Science on anti-GOP bias of the NAS

Science Insider has printed a courageous article about the left-wing bias of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences yesterday:

A Partisan Look at U.S. Science Policy

The academy invited the former and current science advisers to the U.S. presidents to a symposium. All of the attendants turned out to be Democrats who served for Democrats, starting from Frank Press who served for Jimmy Carter.

How is that possible? Haven't there been some Republican U.S. presidents after Carter, too?

Psychology of dark matter denial

Sean Carroll mentioned some developments concerning dark matter that have been discussed on this blog, too. His short text is another example of the fact that his comments are sometimes right, however rare these events may be.



A month ago, the media overhyped a paper by Chilean astronomers who claimed that their measurements show that there was no dark matter in the vicinity of the Solar System. However, Bovy and Tremaine showed that with a more realistic model for the velocities of the galaxies, the corrected method seems to yield a dark matter density that is fully compatible with the value obtained by more common methods.

Among the media, only Universe Today, Phys Org, and Nude Socialist mentioned the new article which arguably is – unlike the previous, overhyped one – correct. The ordinary non-scientific media remained silent. Theories that work are not too interesting for the journalists; they prefer to write about things that don't work, especially if these "don't work" claims are untrue.

These days, many people – or at least a sufficiently large number of loud people – are literally obsessed by attacks against some key theories contained in the very foundations of modern science. String theory may be just too mathematically abstract for a number of amazingly aggressive "critics" if I have to avoid the term "imbeciles". Quantum mechanics brought the most profound conceptual revolution in the history of physics.

South Dakota's LUX will join the dark matter wars

Many articles on this blog were dedicated to the war on the existence of dark matter.

Some research teams claim that they have already detected a proof of a dark matter particle, a WIMP, whose mass is of order 10 GeV. Other teams disagree equally vehemently.



The Homestake Mine

In the Fall, a new big player will enter this conflict; see a list of other participants. Its name is LUX: Large Underground Xenon detector. Phys.ORG just dedicated a fresh article to the experiment:

Lying in wait for WIMPs: Researchers seek to increase the sensitivity of Large Underground Xenon detector by orders of magnitude

But much of the data were already available to readers of the Symmetry Magazine in April 2012.

Sheldon Cooper's revenge to Stephen Hawking: Hawking made a boo boo

Yesterday, we discussed an interesting new paper by Hartle, Hawking, and Hertog. It claimed that because of some mysterious maths of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, a theory with a negative cosmological constant may accelerate the cosmic expansion just like as if it were a positive cosmological constant.

I said it couldn't be right: there had to be a sign error. But I didn't know where the error was. A reader named "test" or "HB" has quickly filled the gap. I just verified that HB's remark is right. So I will alert Jim Hartle – the only author whom I have talked to for a long enough time – and send him a link to this blog entry. I am sure he will be happy!

Euro, geuro, and Greece before grexit

The outcome of the recent elections in Greece was an unbelievable proof that Greece is a dying democracy, something I've been predicting for years.

The single largest party turned out to be New Democracy which, despite its attempts to right-wing image, one could recognize as a remote counterpart of some center-left parties in the rest of Europe. I actually consider New Democracy – which received about 19 percent – to be an extreme left-wing party, too. But the other parties are worse, much worse.



A one-geuro coin.

A collection of would-be far-right nuts is called Golden Dawn. They use a modified swastika (with some Greek explanations) as their symbol and their leader, an immature 55-year-old teenager, acts as if he were an Adolf Hitler and surrounds himself with skinhead bodyguards at all times. They're against immigration – and living in a virtual reality in which some modest immigration to Greece is Greece's most pressing problem.

But of course, the actual worst problem is the rise of the super insane bug-nutty batshit crazy infinitely far left-wing parties such as Syriza; the Papandreou dynasty that was "just" batshit crazy apparently wasn't crazy enough. Their young boss is a superstupid insane ultracommunist who wants to introduce a society in which everyone has everything he needs and only does what he wants to do. I have watched a few YouTube videos with Alexis Tsipras and I must say that in comparison with him, our insane social democratic jerk politicians are sensible moderate deep thinkers. This Marx who lost the last traces of realism got about 16 percent and it will be even worse. Check e.g. his address to the GDR communist "comrades".

Hartle, Hawking, Hertog: how our C.C. could be negative

A reader has pointed out that I missed a paper by Hartle, Hawking, and Hertog last week:

Accelerated Expansion from Negative Λ

They claim – and please sit down so that your stability gets improved – that the accelerated expansion of our Universe could result from a theory that has a fundamentally negative cosmological constant, like in the Anti de Sitter space (AdS).



