Apollo program was economically sound

Fifty years ago today, in the evening of the European time, the final steps to send the two men on the Moon began. My nation has a particularly close relationship to the astronauts: the primacy ;-) of Czechoslovakia was that it was the third country with an astronaut.

Scott Aaronson "summarizes" his opinions by saying that the Apollo program really was faked (it just included the landing of the people on the Moon) and it was "economically insane". The moonlanding pictures are a testimony of a bygone era in which the civilization was way more cohesive than today – right – and the number of the moonlanding deniers will probably increase, he opines. Well, it probably will. It's even more likely that the far left stinky "elite" will ban any talk about that achievement of the white males altogether.



OK, I don't understand what he means by saying that the moonlanding was "faked" – except that he is a conspiracy theorist by himself. But I understand what he means by saying that it was "economically insane". A majority of Americans used to say the same thing. They were wrong. Do you know what Moondoggle was? It was the forgotten opposition to the space program. In 1979, only 47% of Americans said that it was "worth" to pay for the moonlanding. That percentage increased to 77% by 1989. As you can see, the decision of JFK etc. to go to the Moon was undemocratic in the narrow sense but democratic in the long run. The critics of the program were on the wrong side of the history and are forgotten by now.

Feminists at NYT, WaPo spit at Moonwalkers

Half a century ago, between July 20th and July 21st, 1969 (UTC), the first men were landing on the Moon – four days after the July 16th Apollo 11 launch, just like predicted by Jules Verne. The men who went through the final stage were Commander Neil Armstrong and LM Pilot Buzz Aldrin. LM doesn't quite stand for Luboš Motl, it stands for Lunar Module. They sound similar but the difference may also matter.

Armstrong took the New World Symphony to the Earth's only natural satellite.



The first woman on the Moon

OK, as discussed by Fox News, NewsBusters, and Summit News, two America's leading left-wing newspapers had a great idea to "celebrate" the anniversary: by demonizing all the people who have made it possible through disgusting identity politics.

To make it to the Moon, women have to escape Earth's gender bias (Kowal, NYT)
The hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck (Heller, WaPo)

The NYT diatribe seems more ideological, hateful, and obnoxious.

Ursula Leyen will accelerate putrefaction of Europe

Frans Timmermans was ultimately eliminated as a candidate for the replacement of Jean-Claude Juncker. That didn't mean that the European Union was going in a much better direction.



Farage evaluated Leyen yesterday.

I think that Ms Uršula Kluková will remain the most famous Uršula in Czechia LOL. In this dialogue, she is the owner of a new whorehouse after 1989. During communism, whorehouses were abolished but the brothel (disorder/mess) was here throughout communism, too. I think that these comments apply to Ms Leyen's EU, too.

Emmanuel Macron has proposed Ursula Leyen as a compromise candidate. This failing minister of defense has emerged out of thin air – despite her being inadequate according to SPD, Germany's CDU's coalition partner. Yesterday, a required majority of the 751 members of the European Parliament voted "Ja". She was the only candidate.

Just try to appreciate what it says about the state of democracy in Europe. Each of these MEPs annually collects hundreds of thousands of Euros in salary – but they're collectively nothing else than a machinery obliged to codify absolutely random and counterproductive inventions of a random pompous Emmanuel. He invents a name, there is no other candidate, and they just vote Yes. The top Western European politicians have absolutely no moral right to criticize countries such as Iran, Cuba, China, or North Korea for the lack of democracy – it's no better in the EU today.

Strings 2019 wasn't a comprehensive string conference

The main reason I didn't want to write about Strings 2019 in Brussels (July 9th-13th) was that I am not thrilled about getting dozens of nasty attacks by moronic crack pot-smoking trolls brainwashed and radicalized by pathetic one-dimensional anti-physics websites combined with the silence of those who aren't idiots.



Another reason is that I didn't see much new that I would overlook during the year – which is probably normal for those of us who diligently follow (not only) hep-th on the daily basis. But after some inspection, it became clear to me that it's not just because of my regular arXiv habits. The conference just didn't really cover most of the stringy craft. The holes were obvious both in the topics and the list of participants.

