Firing 90% HEP folks would mean new scientific dark ages

Backreaction, currently the most influential forum of haters of physics in the world, has reacted to the newly completed design plans for the next future collider at CERN, the FCC. You may find the article with the not very friendly but very populist title Particle physicists want money for bigger collider through a search engine.

In that article, we learn that even the lowest estimate €9 billion is too much money and it's not worth spending. Such appraisals obviously depend on one's priorities but a person who finds €9 billion as way too much is clearly an anti-science savage. It's just a small fraction of the capitalization of Tesla, a car company making just some 200,000 cars a year (0.3% of the global annual production of 70 million cars a year) and still waiting for its first annual profit. Or 1/20 of Apple's cash reserves.

Alternatively, the cost of $10 billion is what tattoo parlors earn in three years or the porn industry in one month. The Pentagon spends it in five days and so do the U.S. welfare projects.

What would you think about the global population that isn't willing to pay this much money for the most fundamental scientific experiment once a decade or two?

FCC submits a 1244-page plan to EPJ

Those people who aren't quite satisfied with a 75-second-long popular video about the Future Circular Collider (FCC) at CERN – a video with some usual nice pictures saying that the experiment wants to study particle physics and the Universe – have the opportunity to look at a somewhat more detailed study.

Today, the FCC Collaboration has submitted their paper to the European Journal of Physics:

International collaboration publishes concept design for a post-LHC future circular collider at CERN (CERN press release, different layout)

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FCC Conceptual Design Report (CERN website)

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Big papers in PDF: 222 pages on goals (EPJ C), 371 pages on lepton collider, 361 pages on hadron collider, 290 pages on HE-LHC (all EPJ ST)

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Update documents in PDF: 20 pages (0007), 20 pages (0003), 22 pages, 19 pages

Here you have a 2-minute FCC video starting with the documentary proving that the Earth is flat.

Gillette will only produce razors for feminists' beards and mustaches

Gillette is one of the companies that have greatly changed the culture by its quasi-monopoly. In Czech – as well as all small Baltic and Slavic languages that use letters from the Czech alphabet ("ž"...) – the word "žiletka" refers to the general thin razors for shaving, regardless of the company that made it.

The company was founded in 1901 and has headquarters in Boston. It is currently owned by Procter & Gamble, a truly large corporation. The British marketing unit has decided to change the image of the company by releasing We Believe: The Best Men Can Be | Gillette (a two-minute short film).

Wow, it wasn't accepted too well. Out of 2.7 million views, they have accumulated 240,000 negative votes (still fewer than YouTube Rewind 2018: 15 million downvotes) and just 30,000 positive ones. The film basically says that most men have toxic masculinity (their being male implies that they're bullies, rapists etc.) that they have to shave off. A far left "Young Turks" host is presented as a role model, boys that are playing and men who are praising women are being criminalized. Hundreds of thousands of comments were posted under the YouTube video and hundreds of thousands of comments were erased by the company – only 64,000, mostly supportive ones, were kept as of now.

Why competent physicists can't remain calm when seeing an apparent fine-tuning

Sabine Hossenfelder boasts that "students" are asking her what to think about major research topics in theoretical physics and cosmology

Good Problems in the Foundations of Physics

and she likes to give them the same answer as the rubbish on her atrociously anti-scientific blog: almost none of the research makes any sense, problems aren't problems, physics should stop. Dear students, let me point out that

she is just an average incompetent layman who was allowed to pretend to be a physics researcher just because she has a non-convex reproductive organ and that's why, in the contemporary environment of the extreme political correctness, many people are afraid to point out the obvious fact that she is just an arrogant whining woman who has no clue about any of these physics problems.

But every actual physicist will agree with an overwhelming majority of what I am going to say.

If you misunderstand the basic issues of the current state of theoretical physics (and particle physics and cosmology) as much as she does, you simply cannot get a postdoc job in any research group, with a possible exception of the totally ludicrous low-quality or corrupt places. And most of the relevant people would probably agree with me that if you still haven't figured out why her musings are completely wrong, you shouldn't really be a physics graduate student, either.

