A pocket magnet with 45.5 tesla: a revolution for LHC/FCC?

Pavel has pointed out that I overlooked a remarkable paper on experimental physics in Nature:

45.5-tesla direct-current magnetic field generated with a high-temperature superconducting magnet (by Hahn, Kim, 9 more)

Magnets are cool. When we were 10 or so, our class would work in nearby gardens. Some of the greenhouses were covered by plastic films that were attached by... wonderful square magnets, 10 x 10 x 2 cm or so. I was facing a dilemma: on one hand, the founder of Czechoslovakia Prof Thomas Garrigue Masaryk taught us "don't be afraid and don't steal". On the other hand, the magnets were wonderful and I was a curious kid.

A few times, my curiosity prevailed over Masaryk. By taking a few magnets, I was helping to disassembly the communist regime – some four years before I became a full-time dissident.

Jesus had a reason for a men-only last supper

The amount of censorship by the Big Tech companies that have teamed up with each other and with the totalitarian Left has been incredible in recent weeks. Last night, Soph's new YouTube videos were erased within a day. A 100% polite vegan who loves black pigeons was also silenced for "extreme or repeated hate speech" for a day, before the YouTube account was restored in the wake of a huge backlash.

Pinterest has internally and indefensibly labeled a pro-life group, Live Action, as "pornography" to be capable of erasing it from their platform. Eric Cochran was the whistleblower at Pinterest who was immediately fired and escorted by guards, without an explanation. Project Veritas, a news group that just tried to cover the Pinterest censorship, was silenced on YouTube: their video was blurred in an Orwellian way. The number of such stories is huge. It's impossible to enumerate them, let alone write detailed accounts of each.

Professor Ricardo Duchesne was fired from University of New Brunswick because his books dared to provide the reader with deep evidence that the Western civilization had some traits that no other – and Asian – civilizations could boast. That's white supremacy and it is apparently banned! His dismissal was guaranteed by a mob that doesn't do much scholarly work and may be summarized as a bunch of malicious, lying, and useless parasites sucking dollars from the stupid Canadian taxpayer.

Lots of worrisome news of this new totalitarian type are served by Paul Joseph Watson on his @prisonplanet Twitter account and his new summit.news website. Just the top 5 news in a list over there: Facebook bans comments that only say "Honk". A Brazilian duo of Lesbians has first castrated a boy (plus created a hole which they called the "vagina") and they murdered him – certain feminists aren't just like the Nazis, they're like the Nazi killers from concentration camps. A supporter burned thousands of Brexit Party votes. A Muslim invited to Germany by Angela Merkel has aggressively attacked a random German lad with a bottle – a "revenge for Afghanistan". A female left-wing comedian urged milkshake to be replaced with a battery acid in the milkshake attacks. And so on and so on.

Bell's inequality is straightforward, the quantum world is local

"Quantum Strangeness: Wrestling..." by George Greenstein is another deeply flawed book on the foundations of quantum mechanics that was recently published. It talks about Bell's experiment all the time – which is lame because that experiment is neither very interesting nor very special or pedagogically useful.

The text of the book seems very unprofessional. For example, the sentence "It was many years ago that I first encountered the Great Predictor" appears at the beginning of three chapters, 1,9,16. At least, the author suggests that he decided to be happy about the Copenhagen Interpretation but doesn't make it very clear why it's the right answer and I wouldn't say that his description what the Copenhagen Interpretation really says is quite accurate. So much of the book is communicating some subjective religious emotions of the writer.

I find it totally bizarre how many people are so confused about such an elementary exercise which is included in both graduate and undergraduate courses of quantum mechanics – and the lecture about Bell's inequality is in no way among the hardest ones.

The September 9th asteroid should be nuked

The contemporary public discussions are largely dominated by people who are either totally dishonest, or lack the basic education or intelligence, or have lost any sense of proportion, usually because of some intense ideological brainwashing they have been subjected to.

A comparison to show that point: several U.S. presidential candidates want to spend $5 trillion over a decade (just in the U.S.) to fight a completely non-existent threat of "climate change". On the other hand, some people who have never dared to criticize the climate hysteria are fighting against a $29 billion spending (over the same decade) to build a new generation of particle colliders, the mankind's most characteristic direction to advance the experimental pure science by brute force.

What is wrong with all these people, which clearly include Alessandro Strumia as I learned in recent days? Incidentally, I had to close the discussion because Alessandro was evolving it in totally nutty directions, both when it comes to the anthropic memes and the anti-collider jihad? How can they be so totally messed up not to resist to write a daily dose of lies and demagogy directed against pure science and its value which only costs a few billion dollars per year; while they are silently endorsing the wasting of trillions of dollars for complete stupidities?

