your own copy unless you have another access to it!

You may also search for Mathematica on this blog. You will find articles about Mathematica 6 (just 18 months ago), STRINGVACUA, LHC olympics, Wolfram Publicon, spheres turned inside out, and many other things. Yes, I could now verify that Larry Summers' triple integral is 128/45 Pi = 0.905415, close to his estimate 1.

La Niña may be returning

La Niña, a Pacific atmospheric phenomenon that ended during the summer, to be replaced by ENSO-neutral conditions, shows some signs of life again.



Click the picture above for more maps. The weekly status (click PDF or PPT) indicates that the ENSO region 1+2 has a -0.9 °C anomaly (page 5/30). The regions 3, 3.4, and 4 have -0.4 °C which is close to -0.5 °C, the official cutoff for the La Niña regime (decided according to the 3.4 region).

If La Niña returns, expect more global cooling to be more likely than global warming. Plan for more snow in Colorado and many other things. The cool phase of the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) could bring more frequent La Niñas in the next 20-30 years and less frequent El Niños and take the global temperature down.

More news about the climate change

The climate conference began in Poznan, Poland. The bureaucrats will try to convince each other that they should negotiate a Kyoto II treaty in Copenhagen in 2009. Pressures from Italian, Polish, German, and other economies are fortunately likely to dilute any proposed plans. 

The Telegraph (U.K.) explains that

President-elect Barack Obama proposes economic suicide for U.S.

Well, if you found out that he is not a real American, it would be homicide, after all. Incidentally, it was recently found that the wind mills and turbines built across the U.S. can substantially alter the character of storms. So far this form of energy generates 1% of the U.S. electricity so any such effect is negligible. But the wind turbine's deadly ice shower could matter.

Two well-known people from the climate science, Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt - who are famous for things very different than accuracy, integrity, and knowledge, but they are famous anyway - have been promoting our very own NIPCC report, written down by Fred Singer et al.

Meanwhile, the same Michael Mann was able to create a perfect reconstruction: the first 6,820 decimal places of the temperature for each moment of the 20th century agree. Congratulations. ;-) Craig Loehle wrote a blog version of his article (TRF) about the problems with tree rings and the divergence problem.

The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season is officially over. By its ACE - the integrated cyclone energy - it was about 1.5 times stronger than the 2006 and 2007 seasons but 1.5 times weaker than the 2005 season. Of course, the total damage was much smaller than in 2005, by a factor of 5 or so, and fatalities respect a similar ratio. It will take roughly a century to beat the 2005 season.

The Sun

November has seen some increase in the solar activity, especially due to sunspots 1007 and 1008 (of the new, cycle 24 magnetic fingerprints) in the first half of the month. Since that time, the Sun became pretty quiet again as the SolarCycle24.com website (that just upgraded its design) shows.

Heat expansion of the spectral action and loop diagrams

Ali Chamseddine and Alain Connes have a new paper,

The uncanny precision of the spectral action,

which argues that under some assumptions they find worth considering, two terms in an expansion of an action give the correct initial 6820 decimal places of an action.

It's a typical paper where I feel that there is something extremely cool and exciting going on, but once I spend ten minutes with each such thing, it seems to evaporate. Recall that they want to write a theory of everything as a simple system in noncommutative geometry. The action is

S = Tr [ f(D/Lambda) ]

It's the so-called spectral action. The trace should probably be taken over a first-quantized (one-particle) Hilbert space only, generating the classical spacetime action of a field theory in some way. Here, "D" is the Dirac operator - including all dimensions they consider.

The letter "Lambda" stands for a cosmological constant. You would think that it is extremely small but they actually study "Lambda goes to infinity" limit. That's bizarre and I am afraid that you won't find any justification of such an approach in the paper but some other things are fun so you shouldn't stop reading yet.

The letter "f" is a function of a real variable "x" that drops to zero if "x" goes to plus minus infinity, something like "exp(-x^2)" except that the authors want to prefer a slightly different function with the same asymptotics but with derivatives of all orders vanishing at x=0. Again, not sure what justifies such a strange and arbitrary function. 

Clearly, for some contrived choices of functions and parameters, certain approximations to some quantities may be very accurate, but another question is whether such an observation under certain conditions is interesting, non-trivial, or relevant for anything in science or just an artificially created curiosity from the realm of recreational mathematics. If the accurate values of both sides of the (approximate) equation are physically irrelevant, so is the (approximate) identity!

But what's funny and possibly non-trivial is a "heat expansion" of the spectral action, "Tr [f(D/Lambda)]", for large values of Lambda. You might think that it is just a Taylor expansion except that it is apparently not. I feel that in their non-commutative geometrical context, they have an alternative calculation scheme for loop diagrams in field theory but all the links seem very obscure so far.

For example, I think that the numerator "11" in the equation below (27), obtained from zeta functions, could be equivalent to the "11" in the one-loop beta functions of gauge theories. Analogously, the calculation of the curvature-cubed terms around page 27 could be a reorganization of the calculation of two-loop diagrams in general relativity except that they don't get the desired (or at least expected) non-zero result. 

Note that the Goroff-Sagnotti two-loop result, proving non-renormalizability of general relativity, is a cubic function of the Weyl tensor only, and the rational coefficient is 209/2880. The number 209 could be related to 208 in some of their formulae.

If a reader knows something about the relationship between the heat expansions and loop diagrams, or why it's not there if it's not there, I would like to know! Thanks. Another topic worth research is the conceptual origin of the cancellations of the "a4" and "a6" terms in their expansion and their possible applications in the solution to various hierarchy problems.