How Tesla fanboys' comments look with some hindsight

Free Wolfram: Stephen Wolfram's company has launched a free Wolfram engine for software developers; see an explanation in a blog post. You may connect the Wolfram Engine to basically any system or project for free, in the development stage, but once you start to sell it, you have to buy a production license.

Most defenders of Tesla (or long investors in Tesla) on the Internet may be classified as textbook examples of dumb and obnoxious trolls. They never have bring any ideas, any numbers, anything rational to the discussions at all. They just insult everyone who dares to have a brain – an organ capable of figuring out that the Tesla stock is overvalued at least by one order of magnitude.



To shield my Twitter search pages from this junk, I have blocked roughly one hundred Musk fanboys but new ones keep on emerging. Sometimes, you may find a Tesla fan who behaves as if he were capable of writing full sentences superficially resembling the human thought and I will pick one example here.

On Tuesday, August 7th, 2018, Elon Musk notoriously tweeted that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private for $420 (a marijuana number) per stock. The stock price which was about $340 before the tweet jumped to 1/2 of the interval between the previous price and the promised $420, i.e. to about $380, on the following day.

CMS: an excess for a \(700\GeV\) Higgs

This is a really short blog post whose main point is a graph showing an apparent excess in an LHC search.

In recent months, I discussed several experimental hints for a new Higgs – a Higgs of mass \(96 \GeV\) and, previously, a CP-odd Higgs of mass \(400\GeV\).

WGC and modular invariance: does the WGC constrain low-energy physics at all?

Physicists writing papers about the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) seem to be particularly excited about their work so they often submit their paper to be at the top of the hep-th list. Two weeks ago, a paper on the axion WGC was posted one second after the collection of papers for the new day started.

That's exactly what was achieved by another group of authors, Shiu and Cole at Amsterdam and Aalsma in Madison, who just submitted

Weak Gravity Conjecture, Black Hole Entropy, and Modular Invariance

a second after the beginning of the new arXiv day. A funny achievement of this paper is that it is the 500th followup of the WGC paper according to Inspire, so the Weak Gravity Conjecture has made it to the highest, "renowned", category of papers. Both Arkani-Hamed and Vafa have 19 renowned papers so there is no reason to congratulate them, and Alberto has 2+1 renowned papers with Nima et al. But it's my first renowned paper, so congratulations to me. ;-)

Why the framework of quantum mechanics cannot be deformed

I've explained the inevitability of quantum mechanics and the incorrectness of all the criticisms from many angles.

The main reason why the wrong opinions keep on spreading is that the "natural selection" that used to eliminate the people who are totally wrong about fundamental issues has ceased to exist. The inkspillers who write complete nonsense about quantum mechanics should really be "terminated" as scientists – for their life (that's how it still worked e.g. in the times of Hugh Everett) – but instead, we live in an epoch in which they find a few thousand dumb readers who will say that the "realism" or a related stupidity is cool and the authors may often keep on calling themselves "physicists" although they have just proven to be incompetent.

Quantum mechanics is not only a very useful and precise theory. The general framework of quantum mechanics is also a set of principles that are pretty much totally guaranteed not to change in the future at all – because their unavoidability may be almost rigorously proven. Aside from a few thousand of "real experts" in quantum mechanics, almost no one gets this point. Almost no one understands quantum mechanics. The problem is that almost all people think that it's OK to consider QM to be just a "bunch of random counterintuitive equations" that may be deformed just like some unreadable incomprehensible classical equations. But that's not the case at all.

Rape isn't a good argument for abortion

Jefferson: Buttigieg, a left-wing U.S. presidential candidate, wants to remove Jefferson from the names of things. Clearly, the Harvard physics department's building where I spent 6 years – Jefferson Laboratories – is at risk of becoming nameless because of a radical whackadoodle.

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Because some lawmakers have approved a de facto ban on abortions in Alabama, there seems to be quite some hysteria in much of the U.S. Not only the far left "pro-choice" demonstrators but even the "pro-life" (but not very socially conservative) president Donald Trump and other politicians have distanced himself from the new law. The new law hasn't come to force yet and will be disputed in courts.



A Minecraft video for a Czech tramps' classic song by Wabi Ryvola, The Box of Whiskey, sung by a guy who was sentenced to death and already wants to go to Heaven and drink some whiskey there.