Tricolor Movement: I am a voter again

A new party that finally includes the fight against postmodern far left excesses into the core program

A few months ago, the center right Civic Democratic Party (ODS) – that was founded as a full-blown right-wing party by Václav Klaus Sr, the most important Czech politician after 1989, in the early 1990s – has expelled its most popular member according to polls, Václav Klaus Jr, the ex-president son, for his colorful but apt metaphors criticizing the dictatorial trends in the European Union.

He dared to point out similarities between Macron's and Hitler's plans for Europe; and he dared to point out that most of the laws discussed by Czech lawmakers are forced on us by the EU, a situation that resembles Jews' committees that were "generously" allowed to vote about their own distribution to buses going to concentration camps.



From my perspective, that expulsion was way too much of a collaboration with the evil. And although I still think that folks at ODS are better than the generic SJWs in parties such as TOP 09, I viewed those steps as a betrayal and stopped being a voter of ODS – which I had been from the beginning of that party. Because I am a homo politicus, I didn't choose "abstain" in the European Union elections and picked the nationalist party SPD as a temporarily good proxy for the right direction that the European Union needs.

Two days ago or so, Klaus Jr – the experienced high school principal and mathematics teacher whose face is a textbook on the spontaneous symmetry breaking and I hope the TRF readership is mature enough not to turn this triviality into the main topic of the comment section – and his allies have finally founded a new party, The Tricolor Movement of Citizens (THO). So I registered as a supporter.

Direct anthropic bound on the weak scale from supernovæ explosions – or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Higgs

Guest blog by Prof Alessandro Strumia, not only a famous misogynist but also a physicist ;-)

I thank Luboš for hosting this post, where I present a strangelove-like idea that might be the long-sought explanation of the most puzzling aspect of the Standard Model (SM) of the Fundamental Interactions: the existence of two vastly different mass scales. The electro-weak Fermi scale (set by the Higgs mass, that controls the mass of all other elementary Standard Model particles) is 17 orders of magnitude smaller than the gravitational Planck scale (the mass above which any elementary particle is a black hole, according to Einstein Relativity and Quantum Mechanics).

The puzzle is that, according to many theorists, the Standard Model Higgs is unnatural because its squared mass receives Planck-scale quantum corrections, so that cancellations tuned by one part in \(10^{34}\) are needed to get the small Fermi scale. This naturalness argument lead theorists to expect that the Higgs cannot be alone, that it must exist together with new physics that protects its lightness. Theorists proposed concrete examples of new physics that makes the Higgs natural: supersymmetry, technicolor, extra dimensions... Dozens of thousands of research publications studied these ideas and supersymmetry seemed to work so beautifully that most theorists expected that the Fermi scale is the scale of supersymmetry breaking.

Most laymen have a remarkable psychological problem with the universe born out of nothing

The criticism of Hartle-Hawking by Turok et al. is demonstrably wrong

In the Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover published a new article

Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

about the controversies surrounding the Hartle-Hawking "wave function of the Universe" which quantifies the philosophical guess that "the Universe was born out of nothing". In the "story", there must be two opposing sides – that's how journalism likes to work. So the "other side" standing against the Hartle-Hawking school is Neil Turok and a few sycophants. If I am overlooking someone on his side who is more than just a sycophant of Turok's, please let me know.



Physics normally predicts "what an initial state evolves into". Given an initial state \(\ket\psi\) or \(\rho\) at time \(t_1\), assuming that we have already accepted quantum mechanics, we may calculate the probabilities of measuring \(L(t_2)=\lambda_j\) at a later time \(t_2\). In quantum mechanics, all this evolution is encoded in unitary evolution operators \(U\) – which is called \(S\) if we evolve from \(-\infty\) to \(+\infty\). So we explain why something occurred later – by reducing it (in the case of quantum mechanics, probabilistically) on the laws of evolution in physics combined with some knowledge about the state at an earlier time.

Penington vs information loss

MmanuF has pointed out that I forgot to discuss an impressive preprint

Entanglement Wedge Reconstruction and the Information Paradox

by Geoffrey Penington. He's still a Stanford graduate student but it's totally plausible that he understands the subtle ways how at least AdS/CFT resolves the information loss paradox more than any other physicist in the world.



After a long search for the most illuminating video to embed, I chose Angelique de Peyrac because MmanuF is French while Peyrac was also Geoffrey. Too bad that things like Angelique are no longer sufficiently politically correct in California.

