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.

Evolution, deterioration of the world's thinking about the deepest stringy ideas

A paper on Monday: The first paper was posted in the initial second of the day (showing their pride) by a Munich triplet. They develop a machine learning technique to guess correlations in the string landscape and look for viable vacua. With clever techniques, it could even be possible to find the right vacuum in a googol-like set. Anti-string simpletons don't get such things because their extremely modest brains can only understand brute force (which must be done by others because they don't possess it, either).

David B. specifically asked me to rewatch this video



especially the part between 20:45 and 48:35 (in the first 20 minutes, both Green and Schwarz mostly review their important work around the 1970s). It is a discussion of selected string theory big shots at the end of "String 2021" which formally took place in Sao Paolo but which followed the format of an "online conference" of the Coronazi era. I don't think that Jair Bolsonaro would agree with this kind of a "conference in Brazil". Participating in the discussion were Gentlemen such as Seiberg, Witten, Green, Schwarz, Strominger, Vafa, Yin, Harlow, Berkovits, Ooguri, and a few more.

Cyril and Methodius were at the birth of Slavic education

The brothers were exceptional personalities, they excelled in insight

Commentary by Tomáš Zdechovský, a member of the European Parliament, KDU-ČSL

The arrival of the saints, who were at the origin of Slavic education, has been celebrated on 5 July only since 1863, when a thousand years passed since their arrival in Great Moravia. This day was set by Pope Pius IX at the request of the then Archbishop of Olomouc, Bedřich of Fürstenberg. It was first used in Bohemia, Moravia, Croatia and Slovakia. Later, the feast was extended to the entire Roman Catholic Church. Until then, since the time of Charles IV, the arrival of Saints Cyril and Methodius was commemorated on 9 March. Only the year 863 is certain, when the two siblings were sent to Moravia by Emperor Michael III. Their arrival is recorded in the calendar as a public holiday - the Day of the Slavic Heroes Cyril and Methodius.



However, March was not a suitable time for the celebrations, as the date fell during the Lenten season. Among the reasons for the move, apart from the unsuitable time of year and liturgical time of the earlier date, was the growing importance of the feast of Jan Hus in the Czech Republic, which falls on 6 July. However, we do not know the exact date of the arrival of the Slavic saints. In fact, the date of July 5 has no direct connection with the life of Cyril and Methodius, and the Slavic Orthodox Churches have the day of Saints Cyril and Methodius on May 11 according to the Orthodox calendar (May 24 according to the Gregorian calendar), when Cyril and Methodius are traditionally supposed to have come to Great Moravia. As historian Jaroslav Šebek has already mentioned, it has never been established when the Great Moravian prince Rastislav actually summoned the two brothers from the Byzantine Empire to Great Moravia. Some claim that it should have happened in the spring, others, according to his words, lean towards the transition between summer and autumn.