I enjoyed reading their paper so far. They clearly have brilliant minds. Too bad that the main claim seems to boil down to a sign error so far. ;-)

Of course, it is easier to study stringy AdS vacua than dS vacua and they're related to CFTs by holography, unlike dS vacua (sorry for that comment, Andy Strominger), so I don't have to explain to you how welcome their bizarre conclusion could be from the viewpoint of string cosmology if it were right. One additional advantage of AdS vacua over dS vacua is that they may preserve SUSY but I guess that they don't claim that there is unbroken SUSY in our Universe which is just masked by their tricks, do they?

(The final section of the bulk of their paper is dedicated to string cosmology; they mention holography a few times, too.)

Paul Frampton: three generations from an extension of SM

Paul Frampton, an achieved physicist, former TRF guest blogger, a sex symbol among the Argentine supermodels, and an involuntary importer of a substance is impressing everyone with the physics productivity during his confinement in Argentina where he is affiliated with Centro Universitario DeVoto in Buenos Aires.

Five days ago, a North Carolina judge endorsed the decision of University at Chapel Hill not to pay Paul his salary. Most people at UNC believe he is innocent.



Valeria Mazza, a Ms Frampton candidate

They just published the first part of his Notes From the Gallows:

Three Generations in Minimally Extended Standard Models (arXiv)

Paul's co-authors are Chiu Man Ho and Thomas W. Kephart. And I actually think it's a very interesting preprint.

Klaus for Heartland on AGW: Eastern Europe is a bit corrupt, Germany is confused

Czech president Václav Klaus was the keynote speaker during the Monday dinner at the Seventh Heartland Climate Conference, ICCC-7, in Chicago.



One could have said that all things have been said but one could have been wrong, too. He said some revealing things and addressed some novel questions about politics of AGW.

Higgs combo viXra java applet

Cosmological update: Bovy and Tremaine of IAS looked at a recent Chilean claim – wildly hyped in the mainstream media (but only mentioned in one sentence on TRF, in an article on a different topic) – that there was no dark matter around the Solar System. When they corrected some profiles for the velocities, they found out that the dark matter density is nonzero and compatible with the usual estimates. Via Resonaances

Phil Gibbs has written a cute and user-friendly java applet (download Java 7v4 instead of your dated Java 6v32 if you don't have the new one yet) that allows you to create thousands of charts relevant for the Higgs boson discovery:

viXra combo applet (click)

A screenshot of the applet is below.

Once the page above shows up, try to change the "Plot Type" to Exclusion, Signal, Pvalue, Sigma and see how the bump near 125 GeV is immediately affected. If you want to spend more time, you may try to play with the decay channels and individual detectors that are included and other things.

Klaus: Afghans not ready to take security lead

Czech President Václav Klaus is no military hawk. He had mixed feelings about NATO's interventions in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and probably others if there have been any and many of his attitudes may put him relatively close to folks like Ron Paul.

But before the ongoing NATO meeting began in Chicago, he said something, well, pro-interventionist.



Klaus surrounded by his American and Danish fans. After they shake his hand, they usually don't wash their hands for a week or so.

How the (2,0) SCFT, little string theory, and others arise from string theory

We often say that the primary reason why string/M-theory is so essential for modern physics is that it is the only known – and most likely, the only mathematically possible – consistent theory of gravity. Everyone who believes that he or she can do state-of-the-art research of quantum gravity without string theory is an unhinged crank, a barbarian, and a conspiracy theorist of the same kind as those who believe that Elvis Presley lives on the Moon.

But another reason why string/M-theory is indispensable for the 21st century theoretical and particle physics is that many of the "ordinary", important, non-gravitational quantum field theories and some of their non-field-theoretical but still non-gravitational generalizations are tightly embedded as limits in string theory. In this way, a theory whose main strength is to provide us with robust quantum rules governing gravity is important for our knowledge of contexts that avoid gravity, too.

Because of the dense network of relationships within string theory that link ideas, concepts, and equations that used to be considered independent – and I mostly mean dualities but not only dualities – each of the "ordinary" non-gravitational theories may be analyzed from new perspectives. In particular, extreme limits of the old theories in which a quantity is sent to infinity (or zero) could have been very mysterious but many of the mysteries go away as string/M-theory allows us to use new descriptions.

Among the new insights that we're learning from the stringy network of ideas, rules, equations, and maps, we also encounter new quantum field theories – and some other non-gravitational generalizations of these theories which are not quantum field theories – i.e. theories that are not full-fledged string vacua and that we shouldn't have overlooked in the past but we have. What are they?