The 73-page-long paper has everything to convince me that the man knows everything that is really important for the resolution of the information loss paradox – and the related firewall paradox: the paper agrees with all the qualitative assumptions that I have convinced myself to be irrevocable; and it contains additional 164 equations that seem totally relevant and a dozen of somewhat randomly ones have passed my nontrivial examination. ;-)

YouTube's income should be treated as donations to a far left party

Demonetization of YouTube is needed if the server wants to be used a media department of left-wing and Islamist groups

John Archer and Johnny Liu have pointed out that after a pro-censorship campaign by Vox Media, a sibling of Daily Kos, YouTube has just changed and escalated its censorship policies, it has been doing so for years, and it will continue to do so:

Our ongoing work to tackle hate

Using some obnoxious language that is widespread among far left individuals who have no positive moral or other qualities, the cowardly writer of that seemingly official text declares that YouTube will be removing all contents that has any traces of common sense, the truth, conservative values, or respect for the civilization and those who have built it.

Experimenters and especially journalists can't write good far-reaching interpretations of QM experiments

Sinclair QL (Quantum Leap). Sometimes in the 1980s, I was so attracted by an article about that computer that I memorized a long 1-page article about it. With hindsight, my worshiping seems rather irrational. By some technical measures, it could have been a stronger computer than Commodore C64 that I used to have – but it turned out to be unsuccessful and less software had existed for QL.

Philip Ball wrote a text for the Quanta Magazine

Quantum Leaps, Long Assumed to Be Instantaneous, Take Time

which makes semi-covert statements that an experiment has allegedly disproved the basic principles of quantum mechanics. That much is clear from the title. The subtitle is even a bit more radical than that:

An experiment caught a quantum system in the middle of a jump — something the originators of quantum mechanics assumed was impossible.

Another text saying that the founding fathers of quantum mechanics were not only wrong but idiots, as some current geniuses revealed. In reality, it's the other way around, of course.

EU has turned Czech PM into a full-blown EU hater

In politics, I increasingly have to choose the lesser evil. ODS has betrayed me so for the first time, I voted for the nationalist SPD in the recent European Union elections – although I am far from being a fan of their views on direct democracy, welfare, and other things. But among the parties that would get an MEP, SPD was the only clear non-communist party opposing the terrifying trends of the present EU.

Don't get me wrong: it may have been just a temporary punishment of ODS by one voter, me. I still think that the actual MEPs representing ODS are much better than the average MEPs – and maybe better than SPD's MEPs.

Because these trends seem so terrible, my criticisms against the Czech PM, former communist oligarch Andrej Babiš, correspondingly weakened. In December 2018, the European Parliament pointed out that Babiš was in a conflict of interests. Last weekend, right after the EU elections (so that Babiš couldn't possibly complain about the timing), a report of an EU audit was released. See the 71 pages in English.

Unsurprisingly, the European Commission-hired auditors concluded that he is in a complete clash of interests. They have audited 39 projects out of 101 since early 2017 – when Babiš placed his Agrofert Corporation into two trust funds with the purpose of formally "cutting his ties" from the company – and 19 of them have been found in the violation of the law. Again: about one-half of subsidized projects in Czechia are criminal. CZK 282 million (€11 million) of EU subsidies was found to be illegitimate because of his conflict of interests. Aside from the conflict of interests laws, Agrofert's companies have violated many other laws, however (some of them could lead to new criminal investigations against both Agrofert managers and Babiš himself), so in total, CZK 451 million (€17 million) in subsidies was paid illegally. These funds should be returned.

Clearly, the whole "trust funds" are just a farce invented by Babiš's lawyers – that may have been a "sufficiently good farce" to please the Czech voters and silence Babiš's critics but that doesn't solve anything from an impartial person's viewpoint. He is still the factual beneficiary of the subsidies and he's controlling everyone who matters inside the "trust funds". He may always remove the "protectors" of the trust funds and other things. So placing Agrofert in the "trust funds" hasn't solved a damn thing and the EU audit agrees with this common sense statement of mine.

In practice, Babiš doesn't want to return a penny so the EU – when they make the statement final in 3 months or so, and the conclusion will almost certainly be the same – will simply take the money from the future subsidies for Czechia. It's being rumored that another report from the second audit is on its way and it will demand CZK 2 billion ($100 million or so) of Czech agricultural subsidies to be returned by Agrofert to the Czech state. Note that his net worth is about $4 billion, just like Trump's, and the subsidies have always been crucial for that agricultural and chemical business.

Wednesday afternoon update: The second audit report (about Agrofert's purely agricultural subsidies – the first one was about subsidies unrelated to agriculture) has been sent to Czech government authorities and rumors say that it's equally brutal and will demand billions of crowns to be returned by Agrofert.

Babiš is almost certainly the most subsidized politician in the history of the mankind.