CMS sees a hint of a 700 GeV hadrino

Or is it a shadron or NLSP?

Eva Halkiadakis of my graduate Alma Mater, Rutgers, has presented the newest results of the CMS searches for physics beyond the Standard Model:

Update on Searches for New Physics in CMS:
Seminar web page, poster, PDF, video

Yes, the number of female experimental particle physicists with ancestors from a particular country (she is otherwise American!) is proportional to the country's present public debt expressed in the U.S. dollars.

In the PDF file, you find new graphs – sometimes using as much as 5/fb of data – relevant for the availability of any monster you may think about, from leptoquarks to extra dimensions, black holes, and of course lots of supersymmetric particles, among tons of other stuff.



Shadron, a particle from the World of Warcraft

Phil Gibbs has checked all the graphs and saw almost nothing surprising, no hints of new physics. However, one graph seems to be a provoking exception.

Britain, Czechia resist euro cartel treaty

The eurozone has agreed to establish a fiscal union and all other EU countries except for Britain and Czechia have joined this ill-conceived plan. The countries essentially agreed to pay a fine, 0.1% of the GDP, if they fail to have an essentially balanced budget (less than 0.5% of GDP). The fine will be "enforced" by the European Court of Justice; I am not sure whether they have a sufficient number of cops and soldiers to guarantee such an "enforcement" because billions of dollars in fines are still lots of money.

An older draft also planned to force the countries with the debt-to-GDP ratio over 60% to reduce the excess above 60% at least by 1/5 every year, by running big surpluses, but this rule was removed for unspecified reasons in the final version. So countries with a negligible debt are now subjects to the same severe constraints as countries with a giant debt with is crazy and unfair by itself. It was one of the "essential points" whose deletion helped to decide that Czechia would stay away from the pact.

You know that I may in principle agree with the legally binding law requiring budgets to be balanced – although I am no "fanatical" supporter of this principle (the balance has to manifest itself in the long run but short-term balancing is an unnatural prohibition of some borrowing and lending: in particular, the one-year time scale is totally artificial and arguably too short). But I find the legislation they agreed upon scary and stupid, for many reasons.

Alarmists hysterically react to WSJ op-ed

After the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed signed by 16 prominent scientists that has urged the politicians and policymakers to stop panicking about "global warming" and start to review the money flows directed to climate change alarmism and that has warned about the striking similarity between climate disruption alarmism and Lysenkoism, several alarmist whackos have predictably gone ballistic. They know that the article was influential; the WSJ comment section under the op-ed attracted 2,300+ comments as of today.

If you want to be entertained by these loons who have entered an era in which the newspapers are no longer obliged to pay lip service to their pseudoscientific misconceptions, see e.g.

Peter Gleick (a Forbes blog)

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Joe Romm (Think Progress)

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Skeptical Science (Dana1981 via John Cook)

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Tree Hugger (Mat McDermott)

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Greg Laden ("Science" Blogs)

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Media Matters (Dentists Do Heart Surgery)

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Peter Frumhoff (Union of Concerning "Scientists")

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Dot Earth (Andrew Revkin and William Nordhaus)

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Brian Angliss (to Burt Rutan)

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Grant Tamino Foster (to Burt Rutan)

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Trevor Macomber I (II: Brutish Short)

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Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy)

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Chris Mooney (De Smog Blog)

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Jamie Vernon (on Mooney's Intersection)

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Jess Zimmerman (Grist)

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Get Energy Smart Now (Whacking 16 Moles)

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Michael Tobis (Planet 3 Beyond Sustainability)

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Ed Kilgore (Washington Monthly)
Martin Leggett (Earth Times)

Finally, see a less emotional but equally pretentious answer by Katharine Hayhoe, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and a few dozens of fellow alarmists published as a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal (TRF discussion).

It's good to see that after a couple of years in which insanity thrived in the absence of sufficiently powerful natural foes, the pages of influential dailies are suddenly dedicated to the conclusions of prominent scientists while unhinged conspiracy theorists and hardcore commies may use their reserved spots in irrelevant weblogs, before they will be given more permanent beds in the mental asylums.

HadCRUT3: 2011 was 12th warmest year

The dataset produced at the center of the Climategate scandals, HadCRUT3 (weather stations), differs from UAH AMSU (satellites), RSS AMSU (satellites), and GISS (weather stations).

If you click at the previous links, you will see that unusual coalitions have developed: both GISS (weather stations) and UAH AMSU (satellites) saw 2011 as the 9th warmest year while both HadCRUT3 (weather stations) and RSS AMSU (satellites) decided that the right climate ranking for the previous year was at the 12th spot.

Spain abolishes subsidies for new renewable energy sources

Benny Peiser has pointed out the following good news coming from Bloomberg:

Spain Suspends Subsidies for New Renewable Energy Power Plants

Spain is finally doing something about its fiscal sustainability. The state-backed borrowings that funded ludicrous (i.e. "renewable") sources of energy have reached €24 billion. That's something like 1/15 of the Greek public debt or, equivalently, 1/15 of an infinity. ;-)



This impressive Spanish solar power plant uses molten salt to store energy overnight.

