Postulates of quantum mechanics almost directly follow from experiments

Most of the ordinary people who have tried to understand modern physics find the novel logical framework of quantum mechanics challenging. Some of them have become full-blown anti-quantum zealots which means that they scream "it cannot be true", "physics must ultimately be governed by the logic of classical physics" – well, they love to use different words but this is exactly what they mean.

Although many of these people may have achieved various things, I find it impossible to consider these people intelligent. I have explained the consistency of quantum mechanics (internal consistency and compatibility with observations) and the failure of any "realist" proposal to replace quantum mechanics from many perspectives.

Here, I want to argue that it's pretty much obvious that certain experimental facts just cannot possibly have a different explanation than the precise framework of quantum mechanics.

Out of Tesla's stock price, $300 is due to Musk's silly PC clichés & government's distortion of markets

I think that most people who seriously trade stocks (or invest into stocks) will agree that they are usually trying to estimate the fair or sustainable price of their stocks with the precision that is finer than 10%. Serious investors estimate the earnings with a similar accuracy and think hard whether P/E (the price-to-earning ratio) should be 10 or 20 and what could affect it. At the end, the stock price should be equal to the mean value of discounted life-long profits that the company will generate. So investing isn't quite a high-precision physical science but it is clearly about numbers that are supposed to reflect some underlying reality rather accurately.

Meanwhile, there are things one can buy where the precision isn't as good as 10%. In fact, the current price routinely differs from any fundamental value by orders of magnitude – sometimes infinitely many orders of magnitude (like in the case of the Bitcoin and other unbacked, worthless cryptocurrencies).

Tesla Motors stocks are somewhere in between regular stocks of car companies and the Bitcoin. In the sense of the linear scale, Tesla is almost certainly closer to the Bitcoin because most of its price has nothing to do with realistic expectations about the business. More than 50% of the stock price is unexplainable by the usual rational computations and estimates. Most of the price reflects a religion of a sort, an assumption that the logic and numbers will change dramatically in the future and in the new scheme of the world, Tesla (like the Bitcoin) will play a role similar to God.

The U.N. migration compact is toxic

A few days ago, the representatives of 190 U.N. member states agreed with the

GLOBAL COMPACT FOR SAFE, ORDERLY AND REGULAR MIGRATION

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(full PDF text of the draft; press release).

The document is intended to legitimize mass migration and encourage all countries of the world to adopt the same rules how to deal with the migrants and refugees. This document has been planned since September 2016 when Obama, in the final months of his tenure, made sure that the U.S. was a part of it.

At this moment, it's a draft and the final version of the rules is supposed to be codified in Morocco before the end of the year.

As the media report, the draft was adopted "by consensus". That probably means that a herd of brainless sheep, one sheep representing one nation, was pushed to some meadows near Manhattan.

New Czech government depends on the communist party

Among humans, the former communist secret agent and current Slovak-born billionaire Andrej Babiš is unquestionably the single greatest threat for the Czech democracy after 1989. He has a disproportionate influence on politics, economy, and the media (he owns two of the most widespread dailies and Czechia's #1 commercial radio station, among others).

He has no respect for the parliamentary procedures, power sharing, and his constant whining combined with oversimplified, emotional and irrational, nasty accusations against all of his political opponents constantly reminds us why he is exactly the kind of an assertive yet primitive loyal bumpkin that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia loved to hire up to 1989 and that were moved to labor camps in Germany of the 1930s.

But when he earned 30% votes in the October 2017 elections – which was enough to make the remaining 8 parties in the Parliament look like dwarfs – I wasn't hysterical. His coalition potential was very low, I expected him not to earn the confidence easily. I thought that the era of Babiš's first government without confidence would be rather nice politically – because a weak government is often a good government. I hope that you agree that this blog hasn't become a mirror image of Daily Kos with tons of anti-Babiš rants every day – which 98% of the current readers would be totally uninterested in, anyway.

And I think that I was right. It was nice when Babiš had to struggle for his own survival, when he had to šit into his pants every day and ask: Will I be arrested tonight or tomorrow? I am not an anarchist but when a modern government is limited by the fact that people may point out that it hasn't really earned a legitimate support from the Parliament, it's an advantage.