An incredible hoax-like multi-gender paper made it to astro-ph

Tom Anderson has pointed out a tweet by Prof Janice Fiamengo:

For those who believe (oh antiquated thought) that academics who specialize in Astrophysics should be investigating the origins and structure of the cosmos, you'll be saddened to learn that instead they're paid huge salaries to write nonsense about gender: https://t.co/niYlpdQ8RS

— Janice Fiamengo (@JaniceFiamengo) 14. července 2019

And indeed, a few days ago, an unbelievable paper was posted to arXiv.org and classified in astro-ph as the primary archive. The title is

The Nonbinary Fraction: Looking Towards the Future of Gender Equity in Astronomy

Well, the list of authors is even more interesting and I copy it from the title page of the PDF file:

Kaitlin C. Rasmussen (she/they), Erin Maier (they/them), Beck E. Strauss, (they/them), Meredith Durbin (they/them), Luc Riesbeck (they/them), Aislynn Wallach (they/them), Vic Zamloot (they/them), Allison Erena (they/them)

Very nice. Note that you not only have to accept many genders to understand this list. You also have to abandon the rules of English grammar because "they" may be a case of "she". Well, all other authors are individually known as they/them which is great. Formally, their problem no longer seems to be the inability to identify and accept their own sex. Their problem seems to be the inability to determine "their" number – most sane individuals can count themselves and obtain the result 1. ;-)



Cornell University, the owner of arXiv.org

By the way, the 19th century Czech had a fancy formal way to refer to other people. Instead of "you" (which exists in the singular and plural form in Czech and the plural form may be used as the polite singular one, too), people were saying "they" ("oni"). This way of conversation was probably inspired by German – where "you" and "they" may be expressed by "Sie" – and was known as "theying" ("onikání").

Facebook shouldn't be allowed to issue its currency

Yesterday, Trump finally said what he thought about the cryptocurrencies. And although a big Bitcoin cultist Peter Thiel has been his adviser, it turned out that Trump's views are very close to mine (and other pundits in the conventional financial markets).

Meanwhile, the true Bitcoin cultists celebrated the following criticism because they love to imagine they are a credible foe to the likes of Donald Trump – a reason why I consider the Bitcoin cult to be just another part of the postmodern leftist movement.

I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 12. července 2019

As the zeroth approximation, it's just right. With no backing, material or hard commitments, Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies aren't money. That's nearly equivalent to their high volatility. Aside from the Ponzi-scheme-like lottery, the only good application is the criminal one.

MWI fans are collapse deniers, hypocritically assume collapse in the past, anyway

Ben asked me to refute the Many-Worlds Interpretation again.



I think that the first sentences of the Wikipedia article do a wonderful job in explaining what the typical people promoting the "MWI brand" actually want to believe, and one might argue that this is what Hugh Everett actually meant, too:

The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction and denies the actuality of wavefunction collapse. The existence of the other worlds makes it possible to remove randomness and action at a distance from quantum theory and thus from all physics...

Too bad, these claims are self-evidently wrong and don't pass even the most elementary, 1-minute-long consistency checks, thus proving that the defenders of this indefensible position lack intelligence.

Finns: clouds control temperature, CO2 sensitivity 0.24 °C

Jaime has pointed out that there is an interesting physics.ao-ph paper on the arXiv:

No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change (Jyrki Kauppinen, Pekka Malmi)

I was greatly skeptical about any meaningful content in the article. Six pages is short, affiliations are missing, and there is some kind of broken English – commas before "which" (as if they were Czech), wrong order of the words ("control mainly" in the last sentence), "green house" spelled with a space, and more. Wouldn't you expect some slaying dragon crackpots?

Roboticist: self-simulation yields self-awareness

...an amusingly specific attack on the mystery of consciousness...