Spain is currently controlled by the People's Party, a conservative party, and Mariano Rajoy Brey is the prime minister. Fortunately for Spain, the years of socialist comrade Mr José Luis Rodríguez Zaplaťpéro (whose last name translates as "Pay for the spring, pen, and pri*k" from Czech: you see that their government has paid for lots of useless things) are over.

ATLAS sees some multilepton excess, too

In recent months, many TRF articles were dedicated to the CMS' search for multilepton (and multijet) signatures of supersymmetry or similarly behaving new physics. Quite many of them reported some excesses.

See e.g.

TRF: CMS sees SUSY-like trilepton excesses

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TRF: Trijet and nonajet excesses

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TRF: Multileptons are only "mostly consistent" with SM (CMS)

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TRF: Searches for \(R\)-parity violating multileptons at CMS

Finally, five days ago, CMS' friends and foes at ATLAS published a preprint about the same question based on a reasonable amount of data, about 2.1/fb:

ATLAS: Search for Anomalous Production of Multilepton Events and \(R\)-Parity-Violating Supersymmetry in \(\sqrt{s}=7\,\,{\rm TeV}\) \(pp\) Collisions

What did they find?

Has science refuted materialism?

The Guardian, a top British left-wing daily, became an unlikely place that launched a war against materialism in science. In his article

It's time for science to move on from materialism,

Mark Vernon promotes a new book by Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion. In synergy with some quotes from this book, the Grauniad article argues that most contemporary scientists are confined in the 19th century materialist ideology when it comes to topics such as matter and soul.

Of course that most readers of the Guardian went instinctively ballistic (see the comment section) but we should ask: Are these comments true?

WSJ: 16 scientists urge a critical review of climate investments

Everyone is talking about this article in the Wall Street Journal:

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

The subtitle says that there's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy. Sixteen prominent authors who are close to the climate science present some details about the era of Lysenkoism. Ivar Giaever, who is not a co-author, is their top example of the opposition of contemporary scientists against the climate change ideology.

Al Gore expects to see thin ice in Antarctica

After the successful 24 hours of virtual reality – Al Gore's online project in Fall 2011 that was watched by dozens of people in the whole world, mostly by the readers of WUWT, the world's most followed climate website – Al Gore has prepared another fascinating event that deserves to be promoted.



He will take a couple of his employees – such as James Hansen and Kevin Trenberth but also a cleverly named minister of human settlements, Tokyo Sex Wale (it's surely a part of his job so he will plan a human settlement for some of the citizens of South Africa in Antarctica) and 112 other world's top warriors against global warming – and between January 29th and February 5th, they will make a trip to Antarctica with the pretty National Geographic Explorer above which replaced the MS Explorer. (Note that it was MS Lindblad Explorer, not MS Internet Explorer, so Al Gore didn't invent the previous cruise ship.)

MS Explorer (1969-2007) sank in November 2007 when it hit a few-inch-large object. National Geographic Explorer hasn't sunk yet so it is eagerly waiting to host Al Gore and his hired guns. Al Gore is already getting ready for the frying hot weather he will surely experience in as little as 3 days.

Mayan "end of the world": in 2116

But it gets repeated every 394.3 years

Czechia may be the most atheist nation in the world but be sure that it doesn't prevent the Czechs from believing any kind as well as all kinds of superstitious crap you may think of. In fact, it's plausible that the almost complete absence of Christianity or another rigid religion gives the people the freedom to believe any nonsense they hear or receive in the mailbox. Human stupidity knows no limits and atheism isn't a universal cure against it.

So some of the most well-known Czech scientists, especially astronomers, actually organized a couple of recent press conferences (plus interviews on TV) in which they tried to deny the widespread reports that the world will end on December 21st, 2012. ;-)

Some of the most courageous Czech musicians claimed that they are not afraid to get pregnant because they belong among the freaks who don't believe in the end of the world in 2012. Last night, Prima Cool – which otherwise broadcasts The Big Bang Theory, Top Gear, Futurama, Simpsons, and lots of other programs – also offered a visually striking "document" from the Discovery Channel, Apocalypse, that is embedded later in this blog entry.

Sustainable conference in Rio finds AGW panic unsustainable

Reuters: Environmentalists throwing global warming under the bus

Twenty years ago, Rio de Janeiro organized the Eco [June] 1992 Earth Summit which created the Convention on Biological Diversity and, more importantly, The Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The latter body was the first global political octopus that gradually led to the top-down, politically driven creation of a nasty tumor inside physical sciences, the climate alarmism "research".

However, you shouldn't forget that in 1992, the AGW propaganda was just one of several environmental topics – in Rio as well as in Al Gore's first bestseller, Earth in the Balance, published around the same time. The AGW ideology was just destined to experience much more striking a growth rate and overshadow all other topics and misconceptions that the environmentalists liked to talk about (a few of which were legitimate) within a decade or so.



Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Hundreds if not thousands of immoral corrupt pseudoscientists and ideologically fanatical loons were increasingly promoting indefensible statements about the climate on Earth and its evolution. The destruction of the capitalist industrial economy as we know it was their proposed "cure" and the organized clique of loons got remarkably close to realizing their goals. This scary social phenomenon peaked about 15 years after the Earth Summit.

All of us remember these recent events very well; in fact, even today, in 2012, some of the AGW climate alarmist zombies are still occasionally walking on the streets of our cities or they are trolling in the comment sections of our blogs.

Now, the Associated Press, Reuters, and others are informing us about a June 2012 conference that will take place exactly 20 years after the Earth Summit and will therefore be called "Rio plus 20":

UN conference returns to Rio with new emphasis (AP)

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U.N. sustainable development summit shifts from climate change (Reuters)

The conference is called

United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20 website)

The press agencies inform that the organizers have acknowledged that the climate hysteria is "too controversial" and "intractable". It is not sustainable so they have shifted to a topic that "everyone" must agree with, namely "sustainable development". The Center for American Progress, a communist tank in D.C., already labeled the Rio+20 conference as "a missed opportunity" because it seems unlikely to the comrades that it will manage to destroy capitalism (see the Reuters report above).

Some Boston Bruins meet Obama

I must admit that during the 6 years in Greater Boston, I have never attended an ice-hockey match. After all, my Boston patriotism was very limited. If New York Rangers (then) with Jaromír Jágr came to Boston, be sure that I would root for the victory of the guests.

Of course, an even more brutal description would apply to baseball which I am not quite getting. When the Red Sox won the 2004 Galactic Series (or whatever is the modest name of the competition) and breached 86 years of the curse (they also won in 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1918, 2007), I was mainly affected by the necessity to use the ear plugs from the airplane to be shielded from car horns during the following night. ;-)

Apologies to baseball enthusiasts. (Boston Celtics won the basketball championship in 2008 and New England Patriots won the football championship in 2004 and the conference in 2011. So Boston seems to be a dominating city of U.S. sports.)



At any rate, the Boston Bruins just won the Stanley Cup (that's an ice-hockey trophy) and some of the players visited Barack Obama in the White House.

Armenian genocide: Turkey doesn't belong to Europe

The French lawmakers passed a bill that makes it illegal to deny the Armenian Genocide. Nicolas Sarkozy's signature was considered to be a formality; a week ago, most French senators in a committee voted against the bill because it violates the freedom of speech. They were overruled on Monday. If the bill ever comes to force, genocide deniers may pay $60,000 or so and/or spend a year in jail.

Turkey is suspending most of its ties to France and threatening further "sanctions".

Why "semiclassical gravity" isn't self-consistent

Sabine Hossenfelder recently discussed various gedanken experiments showing that "semiclassical gravity" can't be a consistent description of Nature:

Backreaction on Eppley-Hannah's thought experiment

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Backreaction on this and Page-Geilker's thought experiment

While she admits that "semiclassical gravity" can't be right for various theoretical reasons, she still irrationally criticizes the two thought experiments above. In this inconsistent treatment of hers, she seems to misunderstand that the very purpose of gedanken experiments is to give us those "theoretical reasons" to know that Nature can't work in certain ways.

Now, I must tell you what we mean by "semiclassical gravity". Quite generally, the adjective "semiclassical" in physics means that certain parts of the physical system are being treated in the framework of quantum mechanics; others are treated using classical physics. If the two parts influence each other (in both directions), this is really an inconsistent approach, as I will discuss, and it doesn't make sense to develop the "semiclassical approach" too accurately.

In particular, the term "semiclassical approximation" is often applied to electrons in an external potential. The potential, e.g. the electrostatic potential induced by the atomic nuclei, is assumed to be a source of classical external forces. This is justifiable as an approximation because the nuclei are much heavier, and therefore "more classical", than the electrons and the same comment applies to the field they exert.

However, such a treatment automatically denies the existence of virtual photons etc. so it can't possibly be right at the quantum (loop) level. Only the leading quantum effects influencing the electron, those proportional to \(\hbar^1\), may be considered in this treatment. That's why the first quantum corrections to classical physics, e.g. one-loop diagrams in various quantum field theories, are often called "semiclassical" as well; some people view "semiclassical" and "one-loop" to be synonyms. The WKB approximation is a typical example of a semiclassical treatment in non-relativistic quantum mechanics.

In the context of gravity, people use the term "semiclassical gravity" either as a legitimate approximation that is aware of its limitations; it's the approximation that was used e.g. by Stephen Hawking to derive the thermal radiation emitted by black holes. Alternatively, some people use the term "semiclassical gravity" as a proposed "hybrid" quantum-classical picture of physics. Reasons why this idea is wrong will occupy the rest of this blog entry.

