Both ATLAS, CMS: it may look like a new \(28\GeV\) particle

After a few days of silence, here is another blog post whose title remarkably differs from the previous title. There is quite a diversity of topics here these days, right? ATLAS (an LHC detector) just released a new preprint

Search for Higgs bosons decaying to new spin-0 or spin-1 particles in four-lepton final states at the ATLAS detector with 139/fb of \(pp\)-collision data at \(\sqrt s = 13\TeV\)

OK, these events start with the well-known new \(125\GeV\) Higgs boson, some of them may decay to \(Z_d Z_d\), and these two new bosons should decay to four leptons, either electrons or muons or their antiparticles.

Both ATLAS, CMS: it may look like a new \(1\TeV\) particle

One week ago, Tošihide Maskawa (81) died of acncer; see Physics World. He co-authored the CKM matrix with Kobajaši and got the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jojčiro Nambu (with the symmetry breaking as a theme).

The excesses are 3.00-3.12 sigma

I have never stopped going through all the ATLAS and CMS (LHC) papers on the arXiv plus the CERN preprint server (which alerts me through Feedly), looking for signs of new physics. The number of people who do this job in the world may be counted on the fingers of two hands; it is more or less true that the LHC collider was built almost just for me and I deserve it. An hour ago, a brand new ATLAS preprint

Search for resonant and non-resonant Higgs boson pair production in the \(b\bar b\,\tau^+\tau^-\) decay channel using \(13\TeV\) \(pp\)-collision data from the ATLAS detector

had to attract my attention because the mandatory search for the word "excess" has produced nice whole promising sentences, not to mention the Figure 8 with the excess.

Science Magazine, climatologists: models overstate temperature changes by a factor of two or more

Dr Roy Spencer's 2014 page. Similar graphs showing that almost all the models simply overstate the warming have been published by climate skeptics before 2014 as well as after 2014. It's clear that the longer time the climate modelers follow a flawed methodology that clearly overstates the warming rate, the larger the deviation between the models and the reality becomes – and at some point, the climate modelers won't have the stomach to defend models or a model methodology that is clearly flawed. Note that Al Gore and the IPCC got the Nobel Prize in 2007, it is almost 14 years ago. For that time, median models predicted over 0.4 °C of warming but we only observed 0.2 °C or so.

Bill Z. sent me a remarkable pair of articles by Paul Voosen, a staff writer, in the Science Magazine:

U.N. climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming

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New climate models forecast a warming surge

It has been eight years and... the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change) will release its first new assessment since 2013. What has changed since 2013? Well, nothing detectable has changed about the climate – Voosen has the duty to start his first article by writing that the Armageddon has escalated, almost all the ice has disappeared, the end of the world is very close now. Nice. It is ludicrous but no longer surprising. What is surprising is what he writes after that.

EU's war on humor

Willie Soon sent us an incredible document that is hosted on the European Commission's server and labeled as a pretty official document of the European Commission (i.e. The European Union) and its "Radicalisation Awareness Network"

It’s not funny anymore. Far-right extremists’ use of humour (PDF, 18 pages)

The first sentence boldly proclaims:

Humour has become a central weapon of extremist movements to subvert open societies and to lower the threshold towards violence.

After 2+2=4, humor had to be finally identified as a tool of racist sexist transphobic homophobic torture by climate deniers, too. It's coming.

Just years ago, you would be sure that something like that had to be a parody. Everyone would agree that only a true pile of human crap may overtly denounce humor. However, the times have changed and a simple background check of the two authors makes it almost certain that this document is meant seriously: 18 pages of garbage that is comparable to the first sentence above.

A small toroidal universe is possible, unlikely, would be revolutionary, but there is no really new evidence

The way how the "popular" media pick ideas to be hyped is deeply disturbing



One week ago, the donut news made it to Live Science, Vice, AV club, and others, and for some reasons, the huge mainstream Czech news server Novinky.cz turned it to the story #1 last night.

All these articles promote the June 2021 preprint

The variance of the CMB temperature gradient: a new signature of a multiply connected Universe

by Aurich, Buchert, France, and Steiner (Ulm, Lyon). My understanding is that Buchert is the head of the team.