I find it crazy that the U.S. South that is often said to be socially conservative and full of fundamentalist Christians actually seems to have more pro-abortion laws than many important European countries. Only four "mostly Southern" states have adopted the heartbeat rule. One can abort an embryo before the first detectable heartbeat – which occurs roughly in six-week-old embryos.

First of all, I am no fundamentalist but I am obviously closer to the pro-life position. From my viewpoint, it is really a matter of scientific literacy for one to understand that there is no natural yet qualitative difference between abortion and murder. Societies generally accept that it's very wrong to murder 4-year-old kids. But these babies have gradually evolved from smaller babies, fetuses, and embryos.

Australia: climate hysterical Labourists lose unlosable election

We have some great news coming from Australia. Just like Trump and Brexit-Leave were predicted to lose by the pollsters, the center-right coalition led by the current prime minister Scott Morrisson was predicted to comfortably lose the Australian federal election today. The pollsters were wrong in the Trump case, in the Brexit case, and they were wrong about Australia, too.



The pollsters were predicting at least a 52-to-48 edge for the Labour Party, relatively to the center-right coalition. In reality, counting the lawmakers (there are 151 in total), the center-right bloc won 74-to-66 or so, by more than ten percent (of the Labour Party's gain).

The winner, Mr Morrison, has already thanked "miracles he has always believed in" and the "quiet Australians" for the victory; the loser, Mr Shorten whose electorate was shortened relatively to the predictions, has already admitted defeat.

Heckman, Vafa: QG bounds the number of hierarchy-like problems

Every competent physicist knows that fine-tuning is a kind of a problem for a theory claimed to be a sufficiently fundamental description of Nature.

Fundamental physicists have wrestled with the cosmological constant problem, the Higgs hierarchy problem,... and perhaps other problems of this kind. Fine-tuning is a problem because assuming that the fundamental "theory of everything" works like a quantum field theory and produces the couplings of the low-energy effective field theories via renormalization group flows, the observed hierarchies between the scales etc. seem extremely unlikely to emerge.

In principle, there could be arbitrarily many couplings and even fine-tuned couplings which could cause an infinite headache to every theorist. In a new paper, Cumrun Vafa – the Father of F-theory and the Swampland Program (where this paper belongs) – and Jonathan Heckman, a top young research on both topics, present the optimistic evidence that in string/M-theory and/or quantum gravity, the infinite fine-tuning worries are probably unjustified:

Fine Tuning, Sequestering, and the Swampland (just 7 pages, try to read all)

What's going on? Effective field theories outside quantum gravity may be built by "engineers". You may apparently always add new fields, new sectors, and they allow you to tune or fine-tune many new couplings. There doesn't seem to be a limit.

Leveraged cryptoexchanges probably encourage price fluctuations

After reaching $20,000 in mid December 2017, the Bitcoin price went mostly down, dropping near $3,000 in December 2018. It was mostly stable for months but started to show signs of life in the recent month or two and reached levels above $8,300 (more than a one-year-high) a day or two ago. Two hours ago, it suddenly saw a drop from $7,800 to $7,000 in a few minutes.



The price behavior is extremely unnatural, showing the mood swings. For a long time, you may see a virtually constant price. Suddenly, a flash crash or a pump takes place. The magnitude of fluctuations may suddenly change. Most of these changes result either from some unusually large traders or from psychological changes of the traders – or a combination of the two.

What's funny is that some cryptoexchanges saw a more brutal drop within those ten minutes today. Bitmex saw the price decreasing from $7,800 below $6,370, almost by twenty percent in minutes. Bitmex trades real U.S. dollars. But you saw similar swings down to $6,500 or lower at exchanges that trade the Tether (USDT) instead of the real dollar.

Incidentally, according to the current view of coinmarketcap.com, the Tether pegged to the U.S. dollar is the most traded cryptocurrency now!

I mostly do believe that Soph mentally beats average 20-year-old women

Trump vs censorship: The White House has launched a new website where Americans may report censorship on the Internet.

In recent 24 hours, I have watched several videos by the young pro-capitalist, Libertarian, old-fashioned right-wing YouTuber Soph T. – heavily censored YouTube channel, BitChute channel (yes, I can imagine that we will gradually move from YouTube – a soon-to-be-censored cultural Marxist hell – e.g. to Bitchute). Two blog posts ago, I mentioned her as the brilliant counterpart of the hysterical and unspectacular Greta Thunberg.



