For a few decades, competent researchers of fundamental physicists have "almost known" that any consistent theory of quantum gravity has to be string theory.
For a long time, the evidence supporting this statement has been somewhat incomplete, somewhat circumstantial, somewhat built on fuzzy aesthetic criteria, and on the elimination of some imaginable, increasingly large classes of conceivable alternatives (which were never quite "all possible alternatives"). In recent years, however, a more systematic or more axiomatic analysis of the concepts and patterns has made many things clearer to get closer to establishing the equivalence
CONSISTENT QUANTUM GRAVITY = STRING-M/THEORY
which is basically the same thing that Cumrun Vafa calls the "String Lamppost Principle". Jared Kaplan and Sandipan Kundu (John Hopkins) posted a fun hep-th preprint
where they prove the existence of the closed string spectrum (a Hagedorn tower) from the assumption that higher-spin particles exist; and causality works.
Today, the Czech media have informed about the visit by Mike Pompeo with headlines such as "You have our backs". They were quoting the American secretary who expressed worries about our freedom and democracy which are, in his opinion, threatened by the activities of the competing superpowers, China and Russia. He was assuring us that the U.S. is ready to help us to defend the conditions of liberty. We must praise it, that is how it should look in between allies.
David B. sent me several interesting videos including some interviews with Peter Thiel. Exactly half a year ago, he participated at this Hoover Institution event:
His are great ideas and I agree with virtually everything in this video, except for some comments (including some in between the lines) closer to the end. Concerning China, something we solve intensely these days because Mike Pompeo visited the EU capital Pilsen (I was 3 meters away from him) and he added a less important city named Prague today, and will continue to Poland, Slovenia, and Austria, Thiel said that China is a non-democratic mostly capitalist mixed system and it can survive in this way or it may change. We don't know.
Is China ahead of the West? It often enforces two totally contradictory opinions on the Westerners at the same moment: China is superstrong and ahead; China is superweak and stuck in the Middle Ages. These claims disagree with each other but they're used psychologically to double the impact on the typical listener (the goal is for everyone else to give up). I agree it's all irrational. China is something in between and it will almost certainly be "comparable" to the U.S. for quite some time. It has made a big economic progress but it's equally amazing how poor they still are. They are 1.4 billion people whose average IQ is above the average American IQ but they still have just the GDP similar to the 330 million Americans. A sign that something is still very wrong about the system.
Off-topic: A fun popular stringy talk by Cumrun Vafa from the last week, hat tip: Erwin
And translatable to well-defined properties of the sensory perception
The laymen usually refuse quantum mechanics – and jump on the bandwagon of moronic pseudoscientific fairy-tales such as Bohmian mechanics, many worlds, objective collapse, or even superdeterminism – because they are just overwhelmed by the very realization that the observer plays any role in the application of the theory.
The insight that observers matter sounds like "soul" or "religion" and materialists in a very broad sense (a set that happens to include many Catholic theologians, it turned out) just instinctively refuse it. But it is simply wrong to reject scientific propositions instinctively; it is wrong to clump and conflate them according to ideological criteria. Even if the quantum mechanical observers were "religion", it's not the same as "Islam" or something like that and your usual arguments against religions simply fail. They certainly fail. In fact, the basic postulates of quantum mechanics and demonstrably true.
We have often said or heard that the old, manipulative media are dying and that is why the filth working in them is getting desperate and increasing the amount of lies that they are spreading. This may very well be true but it is also true that they are still alive and turning millions of people into brainwashed mental cripples.
Thankfully, while most of the Western European and North American youth have been persuaded to hide in the basement, their Czech and Slovak counterparts participated at this traditional bucket party on the Zrće beach, Pag Island, Croatia. A bucket party is a party where everyone drinks alcohol from the same 20-liter bucket; the Czech-and-Slovak slang is "párty kýbl" (the correct Czech word for a "kýbl", a cool parasitic Germanism, is a "vědro" or a "kbelík", however). Bucket parties have existed for years before Covid-19 (see videos from previous years) but something was "even more sexy" about drinking from the same bucket in July 2019.
I read most of tweets by the Archbishop of Prague, Dominika Duka. I have drunk beer next to him several times, he's spent years in my hometown of Pilsen (in the Bory Prison above: he overlapped with Havel at least once) and he's simply a man of integrity who has wise opinions about the historical as well as currently relevant political questions.
Today, his tweet looked like he was worried and the topic seemed unfamiliar to me:
Duka: I get goosebumps when I hear about the revisionist opinions that became widespread at the Philosophy Department of the Charles University in Prague when it comes to the appraisal of the previous [communist] regime – and when I realize that these opinions are often articulated by those who could only hear about the events indirectly.
He linked to his fresh blog post where he supported Michal Klíma, his friend and the boss of the Holocaust Victims' Foundation in his arguments against the dean of the Philosophy Department (who has a German sounding surname).
At least in the 1980s, the \(E_8\times E_8\) heterotic string theory was the main phenomenologically relevant class of string compactifications, the main candidate for a theory of everything. However, there's another possible gauge group of heterotic strings in \(D=10\), namely \(SO(32)\), more precisely \(Spin(32)/\ZZ_2\).
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 \(E_8\).
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)