An unexpected encounter of digits of \(\pi\) in the counting of collisions

Peter F. and John A. simultaneously sent me a nice video on the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel that wonderfully popularizes various mathematical curiosities and gets well-deserved hundreds of thousands of views for that:

The most unexpected answer to a counting puzzle (a 5-minute video)

Imagine two boxes on a line, a big one and a small one. The big one is \(M\) times heavier than the smaller one. The small box starts at zero speed, the big one approaches from the right, collides with the small one. And the small box elastically oscillates between the big box and a static wall.

You count all the "clacks". When the boxes are equally heavy and \(M=1\), you will get \(3\) clacks. When \(M=10^{10}\), you will get... \(314,\!159\) clacks. It's almost like digits of \(\pi\). And indeed. The rule continues. Why do you get digits of \(\pi\) in a counting problem? And why are they multiplied by powers of ten?

DNA: cranks fully expel James Watson from his lab

Genetics used to be banned in the Soviet Union up to the mid 1960s.

A crackpot named Trofim Lysenko proposed alternative, superstitious methods to increase the yields in agriculture (basically some reeducation camps for crops – contemporary cultural Marxists would approve Lysenko's methods because they were also all about "nurturing") and he became a darling of an influential local mass killer named Joseph Stalin.

That man therefore banned genetics – the discipline established by Czechia's German Gregor Mendel – and all scientific methods in agriculture.

It was before the DNA was discovered. Just to be sure, Mendel's genetics determined the probabilities that the offspring has one trait or another but it didn't say "why". DNA emerged as the detailed microscopic molecular explanation why those probabilities work as Mendel has experimentally determined.

Americans like to view the story of Lysenkoism as some tale about savages who are surely nothing like Americans. Too bad, when it comes to the freedom to do research and report the results, the atmosphere in the U.S. is already as bad as it was during the Soviet Lysenkoism era if not worse and the Yankees' ideas that the Soviets were worse are just unsubstantiated fantasies driven by the primitive and widespread anti-Russian racism.

Self-immolation of Jan Palach: 50th anniversary

In August 1968, five European communist countries' armies invaded Czechoslovakia and terminated the Prague Spring, an era of the socialism with a human face (or some accelerating liberalization of communism if you wish).

Within months, almost all the people got used to the renewed neo-Stalinist conditions, opportunism, spying, restored censorship, and firing of the inconvenient folks (starting from those who led the liberalization in 1968) – the process of reversal of the Prague Spring has been termed "The Normalization" by Brezhnev and his comrades and those of us who are terrified by that process use the euphemism, too.



For some time, students kept on protesting but they figured out that no one dares to support them – no one apparently wants them to fight – which is why this student resistance faded away. There was one 20-year-old student of history and political economy, Jan Palach, who couldn't swallow the people's becoming spineless and passive in this way.

On Wednesday, it will have been 50 years from his January 16th self-immolation at the top of the Wenceslaus Square – not far from the St Wenceslaus statue and the National Museum (which is freshly renovated now).

Michael Atiyah: 1929-2019

Sadly, yesterday, just months after his lecture about his efforts to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, the Lebanese-British mathematician Michael Atiyah died at age of 89.7. See The Telegraph or some press in Bangladesh (that reprinted the New York Times).



He died 10 months after his wife (from 1955), Lily Brown, also a mathematician, who was 90.

Atiyah articles at TRF...

Quantum gravity from self-collisions of the configuration space

One of the seemingly quirky ideas that are waiting to revolutionize theoretical physics – at least your humble correspondent feels it should be the case – is the unified treatment of world sheets + world volumes + other auxiliary spaces, spacetimes, and configuration spaces. All these spaces may be used to encode the information about physical systems. All these spaces have some quantum gravity on them (I will discuss the last one). They are mapped to each other in various ways.