Leap seconds may be abolished in 2015

When the new year began, I was discussing the subtle issues of leap years and the methods to approximate the tropical year by a rational number.

The key number, 365.242189, was the ratio of the mean tropical year and the mean solar day. Note that both of these periods are defined astronomically.



Dial of the Prague Orloj which celebrated 600th birthday a year ago

However, there is one more number and one more "leap object", namely a leap second. It sometimes has to be inserted because the number of seconds per solar day is something like 86,400.002, also different from an integer. How is it possible?

Climbing inside a Fukushima reactor

Four days ago, a friend in Japan who is a good mountain-climber teamed up with 40 Japanese workers, drilled a hole into the reactor, took an Olympus-made endoscope, a few ropes, and shot this short and simple 1-minute movie from the 2nd reactor of Fukushima I.



The white mottles are gamma rays – which is just friendly light whose color is somewhat more violet than violet, if you haven't heard of gamma rays – while the white strings are water droplets.

Miller’s grizzled langur goes unextinct

The disappearance of species and biodiversity fears belong among the classic themes of the environmentalist movement – it has been talked about since the beginning and every new mutation of the environmentalist movement has recycled the concept in a new way. Global warming alarmism is no exception.



Washington Post and lots of other media run the story about Miller’s grizzled langur [P.h. canicrus], a large grey monkey. It was believed to be extinct for some time. In 2004, some people decided to look for it. They didn't find it so they did something they were eager to do: they declared the species extinct.

Cambridge, Mt Auburn cemetery

I wonder how many TRF readers recognize places in this video:



I just randomly posted an unedited people-free May 2006 11-minute video to YouTube. It didn't happen earlier because the YouTube limit was only raised from 10 minutes to 15 minutes some time ago.

Quantum field theory variants

Jimi asked: I am a math guy, so sorry for the naivety. When I peruse the wikipedia I see many "variants" of quantum field theory... conformal quantum field theory, topological quantum field theory, axiomatic/constructive quantum field theory, algebraic quantum field theory, etc. Whether or not these are actually variants of something is unclear to me. I don't really have a specific question, but I was wondering if you guys could help me understand what these different things are and/or point me to somewhere to get a clearer picture.

GISS: how to defend a 2.3 °C climate sensitivity

NASA's GISS has completed their 2011 global temperature dataset. According to GISS, 2011 was the 9th warmest year. The average warming trend in 1880-2011 was 0.60 °C per century; in the satellite era 1979-2011, it was 1.58 °C per century, not too much greater than those 0.14 °C per century according to the satellite teams.

Megaupload shut down: SOPA unnecessary

I am sure that most TRF readers have heard of MegaUpload.COM. It was one of the servers where some people uploaded the ClimateGate files, among other things that were vastly more important for the accounts of the people behind the server.



Megaupload.com was the 72nd most visited site on the Internet. It was headed by Kim Dotcom; at least that's how most people called Kim Schmitz (originally from Germany), probably because he resembles a dotcom bubble.

American authorities decided to arrest Mr Dotcom a few weeks ago and the dream came true in New Zealand today. I must proudly add that the most important collaborator of Mr Dotcom is Július "Juice" Benčko [Yoo-lee-yoos "Juice" Bench-kaw], a webdesigner born in [Czecho]Slovakia in 1977. This author of the Megaupload.com graphics issues managed to earn about $1 million in the last year. Not bad. More precisely, it is very bad.

Madrid IFT inaugural conference: slides & videos

Luis Ibáñez sent me links to an impressive high-energy physics conference that took place in Madrid's new theoretical physics building right before the Christmas:

IFT Inaugural Conference & Xmas Workshop (Madrid, December 13-16th, 2011, main web page)

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Transparencies and videos

Among others, you may find talks by D. Gross, T. Veltman, S. Glashow, A. De Roeck from CMS (with the first Higgs results 3 days after CERN anouncement!), N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dimopoulos, and others.



Veltman, Glashow, Gross in Madrid: how to hit three Nobel prize winners in one shot: click to zoom in. © El Pais

Three days earlier, they organized their Christmas workshop with many other prominent speakers (e.g. Dvali, Antoniadis, Lüst, Nilles, Rabinovici, Lipatov, Ross, Kallosh, and so on), see the web page.

Václav Klaus: notes from Saudi Arabia

Czech president Václav Klaus has wrapped up his visit of Saudi Arabia. TRF brings you his observations published at klaus.cz, as translated by your humble correspondent.



Click to zoom in.

Part I: January 17th

It's extraordinarily interesting to visit Saudi Arabia at the time when many Western European countries experience their frustration caused by the lost AAA rating. Even the European reactions were interesting: the Austrian prime minister (in synergy with the Austrian dailies) positively says: "We've got a homework to do"; the French prime minister, on the contrary, says: "A rating is just an opinion!". The German chancellor adds resolutely but unconvincingly: "We need the growth and innovations." I have to add that the communists have already relied upon innovations, too.