A quasi-smooth compact manifold may be hiding in monster group, pure gravity

The most extreme, simplest, consistent vacuum of quantum gravity could be Witten's monstrous \(AdS_3\)/CFT pair. The boundary CFT is a two-dimensional theory with the monster group symmetry which has been used to demystify the monstrous moonshine. The bulk seems to be just \(AdS_3\) with mo massless fields, just black hole microstates, which is related to the absence of the minimal nonzero-length roots in the (even self-dual 24-dimensional) Leech lattice.

By pointing out the absence of some twist fields using group theory arguments, Gaiotto has shown that counterparts of this theory don't exist for every \(N\) – a problem arises already at \(N=2\). But even if there only exists the \(N=1\) theory with the minimal \(AdS_3\) curvature radius, it's still interesting. Perhaps exceptionally interesting. It may be the most "negatively curved" \(AdS\) background in all of quantum gravity, among other things.

The holographic analyses often focus on the \(AdS_3\) part of the bulk geometry. So the assumption is that only the \(AdS_3\) geometry is "real" in the bulk. But I think that this is a superficial and uninspired treatment – and a similar oversimplification as if you said that the dual geometry to the \(\NNN=4\) gauge theory is the \(AdS_5\). Well, there's also the \(S^5\) in \(AdS_5\times S^5\). In fact, both factors have exactly the same curvature radius so if you don't neglect one, you shouldn't neglect the other, either.

Prosecuted prime minister appoints himself the minister of justice, too

Update: Thank God, due to the pressure, Babiš changed the plans and will nominate a different man, Mr Kněžínek, instead.

Suddenly, the EU doesn't care at all that the rule of law is collapsing in Czechia

For two weeks, Czechia has had an incredibly incompetent minister of justice. Mrs Taťána Malá was originally a substitute who could meet Mr Babiš in Lelekovice, a village of 1900 people.

But she managed to flatter Mr Babiš more than everyone else so she was invited to the Stork Nest, Babiš's luxurious farm co-funded by subsidies from his subsidy fraud, and she became a visible lawmaker for Babiš's party. Two weeks ago, he picked this average girl from a small village as the minister of justice. Meanwhile, it turned out that she has plagiarized both of her diploma theses.

Her yesterday's defense of the plagiariasm was truly painful, especially if you realize that the woman was supposed to enjoy the respect from Czechia's judges and other lawyers. We learned that things are OK because the whole pages aren't identical to the pages in the thesis she copied. Moreover, plagiarism was OK in 2005, we were told. (Obviously, the trend is going in the opposite direction. A similar kind of misconduct is being increasingly tolerated.) Also, the theory about rabbits is a bunch of facts so it's obvious that two women write identical 10-line paragraphs about this theory, we were told! Wow.

On top of that, her work was incredibly original, trumping Einstein's special theory of relativity. To get her degree, she measured the weight gain of male and female rabbits in winter – before they're fed and afterwards – and she decided that female rabbits don't gain much weight in winters. I have serious doubts about this "law" but even if it were right, I would probably disagree with the idea that college degrees should be given for weighing rabbits after the winter feeding season.

Spin correlations at ATLAS: tops deviate by 3.2 or 3.7 sigma

After some time, we saw an LHC preprint with an intriguing deviation from the Standard Model predictions. It appeared in the preprint

Measurements of top-quark pair spin correlations in the \(e\mu\) channel at \(\sqrt s = 13\TeV\) using \(pp\) collisions in the ATLAS detector

You should also see a 27-page-long presentation by Reinhild Peters.

Czech justice minister: plagiarism, sycophancy, lies, obstruction of justice

The story of Mrs Taťána Malá [the first name is popular in Russia, the surname means "Small"] is infuriating but what's "refreshing" is that this scandal has nothing to do with the PC globalists' war on the civilization.

Former Slovak communist agent and billionaire Andrej Babiš won 30% in the elections in October 2017. It turned out to be extremely hard for him to earn a majority in the Parliament and his government hasn't earned confidence yet – after almost 9 months. In the freshly announced second government, one with social democrats that should be silently "tolerated" by the communist party and depend on it (for the first time since 1989), the justice minister is supposed to be Mrs Taťána Malá, a 36-year-old blonde.

John Huss' monster trial resembled MeToo witch hunts

On July 4th, the Americans celebrated the Independence Day – although a powerful algorithm at Facebook has pointed out that the Declaration of Independence is hate speech.