Could a Czech Covid-positive Olympic athlete need oxygen?

Not really.

OK, Czechia has 10.7 million people. Assuming the thresholds that are used for flu, the Covid-19 epidemics ended sometime in April or May and for all practical purposes, there has been no Covid-19 in Czechia for a month. The daily cases, hospitalizations, daily deaths etc. are 98.0%-99.7% below the most recent March peaks. In total, 30,000 lives were "ended with Covid-19" according to the official statistics. Every year, about 112,000 Czechs die without Covid-19.

Now, the Czech Olympic team is composed of 116 athletes. 80% of them have been vaccinated against Covid-19 which is a higher percentage than 60% in the general population: athletes are really being pushed into this ritual which still "isn't quite mandatory" but it's close to being mandatory. A special flight took 40 people, mostly athletes but some members of the support staff, to Tokyo around July 20th. A day later, we already discussed their positive tests. The Japanese have more sensitive PCR tests than we have. None of the people have any symptoms. As far as I can say, every single one is a false positive.

Let's divide the European Union

By Dr Jiří Weigl, July 22nd, 2021

Last week's publication of the European Commission's plan for a green "great leap" in the holy struggle to save the climate has definitively confirmed that the gulf of opinion, ideas, and interests between the EU's West and its post-communist East has reached an insurmountable dimension.

Will the Green Deal destroy the EU's destiny?

Commentary by Alexander Tomský

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the communist empire, the West has been pushing two ideologies that normal everyday people cannot believe and wonder how it is even possible that they are promulgated by educated people, at least in the sense of people with university degrees. Few suspect that this is a hidden disease of the speculative intellect.

Steven Weinberg: 1933-2021

Virasoro: Yesterday, on the same day, Miguel Virasoro died as well: news. He was an Argentine-born Italian pioneer of string theory; the closed-string tachyonic "Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude" is named after him (Shapiro was my instructor at Rutgers) and so is the "Virasoro algebra".

Tragically, Steven Weinberg died in the ICU of a local hospital last night (via his colleague Coker), after weeks of hospitalization. He has been a giant of theoretical physics.



I took this picture (of Steven Weinberg with the wife, of Sheldon Glashow) during Sidneyfest in 2005 in our Harvard Society of Fellows' dining hall (inside the Elliot House). Both of us were already former junior fellows at that moment. I can find about 5 other pictures of Weinberg that I took at various moments. When I was giving a talk in Austin, Weinberg was sitting next to me during a dinner that he formally organized for me. My Erdös-type collaboration distance was 3, e.g. Motl-Dine-Witten-Weinberg.

Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam. While the first two were classmates since the childhood, the third dude was arguably the greatest Muslim theoretical physicists of all times.

Excessive fears are worse than Covid-19

A newspaper interview with the Czech expresident Václav Klaus

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You're asking the government to stop scaring citizens. What do you think it should do?

The government should stop worrying about us, it should let us live our lives normally, it should allow us to choose our level of risk, our level of responsibility towards our neighbours, towards the world. Everyone should decide for themselves how to behave covidly. It is worthless for the state to advise us, and to advise us as stupidly as it has done so far.

Hatsuda, Siegel on their set of F-, M-, T-, S-theories

Mrs Mačiko Hatsuda (Tokyo+Tsukuba) and Mr Warren Siegel (Stony Brook) posted a fun new paper with their somewhat unusual cousins of M-theory:

Perturbative F-theory 10-brane and M-theory 5-brane

Readers who expect colorful fonts (not only) on the title page won't be disappointed. This research is a part of the program to make dualities manifest by increasing the dimensionalities of spacetimes and branes' world volumes.

Did Covid shorten Czechs' life expectancy by one year?

No, it was just around 0.04-0.27 years, the decrease was temporary, and by now, Covid-19 has led to an extra (albeit tiny) increase of our life expectancy on top of the trend-like increase!

Dear Prof Klaus,

thank you very much for your wonderful message and your question whether it's possible, as the Czech biostatistician Mr Ladislav Dušek claims in a daily, that Covid has shortened life expectancy of Czechs by one year ("in 2020"). It is an excellent question that should be seriously discussed, instead of irrelevant factoids about the number of "cases" in this or that place which people are still fed by the media, aside from the repulsive needles and deceitful arguments in favor of needles.