Obama will reject Keystone XL today

Today, Wikipedia, Anthony Watts' blog, and others are protesting against a planned legislation to fight online piracy. In principle, it is directed against servers such as thepiratebay which are not exactly something whose survival is a condition for my happy life.



However, I seem to agree that the bill, as formulated now, could be abused against pretty much any website on the Internet including the vital ones – such as Wikipedia, Google, or TRF – and that could introduce censorship and cripple the Internet to a comparable extent as the Great Firewall of China or the Iran IRNA Intranet.

At any rate, while such legislation could affect us over here, your humble correspondent is not a U.S. citizen so it doesn't seem to be my business to tell the U.S. lawmakers what to do. Moreover, I would bet that the bills will be defeated, anyway. ;-) However, the supporters of SOPA currently beat the opponents in the Congress, 80 to 31 (pretty much across parties).

CATO Institute is obviously against SOPA. They use a map to explain that Americans have the right to speak on a Czech board such as The Reference Frame. However, the dot seems to be in Eastern Moravia if not Slovakia or Poland. ;-)

Because you can't open WUWT, TRF may be the first place where you can learn about the breaking news: this afternoon, Barack Obama is expected to stun many people including myself and reject TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline: The Montreal Gazette, others. The Department of State should release the official report in hours.

DHCP and SENS service hang, timeout

Problem that has occurred to me, too

Your computer may get restarted once, after you wake it up from hibernation. At any rate, next time, once you choose your user name to log in, you are waiting for long minutes before you can see your desktop. You're told that some Windows services failed to start.

In the problems waiting to be reported, you find new messages on DHCP and SENS. DHCP is a system to start the Internet and assign IP addresses; SENS is "Systems Event Notification Service". At any rate, because DHCP failed to start (and in services.msc, it shows "starting" all the time), you figure out that this is the reason why the Internet isn't working for you.

All related services and programs that depend on the Internet fail, too. You are planning to reinstall your computer, throw it into trash bin, make a terrorist attack against the mall where you bought it, and declare a nuclear war to 27 countries that may have cooperated with the computer's producer or with Microsoft. But is it the simplest solution to the problem?

How bad science becomes common knowledge

Two case studies (solar and climate change)
by Eric Dennis

►► The author holds a PhD in physics from UC Santa Barbara and is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Industrial Progress. For related posts, see “Go Industrial, Not ‘Green’” by Alex Epstein (Parts 1 and 2). ◄◄

“When we hear of vast numbers of scientists endorsing Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph… What we don’t hear is that the vast, vast majority of them never sought access to the specific data and algorithms claimed to support it (much of which was actively withheld from the scientific community at large). They did not independently evaluate either Mann’s claims or the specific, technical objections raised against them by a few critics who were able to wrest those data and algorithms from Mann’s clenched fist over a period of years. Neither had the scientific media performed any independent, critical review when reporting on such issues for over a decade, most of them simply not being equipped to do so.”

To read the popular media’s account of climate science, it is a certainty that burning fossil fuels is causing an unprecedented and catastrophic warming of the planet. The volume of such claims is so vast that those skeptical of catastrophic warming are often viewed as conspiracy theorists, believing that scientists and the media have formed a secret cabal to foist falsehoods on the public.

U.S. classrooms beating unlimited alarmism

A few years ago, kids could only hear one thing about the climate at school: man-made climate change is making the apocalypse imminent, there is no God who could save us, and Al Gore is His prophet. ;-)



A typical lecture on climatology in the contemporary EU schools.

This description pretty much applies to much of Western Europe even today. However, it is thankfully no longer the case of the U.S.:

Climate change skepticism seeps into science classrooms (L.A. Times)

In the text above, an activist named Ms Neela Banerjee is crying that the "deniers" have succeeded in many states of the U.S. in their efforts to regulate the expansion of the global warming propaganda at schools. At some places, teachers are required to discuss the existence and/or arguments of climate skeptics.

At other places, any talk about a man-made climate catastrophe at schools was pretty much outlawed. At most places, teachers who dare to promote Al-Gore-like delusions about the climate and the mankind's role in it face opposition from the kids and their parents.

Could the Koide formula be real?

Warning: the following line contains spoilers
Nope.

That was the compactified version of the article. Below you may find the decompactified one.



The page containing this picture explains how to associate numbers 0-9 with planets and how to remember the author's telephone number. Also, it tells you that numerology is for the people who find astrology too scientific. ;-)

In 1981, a man named Yoshio Koide has made a bizarre observation known as the Koide formula. It has apparently been a source of life energy for more than 30 years for our friends such as Mitchell Porter, Carl Brannen, Alejandro Rivero, and maybe others.

What is it about?

NASA: Canada is focal point of climate change

Comments about frozen methane and doubled fossil fuel reserves added at the end

Canada became the first country that has withdrawn from the Kyoto protocol a month ago. NASA's experts similar to James Hansen and CapitalistImperialistPig have already incorporated this event into their models.