Soph T. – the surname is known to me – was born in September 2004 – the precise date is known to me – so she is 14.7 right now. She lives in an upper middle class suburb somewhere in the Bay Area. She's been creating unusually intelligent videos for a kid, mostly about gaming, when she was 9-11. She was gradually switching to more political topics. I find this evolution natural because I would also care about computer games at age 10-12 but politics became very important when I was 14-15 or so.

Student rabble has fired a top Harvard law professor

I think that I should no longer afford to host some great and young Californian visitors in Pilsen – so I was lucky and pleased that they have hosted me today. ;-) With their Irish Papamobile (a blue Škoda Rapid Spaceback), they took me to the Great Synagogue, the historical underground, Kozel the chateau, Radyně the castle ruin, the Salzmanns' restaurant, and more. One of my hosts has been a Harvard student in a different department during my Harvard years.

Well, I still sometimes follow The Crimson, Harvard students' newspapers (thecrimson.com), and in recent years, I was stunned by the rapid increase of the percentage of articles that are dedicated to some extreme left-wing politics. It seems to be an overwhelming majority now. One of the most read articles in recent days was Winthrop Faculty Deans to Leave After Harvard Refuses to Renew Their Appointments. There have been other Crimson stories about the affair, too.

Ronald S. Sullivan Jr and Stephanie R. Robinson were fired, something seemed fishy, but I hadn't read the articles carefully which is why I didn't really know who the people were, what were the actual reasons, whether there was some justification, and so on.

EVs vs ICEs, NOx, critics of science as thought police, Ponzi scheme, Soph

There are too many terrible events happening in the world right now – every day, both famous and unknown people are getting fired and hunted for saying the truth or for not being far left extremists; scientifically illiterate snake oil salesmen are receiving the Hawking Prizes; media are bombarding us with lies against science and the Western civilization.

A major Dutch publication has written a text on the topic "is physics a Ponzi scheme?". My once co-author Robbert Dijkgraaf and Juan Maldacena are the only voices that actually and calmly explain the state of theoretical physics now. They're overwhelmed by critics who don't understand the field at the technical level at all and who are being presented as if they were equal – Maldacena is the top theoretical physicist of his generation and Dijkgraaf is, among other things, the director of IAS Princeton where Einstein used to work.

Those special attributes don't seem to matter to the journalists anymore. Random angry activists and hecklers who are allies of the journalists are often made more visible.

Grothendieck's hermitian 70,000 pages: do they have a value?

TBBT in Long Island: Newsday (for EU readers harassed by GDPR) tells us that the string theorist Luis Álvarez-Gaumé, the Spanish-born director of the Simons Center, and others on the island are fans of The Big Bang Theory, like your humble correspondent. The article discusses the child-like personality of physicists, supersymmetry, Asperger, and whether the viewers laugh with the characters or at them, among other topics.

Last week, Le Monde brought us some information about the material left by Alexandre Grothendieck, a legendary mathematician. Here you have an English translation:

The elusive archives of Alexandre Grothendieck (Archyworld)

Grothendieck, considered the greatest 20th century mathematician by numerous smart enough folks, was born in Berlin in 1928 to anarchist Jewish parents and moved to France during the war. After the war, he started to do some deep mathematics and discovered fundamental insights in category theory, number theory, topology, algebraic geometry etc.



He has greatly influenced the "way of thinking" of professional mathematicians – and as diverse results as the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem as well as the Higgs mechanism in physics.

Neff: when reason is pushed to the corner

By Ondřej Neff, a Czech science-fiction writer and the editor-in-chief of The Invisible Dog

The World: When Ratio [Latin for "reason"; Czech spelling of Neff's: "racio"] Stands In a Corner
Environmentalism is nonsensical in the Western world. Let's be guided by facts, not emotions

The parallel between the communist and environmentalist ideologies is more obvious to the older, if not the oldest, generation. Even people who are in their 50s or 60s today haven't experienced the proper communist regime when people were hanged, tortured, and when prisons were overfilled – while, on the other side, there were polite, educated, idealist people who "knew" that even these mistakes (as they later called these acts) would lead to a new, better, more just world rich in prosperity and happiness.

