I had a pleasant and refined German guest-scientist in Pilsen today. We chatted about lots of things and – because of some related work by my guest – we also mentioned Joan Feynman. With some uncertainty, I said that she recently died – because it followed from a tweet by John Preskill that I read in the last week:
Joan Feynman 1927-2020. You can get a sense of how remarkable Joan was from her presentation in 2018 at the Feynman 100 celebration.https://t.co/b0E3xcLXaT
I didn't quite internalize the information about her death because "-2020" were the only characters in the tweet that talked about the death. Sadly, a Californian funeral website supports the theory that she died and/or had a funeral on July 22nd.
The video that Preskill embedded shows her lively mental abilities and her charmingly modest yet realistic sense of humor – when she was already over 90 years old. I also think that her way of speaking and gestures are extremely similar to her brother, Richard Feynman. They had the Far Rockaway, Queens, New York accent, some Jewish flavor added into it, but the similarities go much further and deeper, into the rhythm of the smiles and the "preparation for a shooting of ideas" with some degree of a combative, suffering frowning at the right moments that precedes the smiles. You are invited to provide us with a more detailed quantification of their similarities.
0:00 Dear friends,
allow me, on the occasion of handing over this award to me, more precisely of taking over this award... To put it clearly, your handing over and my taking over of your award. Well, of the award that used to be yours but now it is already mine.
0:22 Friends, I am touched and I am moved. I can't even hide my erection... I mean elation... my movement. I cannot move. I cannot find words.
0:39 Friends, I am looking for words and I cannot find them. Friends, on this occasion, let me thank to all those who made it possible for me to earn this prize. In the first place, it was the viewers in the first row.
0:59 But also the viewers in the second row. Viewers in the third row. Viewers in the fifth row. Viewers in the sixth row.
1:13 Friends, I cannot forget the viewers in the fourth row. Last but not least, I thank to the viewers in the last row.
1:40 Friends, I am thankful to the employees of the Czech Television who have built the stage sets, who dressed me, who lubricated me, and who have called me to the stage, often in vain.
1:57 I am also grateful to my colleagues-actors who have collaborated with me and in this way, they created the opportunity for me to come to the fore.
2:20 Thanks to the actresses that they gave me... the same opportunity. Thanks to the film directors that they haven't given me the same opportunity.
2:40 Thanks to the script directors for having crossed out my, often not too witty, text and replacing it with a far different, with a far different text.
3:04 I also thank to all the lighting electricians who have enlightened me. But also to the workers in the power plants who have released the electricity here into us.
3:23 Also, I thank to all those who are reparing the roads and cars. Without all these people, I couldn't get here and without without all these people, I could shove my acting, frankly speaking, I could shove my acting... somewhere.
3:48 Friends, thanks to my wife who has always calmed me and cleaned me; who has always, when I brought the salary from the Czech Television, done the vacuum cleaning. And who is washing me very often. Thanks.
4:14 I mustn't forget about my parents, either. Friends, thanks to my mother who has given birth to me. I thank to my father that he met her... and that he had a child with her and in fact, it was such a child that was one like me. And they made it possible for me to grow in such a grea... to grow in such a great ate ate... for me to grow in such a? Great? ATE ACTOR who has such a terrible prize.
5:25 I am also thankful to the parents of their parents. But also to the parents of those parents and of those parents... Friends, I thank to Forefather Czech for having brought my great great grandparents here.
5:43 I thank to the Slavník Dynasty that they created the room for the Přemyslid Dynasty. I thank to the drug addicts, the narkomen... the Marcomanni, the Quadi, and the Celts that they have evacuated our territory in time so that my great great grandparents could have come here.
6:06 Also, I thank to the Asians that they allowed the Slavs, before the latter found their new home here, to be accommodated on the territory of the contemporary Mongolian People's Republic and its vicinity.
6:23 I thank to the monkeys that, in the prehistoric times, higher, erected mammals could have evolved from them, i.e. the humans, and to Darwin who has made this realization because otherwise I would run out of the people whom I can thank. Thank you!