The result is described here:

NASA says Canada in 'hot spot' of ecological change (CBC)

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NASA predicts massive ecological change in Canada (Digital Journal)

We are being told that the Armageddon is going to begin in Canada – especially in Alberta (no kidding) and the vicinity of the oil companies' headquarters in particular – and all ecosystems are going to move northward by 2100. Canada is already so hot today that another degree of warming would almost certainly exterminate everything that is alive, NASA implicitly argues.

Another source describes the paper as follows:

NASA Blames Canada for Global Warming (Dallas blog)

How did the NASA "experts" determine that Canada, and not the U.S., is currently the primary villain causing global warming? It's simple. The reason is that Canada has a more conservative government than the U.S. these days, something that is sort of unprecedented in the historical context.

Friendship: dog and dolphin

An emotional video for Monday.

Getting ready for 1100 °C greenhouse runaway Earth

The current global average mean temperature is about 15 °C. However, Colin Goldblatt and Andrew J. Watson have submitted a preprint called

The Runaway Greenhouse: implications for future climate change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres

to the Royal Society which discusses a balmier temperature that we may expect soon: 1,100 °C. In such a temperature, you won't need a sweater.



Of course, the process by which this outcome will be achieved is the "runaway greenhouse effect". It gets warmer, so some oceans will evaporate and water vapor will get more abundant in the atmosphere. This water vapor will induce extra warming, and so forth. The equilibrium temperature may only be reached near 1400 K because that's where the water vapor no longer absorbs a sufficient portion of the thermal radiation.

The authors expect this great outcome to be reached in 2 billion years because the solar output will increase by a sufficient amount, as the Sun is getting closer to its red giant phase in about 7 billion years. However, may it happen that we will actually switch to the 1100 °C Earth earlier?

James Annan lost his bet against a skeptic

Reason Magazine, Benny Peiser, James Delingpole, and WUWT mention an amusing story.

In April 2008, climate skeptic and astrophysicist David Whitehouse – who is currently an adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation – stated that the 1998 record warm year according to HadCRUT3 wouldn't be surpassed in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. He was willing to bet £100. It's not much money but it's still fun.

A somewhat moderate alarmist who was very close to Wikipedia's A.G.W. Goebbels, The U.K. Green Party's William Connolley, whom many of you know, James Annan (now in Japan), thought that it was a great deal. See his April 2008 blog:

More on the 4-year bet

As you might have predicted, the alarmist was going to lose the bet while the skeptic would be going to win; the year 2011 is over and we are very sure that David Whitehouse was right and there would be no warm record set between 2008 and 2011. But it's fun to look at some of the detailed reasoning by James Annan in 2008.

Nima Arkani-Hamed on the meaning of the 125 GeV Higgs

I've seen parts of some talks at a recent Jerusalem winter school in theoretical physics. For example, the physicist from the title has updated our knowledge about the twistor'n'grassmannian minirevolution. It was interesting to hear that the Yangian is composed of diffeomorphisms.



It's still not clear to me whether I have absorbed the novelties and distinguished the insights that are new for me from those that are actually new for the scientific community.

Warm winter 1911-1912

Time for another climate edition of the Centennial Courier by Mr Ivan Motýl [Mr Ivan Butterfly]. Let's look at the beginning of the year 1912 from the perspective of Prague.

Butterflies took off, ice-hockey is suffering and the beer is warm – or: a strange winter



Czech ice-hockey was significantly suffering in January 1912. People were vainly waiting for ice to cover rivers and ice rinks, something they were used to from other years.

January 8th, 1912: Do you think that this winter is a strange one? One hundred years ago, the situation was similar. The owners of ice rinks were whining about the lost profits and pastures turned green.

"A genuine winter weather has been a dream for quite some time, a weather that would bring us a bit of winter scenery, one that would donate ice to the innkeepers as well as the joy of winter amusement to the youth," the publicist of National Politics complained on Monday, January 8th, 1912.

Thames & Kosmos: Global Warming

A wonderful gift I received from a famous Ivy League professor teaches the most curious kids and deniers about global warming.



So I have constructed my own Earth with the continents etc. and just like the real one, it can be embedded into a transparent greenhouse ball.

Al Gore: realitree, reality drops, climate reality patrol

"Gaming for good"

Al Gore may have become irrelevant but he hasn't officially surrendered in his holy war against the fossil fuels and he still has lots and lots of money.


Gaming For Good from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

If you can't play the video above, click at the link under "Gaming For Good".

In the rant above, he repeated some of the usual talking points about the ManBearPig that you have heard 500 times even if you tried to do your best to avoid them. However, there are also some new concepts that Al Gore and the people who pay him will waste their (taxpayers') money for, after their failed 24 hours of virtual climate reality.

Goodbye, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan

Four casualties of a certain type in five years isn't exactly an entry for the Guinness book of records. However, the precision and focus of these operations are symptoms of intelligent design behind them.



Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was a 32-year-old professor (with expertise in chemistry and nuclear physics) in Tehran and the boss of the commerce department at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility. Oops. You shouldn't work on similar tasks! The procedure to remove him from the Earth was apparently simple and followed a repeatable pattern. A magnetic bomb was attached to his car by two motorbikers. He was instantly dead; his driver died later.

Michael Mann: Standard Model is a climate model

Freeman Dyson shouldn't be allowed to use cars, airplanes

A superstitious tabloid ironically calling itself Scientific American has asked one of the most notorious fraudulent crooks on this planet, Michael Mann, to defend the climate models.

If you need to increase your blood pressure just like I did 10 minutes ago, click at the link above and listen to the 5-minute interview with Michael Mann (or read the transcript).

Canada, Greece, Iran, Germany

Various things are happening in the world.



Canada declares war on James Hansen and other green radicals

Reuters writes about the Canadian government's decision to blast insane critics of the Alberta tar sands pipeline. The Natural Resource minister accused the local green lunatics of links with convicted foreign criminals such as James Hansen who are richly funded by the organized crime groups. They oppose the Canadian economic interests, the increased independence of North America on the Middle East, and the efficiency with which the new oil will be transferred.

The activists have claimed that they don't try to attack Canada: they just try to uproot oil companies and their consumers, also known as the human beings.

Virgo favors 20-60 GeV SUSY dark matter particle

This blog has repeatedly updated the story about the ongoing war between Dark Matter Witnesses and Dark Matter Deniers. Some experiments claim that they have seen hints of a dark matter particle in direct searches; others claim that there's nothing there and that the first group has to be deluded. The Dark Matter Witnesses got a bit stronger recently. They usually favor a new particle of mass 10 GeV or so, something like a bino.

A new paper from 2012 tells us what the famous places in the Universe that have previously strengthened our belief that dark matter exists have to say about these matters (if observed by Fermi-LAT for 3 years): I am talking about the Virgo, Fornax, and Coma clusters:

Evidence for extended gamma-ray emission from galaxy clusters

What do they say?

Will CO2 save us from next ice age?

In 2010, I wrote about a groundbreaking article,

In defense of Milankovitch by Gerard Roe

This paper by a former student of Richard Lindzen finally managed to fix Milutin Milankovič's theory which hadn't worked and the outcome was a theory that does work. The graph below contains both theoretical predictions as well as the observed data about the Northern Hemisphere temperature and you may see that the match is beautiful:



As the TRF article mentioned above shows, previous attempts to make the theory work displayed the right frequencies but the graphs never really agreed. The probability that the agreement above is coincidental is pretty much zero. Lots of high-frequency wiggles agree. In the future, one may optimize the Milankovič theory but these will be incremental improvements; the qualitative fact that the astronomical cycles dictate "most" of the dynamics in the glaciation cycles has been established by the graphs above.

The key correction that Roe had to add was a "derivative" that was previously neglected. So the two quantities that he may successfully compare are:

• the time derivative of the observed ice volume in the last 750,000 years or so (white)
• the calculated Arctic Circle insolation in June (cyan)

The time derivative used to be neglected in the past; people tried to link the insolation directly to the amount of ice. But what the Sun near the Arctic circle is doing is not to determine the volume of ice from scratch; instead; the amount of solar radiation decides about the melting or growth of the ice, i.e. about its derivative.

In the following year, I contacted Gerard Roe and he sent me the detailed data that were used to draw all his graphs etc.: a perfectly transparent scientific approach. However, it was still largely useless for my goal – to calculate the future ice ages – because much of the data was taken from tables published in other papers. They only published the insolation in the past; they didn't provide us with the algorithms to calculate the cycles (such as the precession etc.) which means that I couldn't calculate the future evolution, either.

Compositeness and SUSY at LHC

Attempts to import Seiberg duality from string-friendly research to routine model building

The first hep-ph paper on the arXiv today is called

Light Stops from Seiberg Duality.

Csaba Csáki (Cornell), Lisa Randall (Harvard), and John Terning (UC Davis) propose a novel framework that could address the hierarchy of Yukawa couplings (why some fermions are much lighter than others), the little hierarchy problem (a small relic of the hierarchy problem that seems to survive even with SUSY or other solutions to the normal, "big" hierarchy problem), and the hierarchy in the squark masses that is apparently needed to solve both the hierarchy problem as well as to agree with the observed absence of supersymmetry signals at the LHC so far.

The new twist in their story is compositeness, the idea that elementary particles of the Standard Model aren't quite elementary, and Seiberg duality, a seemingly abstract but in this context phenomenologically viable symmetry originally found in 1994 exchanging electric and magnetic fields and changing the gauge group of \({\mathcal N}=1\) gauge theories along the way.

The composite particles transform as bifundamental representations which you may visualize as open strings stretching between two stacks of 6 D-branes.

A sensible quantum reaction to Pusey et al.

On November 18th, 2011, I wrote about the invalid paper by Pusey et al.

Nature hypes anti-QM paper by Pusey et al.