Pheno papers on \(96\GeV\) Higgs, trilepton excess, and \(60\GeV\) dark matter

I want to mention two new hep-ph papers about supersymmetry-like anomalies seen by the accelerators. In the paper

An N2HDM Solution for the possible \(96\GeV\) Excess,

B+C+Heinemeyer discuss some detailed models for the apparent weak signals indicating a new Higgs boson of mass around \(96\GeV\). Recall that the only well-established Higgs boson has the mass of \(125\GeV\).

Concerning the \(96\GeV\) little brother, the CMS has seen an excess in the diphoton channel; and decades ago, LEP has seen an excess in the bottom quark pair channel. Heinemeyer and friends say that these excesses may be explained by a two-Higgs model with an extra Higgs singlet. Is that surprising at all? There seems to be a lot of freedom to accommodate two independent excesses, right?

At any rate, concerning supersymmetric models, the NMSSM – next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model – and its extension, µνSSM seem like aesthetically pleasing completions of the two-Higgs-plus-a-singlet models. In the model with the two Greek letters, the singlet is interpreted as a right-handed neutrino superfield and the seesaw mechanism is incorporated. These models look OK for the excesses – there are other reasons to prefer NMSSM over MSSM. But they're also less constrained and predictive than the MSSM, so I think the good news isn't remarkably victorious.

"Lost German girl" didn't deserve better

On the contrary...

74 years ago, Prague was liberated by the Red Army. The Vlasov Army – Soviet soldiers who were captured and forced to fight along with the Germans – were actually critical for the liberation of Prague on May 9th. Note that the Prague Operation occurred one day after the German surrender – Bohemia was both the place where the Second World War "became unavoidable" in the first place as well as the last place where it ended.

In recent years, almost certainly because of the EU pressure, I perceive self-evident efforts to apologize Germans and the role they have played in the Second World War; and efforts to hide or understate the role of Russians in ending the war. I think it's obvious that the EU folks realize the similarities between the EU and the Third Reich – and the similar status of Germany in both – so they don't want to harm the image of "something similar to the EU" too much. I have a big problem with that.

"Lost German Girl", a beaten woman filmed on a country road near the Czech border during the surrender of Wehrmacht troops. Her identity is still unknown.

This footage was filmed 74 years ago today. #WW2 pic.twitter.com/7rAiWMZMWe

— WWII Pictures (@WWIIpix) May 8, 2019

When I searched for "Czech" on Twitter, the tweet above was the first one I got. A frustrated yet attractive "Aryan" girl with a black eye was probably badly treated. It's assumed that she had been previously raped by Czechs – probably Czech men. ;-) Everyone should be compassionate and angry about the Czechs – it's so bad what they did to her. She's so innocent.

And no one will ever learn about the fate of this "Lost German Girl" and her fate, the readers were told. It's so sad and they must have killed her, they were preprogrammed to say by themselves.

Dualities rule out "realism"

Edwin has observed that an interviewer sometimes speaks like a left-wing ideologue who (intensely or primarily) cares about feelings, appearances, and the duty of science to evolve in an ideologically predetermined direction of progress. Well, science doesn't have the duty.

Also, Edwin has correctly connected two other misunderstandings of the interviewer – who is both a "realist" meaning that he believes that quantum mechanics must ultimately be replaced with a classical theory again; and who seems to have a problem with the AdS/CFT correspondence. These two misunderstandings aren't independent, Edwin pointed out.

I think that this connection that Edwin emphasized is another argument in favor of both of the following statements, often advocated on this website:

• String theory teaches us important conceptual things about physics
• Realism in the sense of an opposition to the foundations of quantum mechanics as clarified in Copenhagen conflicts with most of the progress in 20th century physics

Well, as I wrote in the first point, string theory teaches us lots of things – including the second point. ;-)

Only courts and God should punish people for crimes

Lessons from an ice-hockey player's suicide

Right-wing journalist Laura Loomer has been banned from 190 websites including Lyft and Uber – concerning these two, she was dissatisfied with the absence of non-Muslim drivers and the companies were dissatisfied with her dissatisfaction! When Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram banned her last week, this journalism alumni – a brave Valedictorian from a not so prominent college – lost 90% of income and the sort of career she's been building for some five years. She started to suggest that she was thinking about suicide.



Many people love to blame suicides on psychological problems but in many contexts, there are very objective reasons why someone could make such a final decision. And with certain sufficiently serious objective problems (serious diseases are the most obvious ones), even people with rock-solid psychology could almost rationally decide that suicide is the best option. We may approach this issue using the probability calculus.