There isn't a self-evident metaphysical difference between them which is why I believe that the truly exact formulation of quantum gravity doesn't care whether you think that you live on the world sheets, in the spacetime, or on the configuration space. The laws of quantum gravity are certain consistency criteria that have to work on all the spaces above.

For more than 20 years, one of the reasons why I believed in the paradigm above were the Kutasov-Martinec (2,1) heterotic strings. When you combine the left-moving \(\NNN=2\) supersymmetric string theory with the normal 10-dimensional superstring, you apparently get a string theory whose target space dynamics looks like the world sheet dynamics of the superstring – or another world sheet. You may even recursively generate the (2,1) string in the target space of itself.

D.H. wants physicists not to be allowed to talk about me and this blog

The proposal would revive some great techniques of the Inquisition

A theoretical physicist who is known from TRF comment sections and who has published over 50 papers has directed my attention to a tirade by a young physicist D.H. written on his Facebook profile.

D.H. is also a good theoretical physicist who recently won a nice junior award – and his name and work appears in 15 previous TRF blog posts – although his background isn't solid enough for him to be considered a full-blown string theorist. Please keep his full name confidential – to protect his future – because what he has written is truly embarrassing. Quotes below will not be copied verbatim – my sentences will be almost exactly equivalent, however. The scrambling was done to make it harder for readers to search for the exact quotes and identify the author. Well, it's probably impossible to hide the name well – intelligent readers will probably realize that D.H. is so obsessed with the left-wing politics that he had to be a co-author of some nasty and personal Stalinist petitions we discussed in the recent months which makes it trivial to find his name.



Lots of articles on this blog discuss examples of left-wing activists who have spread over the Academia and made the life miserable for numerous "politically incorrect" colleagues. Some of those had to leave etc. But D.H. wants to bring these Stalinist practices to a new level. He wants the people who were generously allowed to stay to be prevented from respecting the people who are outside, like me, or discuss them or read their texts. Sending folks to the Gulag isn't enough for D.H.: people who remember those who left for the Gulag must be sent to the Gulag, too.

Is traditional masculinity pathological?

In Eliza Graves, a 2014 horror film, the patients have acquired the keys from a psychiatric asylum, performed a spherical inversion, and kept the physicians in the basement. It seems that a similar spherical inversion has taken place in the American Psychological Association (APA) that has been conquered by psychopaths.

In August 2018, they wrote their APA guidelines for the psychological practice with boys and men. The document was only released yesterday – see a press release – and it has shocked all the people whose brains haven't been completely devoured by the extreme left-wing ideology. See e.g. Christina Sommers at Tucker Carlson's show, Fox News, Breitbart, and lots of other conservative and Christian responses to the insanity.

Unix: 50 years

Willie Soon sent me a tweet by the Bell Labs:

Today, @InventorsHOF announced their 2019 inductees, including Dennis Ritchie & Ken Thompson for their invention of the #UNIX operating system while at Bell Labs. Today, 50 years later, UNIX systems continue to run machinery from computers to smartphones. https://t.co/sacBaD1Pzk pic.twitter.com/MeLzzc3Aa5

— Bell Labs (@BellLabs) January 9, 2019

Yes, as they discuss on the very informative Bell Labs web page, Unix was invented 50 years ago, in 1969. And because the Bell Labs were bought by Nokia – decades after the research center had earned six physics Nobel prizes and years after I wrote "Rip Bell Labs" – and I bought a couple of Nokia stocks a year ago (they are up 30%, which is rare), there's no reason not to overlook this history.

Recent papers: SFT, SUSY GUT, a new light gauge boson, \(p\)-adic string gravity, swampland

I plan to write a heuristic post about some exciting ideas of mine but let me dedicate a comment to recent papers on the arXiv. There were some rather interesting papers on that server yesterday and today.

Yesterday, Hiroyuki Hata (whom I know as a guy from the Kyoto group, a team behind the first string paper that I intensely studied 25 years ago) presented some analytic solutions for cubic string field theory that are supposed to describe an arbitrary integral number of spacetime-filling D25-branes. The work is meant to be a generalization of the \(KBc\) Prague work by Martin Schnabl (who is Czech) and Ted Erler (who is at most an honorary Czech).