That holiday is followed by two Czech holidays. On July 5th, but 1155 years ago, Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius brought writing (their artificial Glagolitic script) plus the Orthodox Christianity to Czechoslovakia (which was called Great Moravia).



The Czechoslovak and Czech presidential flag says "Truth Prevails" ("Veritas Vincit" in Latin, "Pravda vítězí" in Czech). The truth was favored by the first president Prof Thomas Garrigue Masaryk – but he probably celebrated the tradition of John Huss who is often associated with the struggle for the truth.

On July 6th, 1415, the Bohemian Church reformer and forefather of Protestantism Mr John Huss was burned at stake in Constance, as a heretic, during an intimidating council. Huss was (mostly) a fan of a critically thinking 14th century English scholastic theologian John Wycliffe (who wrote in Latin). This Czech Catholic priest gave lots of cool sermons, criticized [not yet carbon] indulgences and the corruption of the church officials, said that the church should be poor, all people should be equal in front of God regardless of their sex, nationality, wealth, they should look for the truth directly in the Bible and not ask priests, he always filled the Chapel of Bethlehem in Prague (by viewers including rabble, prostitutes, and Queen Sophia, among others), earned the hearts of most Czechs including the Czech aristocracy, and was inconvenient for the Catholic Church and the allied German political institutions – let us call them the CDU – which decided to murder him.

Huss was also the most likely originator of the Czech diacritical signs – the letters that we write as áéíóúůý žščřďťň these days (he started with dots above the letters, something that still exists in Polish).

Did 12 astronauts cause global warming by 2 °C on the Moon?

Or does an organized movement of brain-dead liars calling themselves "journalists" spread far-reaching cosmic superstitions about a mundane hot piece of dark surface under the sunlight?

How much a group of 12 men can change the world? Well, if they're apostles, they may have the last supper with Jesus Christ. They didn't have to pay a penny. Assuming that Jesus Christ was more than Warren Buffett, they saved over $39.6 million.



Incidentally, before He arrives again, they have accepted a temporary job. Every hour, they entertain tourists at the 600-year-old Prague Astronomical Clock (The Orloj). I've seen it many times but only now, I watched it carefully enough to notice that six of them only appear in the left window and six of them in the right window. In my life so far, I have never found it important enough to investigate this detail.

However, weeks ago, some media, e.g. How Stuff Works brought an eye-catching story. A group of 12 Unistatians – the astronauts – has caused the global warming... on the Moon! How did they do it?

Thank God, the European Parliament voted against the link tax etc. today

At the end of May, I wrote that the European Parliament was going to vote on banning the Internet.

Pretending that the policies were meant to defend the copyrights in a better way, the authors of the fascist proposal wanted to make it basically impossible for individuals to discuss the events in the world. If that proposal were passed, bloggers could be unable to quote sentences – and even link to the original source of the information – unless they paid a fee that only large corporations could afford.

The new rules were rather accurately described as a "link tax" and "upload filters". The consequences for the freedom of speech could have been existential.

Our Edwin Steiner is the current leader in the CERN-Kaggle TrackML challenge

Seven weeks ago, I invited the TRF readers to join the TrackML challenge organized by CERN and Kaggle.com. You are expected to write some code that tracks particles at the LHC. The reason why I invited the readers is that this category includes some smart folks – and I wanted to watch a familiar friendly name that quickly becomes the leader in a very big leaderboard.



Ladies and Gentlemen, the current leaderboard shows 490 participants or teams. And the top five of them are shown in the screenshot above (click the image to zoom in).

David Gross: make America great again

The first string theory's formula, the Veneziano amplitude, was introduced to physics in 1968, i.e. half a century ago.

In that year of 1968, Czechoslovakia tried its "socialism with a human face", and the experiment was terminated by the Warsaw Pact tanks in August (next month, we will "celebrate" that). Meanwhile, the youth in the West tried a seemingly similar revolution. Only in recent years, I was forced to realize that what started in the West was really going in the opposite direction than the 1968 Prague Spring.



At any rate, the annual conference, Strings 2018, didn't forget about the Veneziano far-reaching playing with the Euler Beta function. Veneziano was present. The 2-hour-long panel discussion at the end of the conference is arguably the most layman-friendly video produced by the conference. One frustrating fact is that the video only has 1500 views as of this moment. No journalists were interested in the conference.