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.

How Czech press informs about the expulsion of Noah Carl

I am thankful to be surrounded by an island of a relative positive deviation whose radius is a few hundred miles.

In post-communist countries and especially in Czechia, many top media outlets still preserve the old rules of journalism. Well, RT (formerly Russia Today) also beats virtually all mainstream media in the West. Look how RT informed about mini-AOC who got death threats from some really nasty leftists defending America's dumbest lawmakers. RT is clearly fair and balanced and discusses the real point.



Noah Carl, from Support Noah Carl

Four hours ago, iDNES.cz (iTODAY in Czechia), perhaps the most mainstream Internet news server, wrote about the story of the IQ expert Noah Carl who was fired by Cambridge. Virtually all commenters are shocked by the rise of totalitarianism in the U.K. – and elsewhere – and 800+ comments were posted in a few hours. Because such articles are rarely published by the Western newspapers, let me show you what totally ordinary Czech readers read about this story and how they react. (A similar article with similar comments appeared in Echo.)

Genes influence the IQ, a scientist wrote. He was pushed out of Cambridge as a racist

The young British researcher Noah Carl was fired by the Cambridge University after hundreds of Academics have accused him of promotion of racist pseudoscience. Carl has written texts also about the relationship between the genes and intelligence and about the crimes committed by the immigrants. To defend him, another petition has been created and Carl plans to sue. Several Czechs have appeared among his critics as well as supporters.

Czech Greta invented a "reprimand" for her strikes

"Progressive" media immediately parroted her lie

When the world was still alright, e.g. during Maria Theresa's reign here in Austria-Hungary, schoolkids who skipped the classes and severely lied about the circumstances used to be spanked so that they couldn't sit on their buttocks for 12 years.

These days, they skip the classes, scream absurdities that e.g. the Earth will evaporate in 12 years, and they receive a special diploma from the principal. That's the case of the Scandinavian premium unleaded autist role model who enjoys lots of advantages. Well, dishonest kids in many other countries want to emulate this success of hers.

"I am a Czech Greta so I also want a Nobel Peace Prize for skipping the classes, or at least one-half of the prize because I am just a Czech outside the Nordic race." That's what some little opportunists think. OK, the Czech counterpart of the Scandinavian autist šithead is called Miss Anna Merzegová, a visually and especially morally repulsive ninth-grader (find her name on YouTube).

ScienceMag: realistic reforestation may devour all of our CO2 emissions

If CO2 were a climate problem, it would cost just some $300 billion to fix it

After a return from a very nice bike trip through the regional forests, our regional Hit Radio FM Plus switched from music to some talking. In recent years, I noticed that I can no longer listen to the public radio for extended periods of time – although I pay fees and although it was my main radio in the early 1990s or so – because there are just way too many totally disgusting far left activists over there. After a few thoughts of the type "I am a strong man who can survive a lot", the thought "does it really make sense to torture myself?" wins.

FM Plus is different, the jokes they add are rather pleasing, and I got used to it again. Now, the narrator said:

The experts have finally found out how to solve global warming. It sounds like a storyline from a Hollywood movie but it is true.

OK, some new rubbish, I thought. I had to go somewhere so I needed to find out quickly what the remarkable "solution" was. And I found it immediately, indeed:

The global tree restoration potential (Bastin et al., the technical paper in Science)

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Adding 1 billion hectares of forest could help check global warming (Alen Fox, Science promo)

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Restoring Forests Could Help Put a Brake on Global Warming, Study Finds (Sengupta, NYT)

I chose a random mainstream medium.

Unix metadata: two Russians from Pilsen's twin city credited with ClimateGate

One-half of the evidence seems to suffer from a fatal mistake

In 2009, the e-mails and other data that had been exchanged between the people close enough to Phil Jones – and Michael Mann – were released and decent people all over the world were shocked by the total lack of morality among the top alarmist climatologists. They were conspiring to hijack the editorial process, distort the data, liquidate journals and referees, invent fallacious calculations to support predetermined conclusions, and more.

A less explosive second batch was released in 2011.



Yekaterinburg: the Ural Region underwent quite an impressive economic boom in the Putin years.

One of the huge consequences of the ClimateGate that we have never previously discussed – because it looked unimportant – was that ClimateGate was the event that turned a certain man named Donald J. Trump into a climate skeptic. Before these e-mails, he was recommending the world leaders to wrestle with the climate change! The ClimateGate has largely opened his eyes. He wasn't the only one.