The solution is of the form \(U Q_B U^{-1}\) where the product is a product of string fields and, believe it or not, one may write down string fields that behave as unitary matrices under the relevant product. So these folks conjugate the BRST operator by a unitary map and, depending on what the map exactly is, one gets unequivalent configurations that contain a different number of branes. I still haven't been given a good intuitive explanation why the mere unitary conjugation produces something else than an equivalent configuration. In non-commutative field theory, we were comparing kernels and images (the maps would be irreversible on one side) but I don't know what's the trick here.

Hata constructs the most general unitary string field \(U\) which depends on some function of two variables and perhaps some additional functions. It is not quite clear to me why this is the right amount of freedom to start with. He constructs the solution. Because one starts with heuristic solutions like that, one must pay some attention to the possibility to transform the formal solutions to something that makes sense, level-by-level, and that has a finite norm and energy density. He demands the correct tension and energy density and claims to have generalizations for any \(N\).

It's not quite clear whether he is sure that those are solutions and whether he has found all solutions of a certain class – his constraints may be too strong or too weak. Also, I find it surprising how irregularly the solutions behave as a function of \(N\). Something new happens for \(N=5\) and higher etc. (suddenly some \(\pi\) appears in the form of some required parameters) – it is just like explaining the grammar of Slavic numerals! ;-) You have "one/jedna minuta", "two-three-four/dvě-tři-čtyři minuty", and "five-or-more/pět-a-více minut". Only 2,3,4 are "truly plural" numerals and the numerals behave a bit like adjectives but 5,6,7... is too much, the individual minutes lose their separate existence, and all the numerals behave like nouns similar to "a dozen" in English! So it is a "dozen of something" – Slavic languages use an analogous construction for almost all numbers starting with five.

Grievance studies hoax author harassed by "disciplinary" action at his university

In October, we discussed a wonderful campaign – Alan Sokal on steroids. Three academics have succeeded in publishing numerous Sokal-like papers in pseudoscientific journals dealing with "grievance studies", as they creatively categorized them.



One of the three authors – and perhaps the main mastermind – was Peter Boghossian who is an assistant professor of philosophy at the Portland State University in Oregon. Well, to prove that the politically correct "scholars" are full of šit is probably politically incorrect by itself which is why some disciplinary action has been initiated against him.

See the College Fix and Google News for more reports. Thanks to Hallyu Website for informing me about the developments.

PLOS ONE: women are privileged across the West

You must have met one of these unhinged loons (sometimes calling themselves "feminists") who claim that women are being discriminated against.

Every sane person knows that in almost all the Western countries, it's the other way around. Authors from the Universities of Missouri and Essex, Stoet and Geary, have embraced this question as a serious one, performed a massive statistical analysis, and published the results:

Men face MORE discrimination than women according to new research (RT, pop summary)

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A simplified approach to measuring national gender inequality (PLOS ONE)
Basic Indicator of Gender Inequality, BIGI (detailed website of the authors)
Data (a list of countries)

Instead of "the Global Gender Gap Index" which is a crackpots' quantity that only allows the result "women are being discriminated against" and that treats the sexes asymmetrically from the beginning to the end, the authors have defined a simpler index BIGI (Basic Indicator of Gender Inequality).

Is Sheldon's and Amy's paper an extension of Polchinski's work?

TV viewers are watching the last, twelfth season of The Big Bang Theory on CBS. We saw the first episodes of TBBT and Young Sheldon (2nd season) after the Christmas break (the 11th episodes).

Young Sheldon has employed some Socratic and social scientific strategies to teach mathematics to his sister Missy. He had some successes but when he has used the punishment of Missy's doll as an incentive, it backfired and she slapped him in his face. The same thing happened to his older brother George who had a crush on a girl and pretended to be a Christian – this also reminds me of something LOL. She smashed him in his face after he kissed her in the church.