John Pavlus wrote an article for the Quanta Magazine yesterday. I initially ignored it – like the commenters, there are still zero comments there – but it looks very interesting now:

Curious About Consciousness? Ask the Self-Aware Machines

The hero of the article is Hod Lipson, a robot expert at the Columbia University. He has played with similar robots for over a decade.

Multiverse is primarily a scientific concept

Right or wrong... Tabooization of the concept is what is anti-scientific

The Vafa-Ellis-Rubenstein debate about the multiverse has reminded me about the extraordinary difficulty that the laymen – such as the host of the debate, David Malone, a Green Party politician and BBC filmmaker – may have with simple enough terms such as the "multiverse". There must be something fatally wrong about the very word, right?

Shouldn't scientists be prevented from using the term "multiverse"?

The word "universe" comes from Latin; "universus" means "turned into one". Note that "uni-" is one, "versus" is a past participle of "vertere", i.e. "turned". Similarly, "multiverse" is a neologism used to represent "many universes". All of being is represented as belonging to several universes.

First of all, a sociological answer. You really don't want to plan a ban of the multiverse in the scholarly papers. Google Scholar lists 22,800 papers that include the word "multiverse". Top cited papers with the word in the title have about 500 citations. You may find papers on physics and cosmology but also those on proteins and the Indian cinema, among other things.

Clearly, these unusual places where people use the word are "derivative" or "experimental" exploitations of the physics terminology and marketing seems to be the main goal of this choice of the words.

Vafa, Ellis debate with a bright religion scholar

MarkusM has pointed out that a more pleasant, entertaining, and physics-oriented public discussion took place in recent days, in the Institute of Art and Ideas (iai):

Does the Multiverse Exist? | Full Debate (43 minutes)

Participants were Harvard's string theorist Cumrun Vafa whom I know very well, you know, CERN's phenomenologist John Ellis, and an assistant professor of religion, feminism, gender, and sexuality Mary Jane Rubenstein of Wesleyan University. Religion and feminism is quite a combination – maybe she hasn't noticed yet that according to religion, feminists will burn like brown coal in the hell for the eternity (because of the eternal character of the oxidation, feminist corpses in hell count as a renewable energy source). As we will see, she was the nicest surprise of that event.

A frustrating Guardian discussion on string theory

On June 28th, The Guardian's Ian Simple invited David Berman, a very good string theorist whom I know, and Eleanor Knox – both of them did great – to discuss the question

What happens when we can't test scientific theories?

Just to be sure, a good scientist tries to extract evidence in clever ways and hard work, whether easy tests in a foreseeable future look possible or impossible. And indeed, easy tests of string theory look impossible – and have looked impossible in the recent 50 years. When asked about the progress in the future which nobody can know, otherwise it would take place now, they were sketching a century – or thousands of generations – of efforts.

It's possible that people need this much time. It's possible it won't be enough. It's possible that mankind will turn into hopelessly stupid apes again. But it's also possible that the progress could be faster. Clearly, the estimates how quickly a theory of everything is going to be found depends on the recent advances and their extrapolation – on the people's enthusiasm and self-confidence which, in the case of intelligent people, reflects some actual facts or experience. That's why sensible people such as Witten found it totally possible in the mid 1980s or mid 1990s that the theory of everything would be completed within weeks.

Tommy Robinson deserves the U.S., Czech asylum

Tommy Robinson, born as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon in 1982, has spent some time in the prison. So far, he's been arrested thrice. While it's plausible that some of the earlier prison terms were justified, it seems absolutely obvious to every sane person that the legal harassment of Tommy Robinson in recent years is politically driven.



Korn: Last evening, I had a beautiful dream that I was Robinson.

The trials against Tommy Robinson are Stalinist-style monster trials and the far left that is de facto in charge of the U.K. wants to turn Tommy Robinson to a political prisoner. Right now, a court has confirmed the previously abolished verdict about Robinson's contempt of court, after he broadcast some defendants in a trial (well, it's journalism). He's supposed to be sentenced to 2 years in jail.