I am confident that the second quarter (Q2) of 2020 was the peak of the Covid hysteria and the economy is already vastly more open and prosperous (almost everywhere) in Q3 – and we will see a substantial GDP rise between Q2 and Q3. I also think that there has been some learning and nations won't return to as draconian national quarantines as those that they suffered in Q2 2020.
A financial song from a rare country that didn't lose its marbles because of a dumb coronavirus.
So the Q2 2020 figures should be showing the worst results that the human stupidity – totally unfairly blamed on a nearly harmless virus – could have caused. Many such numbers were published today. In Q2, Germany, Belgium, Austria, and the U.S. are estimated (these are first calculations based on the real data, not some guesswork!) to have dropped by 10.1%, 12.2%, 10.7%, and 9.5% quarter-on-quarter. The first three countries' GDP dropped 11.7%, 14.5%, and 12.8% year-on-year (because there has been a 2% or so drop in Q1).
Here, I need to discuss the American figure, 9.5%. The published figure was 32.9%, slightly better than estimates, but Americans publish annualized figures which means figures extrapolated to one year by an exponential function. I calculated 9.5% by the following formula:\[
1-(1-0.329)^{1/4} \approx 0.095
\] The American annualization convention is particularly stupid now – because it basically assumes that the GDP growth rate is a continuous function of time (if it is not, then it is very unwise to extrapolate it!). Too bad, even the GDP itself is far from being a continuous function in countries where it's possible to shut down whole industries overnight.
It helps to show that the virus is really inconsequential.
Because lots of people have been obsessively tested for almost half a year, lots of numbers were produced in the world. The Worldometers statistical page contains a large amount of numbers that describe the "cases" (positively tested people), serious cases, deaths, number of tests in the world's countries (and their states) and their historical evolution.
The two most important official statistical pages in Czechia are Illness-currently and Koronavirus-Mzcr. Let me discuss what was happening to the numbers on the first page.
Can the research of fundamental physics be abolished globally? Not really. Pernicious, scientifically incompetent far left activists may only cripple it locally but the human race may still do it and as long as some truly intelligent humans are alive, some of them will do string theory research. Is it possible that the best theoretical high-energy research will move to an unexpected place such as Mexico in a decade? Yes, it is possible although I still believe that some "everyone is already in Mexico" brain drift would probably be needed.
Alfredo Aranda and Francisco de Anda posted an amusing 5-page-long hep-ph preprint
where they showed how one can get a damn realistic spectrum for a theory of everything while starting with the 10-dimensional \(E_8\) gauge superfield only, the superfield that lives e.g. on the domain walls of the 11-dimensional M-theory. The presence of an orbifold, \(T^6 / (\ZZ_6\times \ZZ_2)\) in this case, a typical stringy feature, is capable of circumventing the usual conclusion that you can't get a chiral spectrum with groups like \(E_8\).
While many Western (and especially Anglo-Saxon) countries are decaying and events from the U.S. and U.K. look increasingly surreal to everyone in countries like mine where people haven't gone nuts yet, lots of people tell me that they're allies. Sadly, they only tell it to me – and they mostly use anonymous nicknames, anyway. On top of that, I am often told things like the following:
I am against the SJWs. But: Shut up. The whole future belongs to the SJWs. The future under their leadership is unavoidable unless some miracle happens, or unless we introduce a full-blown fascist society.
Or:
George Soros may be shorting the stock market and paying the fake news journalists for bad news in order to bring the U.S. economy to the knees (and to hurt Donald Trump and everyone aligned with his fate along the way). Incidentally, I just shorted Dow Jones for the third time because it will surely go to 18,000. Isn't it exciting? I will earn XY dollars when it's at 18,000.
There are lots of things happening. I will avoid all the small topics described e.g. in my tweets. But an hour ago, a guy who thinks he is smart sent me an advertisement for Randonautica. Well, it is an app for Android or iOS.
