Insightful corrections and the weak gravity conjecture

Natalie Wolchover wrote an unnaturally good update about the topic of "corrections to the Weak Gravity Conjecture and their far-reaching implications" for the Quanta Magazine:

Black Hole Paradoxes Reveal a Fundamental Link Between Energy and Order

I wonder whether she did it herself or there is a "real physicist" (one or many?) behind the article.



Centory: Take It to the Limit. 1995 was a really good year for Eurodance (and pop music).

She starts with saying that physicists like to investigate the properties (and events) in the extreme regime because qualitatively new things often happen and it's exciting. Black holes have defined extreme enough conditions for half a century or one century, depending on what you count. She mentions the Hawking-Bekenstein discovery of the thermal traits of black holes in the 1970s.

Then she focuses on our 2006 Weak Gravity Conjecture (to find a new deep lesson from a black hole, you gotta take it to the limit), explains some basic equivalent forms of it, and chooses two recent papers that made some advances.

Twitter's censors have finally made Trump angry

Many of us were often shocked by the censorship that the Silicon Valley companies seem to enforce globally. Donald Trump has sort of agreed with us but it seemed obvious that he wouldn't ever act.



Well, I think that it is no longer so obvious. What was needed was some harm done to Trump's ego; he needed to be personally absorbed into this fight. Well, two days ago, Twitter introduced a new policy: it decided to label politically inconvenient messages by disparaging labels. And it has quickly tried this new policy against the most popular victim of this harassment, the U.S. president.

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

This tweet and its followup was decorated by an anonymous troll who works for Twitter: the addition to this tweet (and its followup) said something like "orange man bad, check the progressive truth about the mail-in ballots". And the "truth" said that Trump had to be wrong for some reasons. I think that the embarrassing label was already erased.

\(B\)-mesons at LHCb: \(Z'\)-bosons or leptoquarks?

The LHCb experiment

Charlie Wood wrote an intriguing article for the Quanta Magazine,

Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes

which mostly covers this March 2020 LHCb paper about the decay of \(B^0\to K^{*0}\mu^+\mu^-\) which is CP-averaged. The decay involving the muons is easier to measure.

Book: At least two philosophers understood background independence

While the fake news media are still obsessed (but less so) with the fake Chinese cough apocalypse, among similar things (and with fake scientists who promote fake theories or irrational hysteria), Tiziana Vistarini, a philosopher at the University of Rome, has published a new book about one of the most important topics in the Universe. Yes, it is

The Emergence of Spacetime in String Theory (Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Mathematics and Physics Book 5) (click to buy at Amazon)

You may be rather sure that the fake science journalists won't promote this book because it actually has some valuable beef. Hardcover and eVersions of the book are available.

Balance between creation and creative destruction

A traditional bricklayer's perspective is simple: when you add bricks, you are doing some positive work and you deserve a positive salary. Those who demolish buildings are doing a harm and they should pay. This simple view may be generalized to lots of other realms of the human activity.

They include not only working class jobs but also science and even investing, aside from many other occupations. The identity of the "beneficial" sign often looks clear. You do something applaudable if you lay bricks, create new cars, write papers creating new models and doing new tests, but also when you invest your money into companies. When you are long a stock, you are becoming a co-owner who risks his own money while trying to encourage the company to produce more products or do more of its services.

But things are not always this simple. The destruction is often beneficial and creative, too.

Can someone hear the Morse code?

Yes, Logic_Beach's puzzle that has turned out to be a piece of arts ;-) has consumed a lot of my time and energy, indeed. (It is a piece of arts because I have finally discovered an organizing principle that makes it more than a lame bunch of 12 assorted and vague hints suggesting random words that are unlikely to be written by anyone, especially not in the right order among 12! orders.) I find it likely that I am or we are so many big steps ahead of everyone else (in the "ordering principle" as well as some individual words) that I can give one or several hints about the 12-word seed to everyone.

OK. Just the identity of one keyword is the topic of this blog post – even though we have some know-how edge here, too. Can someone solve this for me? It's about 1/100 of the actual puzzle so you shouldn't waste too much time. If you find it hard or unsolvable, give up quickly.

The Bifurcation album has 10 compositions: YouTube, BandCamp. The second composition is 2:42-5:17 at YouTube. You may download it for $1.00 here or, more likely, for $0.00 here if you click at "buy", fill the price $0.00, and download the files, ideally WAV (uncompressed, about 0.3 GB).

Satoši or pal just moved BTC 50 mined in 2009

Some Christians are waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Similarly, some fans of the Bitcoin expect Satoši to return – a somewhat scary event because he claims to own one million coins.