Cap and trade for U.S. water

Hank Campbell of Science 2.0 discusses an unusual new proposal, namely to regulate the amount of water in America's largest water reservoir, Lake Mead, on the Colorado River (whose flow is blocked by the Hoover Dam near the border between Nevada and Arizona) by a cap-and-trade system inspired by the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system.

Hank reminds us of the utter failure of the CO2 cap-and-trade system – which is admitted even by most of the champions of the climate panic – and extrapolates the insight by saying that it must be a bad idea for water, too.



Lake Mead from the Hoover dam. The structures look just like Stanford's Hoover Tower, don't they?

The proposal was discussed by Phys Org, Live Science, and Water Online. While I agree with Hank that the CO2 cap-and-trade has been an embarrassing failure, I am not so sure I agree with him about H2O.

Global temperature maps

You may want to bookmark this page if you are often tempted to look at the regional temperatures "right now". Click (or shift-click or CTRL-click) any graph below to zoom in.

First, NOAA's El Niño unit has introduced a new, visually attractive map of the current surface sea temperatures.



It's fun to see how the Gulf Stream makes Europe warmer. Look at the dark blue (cold) color near the East Coast Canadian beaches. Even Northern Norway which is more than 25 degrees of latitude more to the North seems warmer! The temperatures go from less than 32 °F, the freezing point, to 90 °F, a good reason to think that a change by a degree or two can't make a difference.

Chanel Nº 5/fb: sweet fragrance of SUSY

I have discussed \({\mathcal F}-SU(5)\) superstringy models previously. They're based on local F-theory models, flipped \(SU(5)\) grand unification, and no-scale supergravity; each of the concepts brings some attractive or likely features to the model. In November 2011, we talked about profumo di SUSY; in March 2012, it was all about the aroma of squarks and gluinos.



The aromatic authors have added another product to their collection, Chanel Nº 5.

I guess that much like your humble correspondent, you didn't know that it was the world's most famous perfume (for me, the most impressive perfume would be Marrakesh, because of a love story) and the number 5 in the name of the perfume was preemptively chosen according to the number of inverse femtobarns collected by each detector by the end of 2011. You see that the female physicist on the picture above needs a lot of it. The paper by Li, Maxin, Nanopoulos, Walker is called

Chanel Nº 5 (\({\rm fb}^{-1}\)): sweet fragrance of SUSY

What do they claim?

Where and why people's reasoning starts to diverge from the physical one

Introduction to all conceptual mistakes that people do when they think about science and Nature

When you look at the whole set of scientific misconceptions that I have been trying to correct and clarify on this blog for years, whether they are all about the climate panic, rejection of quantum mechanics, denial of the arrow of time, hopeless research projects in quantum gravity, or anything else, you could think that this set depends on a large number of isolated technical details that one should simply learn and many people haven't.

But I don't actually think it is the case; I think that most of the wrong attitudes, wrong conclusions, and delusions are due to some more general mistakes in people's thinking, due to their revolt against some very universal principles of science. If one learns these principles and starts to think scientifically, he or she may exploit them many times. In other words, I believe that most of the people's mistakes are about the rejection of principles that people should probably internalize well before they're in puberty – otherwise it may be too late. And maybe it's not too late.

Let me try to map this tree of the scientific approaches (well, there is only one scientific branch at the end although it may be accessed from several directions) and their "competitors".

Science vs non-science

Near the very root of the tree, let us decouple the people who reject the scientific method as a matter of principle. When they face a new or old claim that someone wants to prove or check or dispute, these people just don't believe that the right answers may be looked for by the evaluation of the empirical evidence that may be done now, in the lab and repeatedly, in combination with the logical and mathematical reasoning.

Will Happer: CO2: friend or foe?

A comprehensive physicist's introduction to CO2 and climate

I would say that most of the competent physicists at good universities who have spent enough time to study the climate change issue are climate skeptics. A good example is Will Happer, an atomic physicist of Princeton.

Today, I checked the list of Berkeley physics coloquia and picked the following November 2010 talk:

CO2: a friend or a foe (MOV video, 90 minutes)

Lots of achievements by Prof Happer are enumerated at the beginning; you may want to listen to it carefully and compare with some of the scientific niemands who promote the climate alarm. As soon as the talk begins, it's fun.

Seventh Heartland Climate Conference: schedule

Between next Monday and next Wednesday, the Heartland Institute organizes the ICCC-7, its seventh climate conference. The schedule is available here:

Schedule of ICCC-7

The composition of speakers looks interesting enough. Czech President Václav Klaus – who has had some complaints about the Heartland billboards – will be responsible for the dinner keynote speech on Monday. The logistic good luck seems almost incredible: on May 20th and 21st, Klaus attends the NATO summit in the very same city of Chicago! Was some intelligent design involved?

Many other well-known names attend ICCC-7, too.