First, I must say that the Czech phrases "střední délka života" and "naděje dožití" ("average length of life" and the "chance of a long life", literally) are considered exactly synonymous in Czech; both are translated as "life expectancy" (click to get the Wikipedia entry, I don't claim that it's the best source I could link to).

There is really only one quantity that may express "how much life is left for an average person". However, one must realize that the word "average" means that we must specify the group that is being averaged (a simple arithmetic average with equal weights) such as the Czech nation. If we choose a subset of the Czech nation, it will have a different life expectancy than the whole nation. In particular, the "remaining life expectancy" will be shorter for older cohorts (groups of people according to an interval of age); but the expected or average age at death (which is the current age plus the remaining life expectancy) is actually longer for the older cohorts because they have already passed a test. It is obvious for those who are 96 because they are guaranteed to die 96-year-old or older; while the average Czech is not guaranteed that outcome of Fred Singer's yet. We must distinguish the remaining life expectancy and the total life expectancy; they simply differ by the average current age of the group we try to describe.

Type IIB string theory with the cosmological constant \(10^{-144}\)

A Cornell-Northeastern-MIT quintuplet (Demirtas et al.) released two new hep-th papers (cross-listed in hep-ph)

A Cosmological Constant That is Too Small (short)

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Small Cosmological Constants in String Theory (long)

Demirtas, Kim, McAllister, Moritz, and Rios-Tascon claim to solve "one of the layers of the cosmological constant problem" as we have carefully distinguished it for over two decades.

Will the people rise up against the EU?

Czech expresident Václav Klaus darkly on the car ban and the protests: 'It fizzled out into nothing'

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Mr President, as a long-time campaigner against green bans and restrictions, what do you think of the European Commission's rather bold 'climate package'?

This climate package is not bold. It is stupid and nonsensical. It is unrealistic, and if it were to be implemented, it would be a completely destructive package. Completely destructive to the lives, freedom and living standards of the people of Europe.



If the package is fully implemented, what good will it do for our planet, globally speaking, if we in the EU reduce carbon emissions by 55% by 2030 and become 'carbon neutral' by mid-century?

That this package can do any good for the planet is something only green activists, only the advocates of the utterly unsustainable doctrine of climate alarmism, can think. Only people who believe in an immediate linear or even exponential relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the average global temperature. I am not one of these deluded individuals who have managed to garner such absurd media coverage. Man's role in the evolution of global temperatures over the long term is completely negligible. Moreover, CO2 has already played its potential role in influencing temperatures. The intention of carbon neutrality is an anti-human policy. It has almost no connection to temperature.

The peril of politicizing science

Willie Soon sent us this wonderful essay in J. Chem. Lett. written by Ms Anna Krylov who is a USC chemist with formidable 20,000 citations.

The Peril of Politicizing Science

It was sent to Willie by a Professor of AE at the same USC, i.e. a male colleague of Krylov's.

"The pure joy" \(E_8\) SUSY toroidal orbifold TOE

In the early 1970s, supersymmetry (SUSY) was discovered. By the end of the decade, it became a vital tool in model building. By 1981, the supersymmetric standard model was mostly understood and seen to be superior to the non-supersymmetric standard model in many respects.



Everybody is already in Mexico, Michal Tučný 1986

Grand unification (GUT) has been around from the early 1970s as well. And in 1985, SUSY GUTs were embedded in the first semi-realistic model that also included quantum gravity, namely the \(E_8\times E_8\) heterotic string theory. \(\ZZ_3\) orbifolds of tori have always been the "simplest" examples of Calabi-Yau threefolds that the unobserved 6 dimensions (among the 10 dimensions in total) could take.

In these new papers, a Mexican-Portuguese-Swedish team (Aranda, de Anda, Morais, Pasechnik) constructs the simplest, non-gravitational combination of the "too good to be an accident" traits of heterotic string theory on the toroidal orbifolds:

AdAMPmini: A Different Take on \(E_8\) Unification

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AdAMPbig: Sculpting the Standard Model from low-scale Gauge-Higgs-Matter \(E_8\) Grand Unification in ten dimensions

The short paper may be considered a commercial for the long one.