Finally, hours ago, BTC 50 mined on February 9th, 2009, about one month after Bitcoin were live, were moved to 2 new wallets, as 40 (an old-format address where they keep on sitting) plus 10 (going to a mixer to obfuscate the flows), after whopping 11 years:

17XiVVooLcdCUCMf9s4t4jTExacxwFS5uh

One month is a rather short time and it is very likely that the mover is either Satoši Nakamoto or someone who knows him.

The logical relationship between quantum gravity and extended objects

Aside from the damn time-consuming Bitcoin puzzle (which may be ingenious or stupid, we will see in two days) – something that destroyed 30% of the night between Sunday and Monday for me – I spent hours by thinking about some good old topics, like the relationship between Matrix theory and wormholes, Matrix theory and the black hole complementarity, and more.

I have some biological instincts that want me to share the findings but I have learned enough to see "it is throwing pearls to swine" (dear readers will surely appreciate this assessment) so I won't discuss my advances. If I generously squeeze all my modesty into this sentence, a 22nd century historian decoding some old notebooks sounds like a better audience to me. Let me write about the writings by others instead.

In recent months, many people started to post their semi-technical essays to hep-th. Today's example is

A symmetry principle for emergent spacetime

by Edgar Shaghoulian (Ithaca). I am interested in the nationality of this bizarre name. OK, in his essay written to win some money from an "essay contest" where real physicists often compete with the armchair physicists (and usually lose), he proposes some relationship between quantum gravity (and the emergent spacetime) on one side and the higher-form symmetries on the other side.

Win $500 easily: a taxi surrounded by 10 trees

OK, here you have the nearly complete solution to the $500 Bitcoin puzzle. No people outside TRF know it, except for the author. The BIP39 seed must be

tree tree tree tree tree TAXI tree tree tree tree tree SOMETHING

and I am donating you almost $500. I hope that the person who can get the funds will reimburse me, at least 50%. At any rate, if he doesn't, people will know that he has probably taken it from this website.



A Krkonoše Mountains taxi driver tried to get to Výrovka. He paid a $100 fine because you can't do it a national park.

SOMETHING is one of the 2048 English BIP39 words; each 16th seed passes the checksum so there are about 128 wallets for different choices of something; one of them should contain over $500. I have checked that neither tree nor taxi nor creek nor water gives the right wallet.

Why is this the right password hiding in that electronic music album, Bifurcations?

South Bohemian CFR: 0.02%-0.06% of those with IgA antibodies die

The official Czech government's sampling measurement of the herd immunity (something I was recommending already three months ago) concluded that only 0.4% (out of the 25k sample) of Czechs had antibodies against Covid-19. Well, that's rather implausible although I can't "rigorously" show that this figure is impossibly low. That number of "cases" (40,000) would surpass the officially "confirmed cases" only by a factor of 5 or so.



The Strakonice Castle. Strakonice is also famous for the legend (and a theater play) about Švanda the Titman. He wanted to marry a babe but her family thought he was poor. So he decided to earn the millions by playing the bagpipes. Fortunately, his mother was a fairy who turned the bagpipes to magic ones. He could enchant even princesses... however, an aide wanted to rob him etc.

But antibody tests are subtle and diverse and the details matter.

A new test in South Bohemia led by Martin Kuba (ODS) has ended up with a very different result. 5% of the Czechs have already developed Covid-19 IgA antibodies (early antibodies to fight against the infection). Note that due to this "IgA", this South Bohemian test looks a notch more transparent and well-defined than the nationwide one. We weren't really told at all "what kind of a test" the damn government experiment was using.

Some people favor extremely unlikely, contrived hypotheses

Under the article about Witten's spaceships, we had exchanges with Jakub Scholtz, a postdoc at Durham. Of course, I remember him as a brilliant Harvard undergrad whom I was officially supervising as a coach of a sort – which means about one or two meetings per year. We should have done more than this bare minimum! ;-) But there was something Czech about our staying near the minimum.

At any rate, in Fall 2019, he and James Unwin submitted a paper that Witten has built upon, one proposing that some anomalies in the Solar System are explained by something better than the ninth planet, namely a small black hole. (The word "primordial" is really redundant if not a lipstick on a pig. Because it's supposed to replace a hypothetical planet, the mass of that beast obviously has to be just planetary, not stellar, so it can't be a stellar black hole. The word "primordial" is just a fancy way to describe the disadvantage of the theory that the black hole is much lighter than the range of astrophysical black hole masses that is well supported by observations and theories linked to them.)

OK, it's a very appealing hypothesis that we have some inch-sized black hole at the outskirts of the Solar System. If you followed the conversation, you know that I remained skeptical about the picture. Well, I surely find it somewhat plausible that there are such small black holes around. But I primarily remained skeptical about the suggestion that they have found new evidence in favor of the theory – anything that you only see gravitationally may be suggested to be a black hole but are there specific reasons to think so in this case?