It's a new app for "orienteering", something like Geocaching or Pokémon Go, but the amount of hype surrounding it has been far greater while the substance is far smaller. Check e.g. Google News and YouTube.
During a yesterday's bike trip, my friend told me that a major international news agency has declared its desire to capitalize the word "black" but not "white" in the racial sense. I didn't want to believe because it still sounds like a story from The Onion. But it is true. Days ago, The Associated Press decided that its employees are obliged to violate the basic rules of English in this self-evidently racist yet childish way. And indeed, some articles about "black men" were edited even retroactively.
Even if the unhinged anti-white racism that cripples America these days spread in Czechia, I still think that the Institute of the Czech Language would show its authority and it would send its grammar cops, an occupation we copied from the Romans, who would punish the rogue inkspillers. Incidentally, the Life of Brian (by Monty Python) is really excellent and you should watch the full film if you have never done so. It's generally respected that the language is something we inherited from 1,000+ years of our ancestors and we have the moral duty to protect it against putrefaction.
The insanely huge competition shows how much this problem was overblown, too
The stupid part of the public was brainwashed by the fake news media that have claimed – screamed – approximately since mid February that the Wuhan coronavirus is a catastrophe of global proportions that would either end the life on Earth or at least totally change the life of humans. None of these things has happened and none of them could happen (at least in mid February, it was already clear that it was not a serious problem); on the other hand, the implications of the fake news, hysteria, and the mad policies building on it have been deep. Some $10 trillion of economic damages are just a part of the problem.
Average people's imagination was encouraged to contribute to this hysteria. People were inventing their own variations of fake news what terrible ET-style symptoms and threats every infected person gets; what bad events in their life may be blamed on the coronavirus (after a motorbike accident death was counted as "Covid", a health official seriously claimed that motorbike accidents are caused by Covid); and people also volunteered to spread the idea that this disease will never be curable or cured because it's at least as might as God.
Some folks could have thought that the departure of the U.K. would make the European Union visibly more unified. Well, the ongoing EU summit in Brussels makes it very clear that this fantasy was always detached from reality. The continental part of the European Union has more than enough sources to completely mock the idea that Europe is "close to being one country".
The prime ministers have been talking about the post-Covid recovery fund that is supposed to be a stunning €0.75 trillion. Thirty 100-kilometer colliders. After the two standard days reserved for the proceedings, they haven't agreed about anything. So they added a third day, Sunday. It didn't help. They will meet at 4 pm again.
An artificial "average Russian woman" was only allowed to work as a secretary in the Urals so far. A key point is that she wasn't allowed to run for Putin's job yet.
Various people have promoted their ideas about the "end of history", "end of science" but also seemingly less ambitious ends such as "end of string theory" and "end of experimental particle physics" and more far-reaching ones such as the "end of fossil fuels". None of those has taken place yet – despite hundreds of thousands of activists who are trying to destroy one or many items in the list. Tim Gowers, a 1998 Fields Medal winner, responded to a question about his most controversial opinion
Research mathematics as a discipline will come to an end within the lifetimes of people just starting out in mathematical research.
Some details and justifications were written in this thread. OK, we are told that mathematicians will cease to exist when the current youngest postdocs start to die en masse. Why? Gowers believes that the expansion of the Artificial Intelligence into mathematics will make sure it will be the case.
I think that his view is a corollary of a mistaken understanding of the relationship between the people and the machines.
which is full of inspiring ideas, correct answers, and especially obsessive promotion of a thoroughly unscientific reasoning. OK, we found some fossils of the multicellular life that existed in the ocean half a billion years ago. It's hard to draw boundaries in between individuals in those life forms. But it's so important to draw these boundaries, all of biology and Darwin's theory depend on it, we are told. Oh, really? Do they?
They don't. The purpose of science is to explain and predict the observations, not to provide us with details of pictures that people arbitrarily made up, such as the assumption that the whole life is clearly separated to individuals by some sharp contours.
Due to some breathtaking recent expenses related to my free expression, I really need your material help... Also try PayPal.me/motls (EUR,CZK avoid a fee)