It was a pleasure today to learn about one of the first replies to this paper published in the middle of December 2011,

The quantum state should be interpreted statistically

by Holger Hofmann in Japan – and not only because the author says the same things as your humble correspondent.

Can the maths in physics be simpler than it is?

Nope.

That was the short version of this blog entry addressed to the impatient readers. But the more patient readers may continue. ;-)

Motto: A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. – A former South German colleague of mine

In a comment, James G. summarized the ultimate driving force that makes so many people reject string theory, quantum field theory, quantum mechanics, or modern physics in general:

I undestand your defence of the depths of the mathematical techniques required for full assimilation of the modern theoretical physics papers – but I for one believe it is not really required i.e. Nature is not so [copulating] difficult.

Yes, the ultimate driver is math phobia. But as a wise web page explains, math doesn't suck: you do.

Allowing maths to play a role

The people who don't understand that the world is fundamentally controlled by maths are a mystery for me, in the same sense as women are mystery for Stephen Hawking. After all, this is not just an analogy, it could be a nearly equivalent statement because most people who deny that maths fundamentally governs the reality are women.

(Hawking has reiterated that the humans have to colonize Mars and outer space to escape from the looming nuclear Armageddon: yes, he echoed Fidel Castro. Because Hawking's IQ tops that of the climate alarmists by 40 points or so, BBC published a criticism of Hawking's summary for policymakers.)

I have taken the key role of maths in the world for granted from the first moment I began to think – which is really why the math deniers look like a different biological species to me. When I was 3 and learned how to write and read, finding the right theory matching the perceptions became a priority. The first framework I had when I was 4 or so was based on matter filling a three-dimensional Euclidean space. Using a modern terminology, it was a classical theory whose configuration space was made out of the maps
\[ f:\RR^3 \to \{0,1\} \] In other words, at each point of the world, there either "is" something, or there is nothing. I bet that for many of you, this was the template of the first theory you believed to match the natural phenomena around you. I was convinced that it had to be true, that properties of the materials are encoded in some microscopic patterns and shapes of the regions where the map is equal to one (regions with boundaries that I implicitly assumed to be infinitely smooth), and the only remaining task was to find out how the map \(f\) evolves in time.

Sudoku: uniqueness requires 17 or more hints

Sudoku has appeared on this blog in March 2007 when a student at Harvard – where I was working – won the Sudoku world title in Prague and was congratulated by Czech president Klaus who is a passionate Sudoku solver himself. (Interestingly, I met President Klaus in Washington D.C. during the same month.) In this entry, we will be more technical. We will talk about a preprint

There is no 16-Clue Sudoku: Solving the Sudoku Minimum Number of Clues Problem

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Physics arXiv blog (review of the preprint)

Using brute computer force, Gary McGuire et al. (Dublin) showed that all Sudoku problems with at most 16 hints have at least two (or zero) solutions. First, let me explain what is Sudoku.

What's up with that fine-tuning?

When I opened Anthony Watts' blog minutes ago, Watts Up With That.COM, I got the following.



Click to zoom in.

The counter on the right side shows 99,999,962. That's a pity because the person who manages to obtain a screenshot with the number 100,000,000 gets a $100 million coffee mug. That's a lot of money. As far as I remember, I didn't hold $100 million in my hands for years if not decades. It's even hard to imagine how the mug may be this expensive.

It's not just the money. The British aristocracy promised to celebrate the 100,000,000th visitor to Watts' blog in the British Commonwealth during the January 7th Watts Up Day. So one had a chance to obtain a giant platinum coffee cup and share the niceties with the British royal family. At any rate, a fast shift-reload didn't give me any better number (it was the same: the next one I got a long time later was 100,004,397) and someone else was lucky.

Is a "Republican" a good word for Kerry Emanuel?

And what about a guy with a clash of financial interests and the spouse of a radical Marxist wife?

Climate activist blog Mother Jones has posted this interesting video that complains about the conservative attitudes of the Republican Party (and the G.O.P. presidential candidates) to the issue of climate change:



The video was created ahead of the New Hampshire primaries.

If you listen to 4:00-5:00, you will hear a lot from MIT climate alarmist Kerry Emanuel. He describes himself as one of the few Republican scientists in the U.S. His impressive punch line is that he is ashamed to be an American because the Republican party that he votes for (much like Obama whom he chose in 2008) isn't alarmist enough.

Instead, Kerry tells us, the Republican party is all about responsibility. And the main responsibility of the conservative people is to act collectively, share the wealth with the whole world, introduce and increase taxes, kindly ask the anointed people in the government to take care of everything, and to adopt the opinions about the climate that were held by Osama bin Laden, Al Gore, and (today) Fidel Castro.

Well, I thought that one of the defining features of the Republican Party is that it usually does not share these opinions, and even if it believed that there is a problem related to the climate (which it shouldn't because there's none), it should adopt totally different solutions than those that are proposed by the most radical left-wing forces in the world. In other words, if many of the candidates for the Republican Party were paying lip service to the climate jihad and propaganda, it wouldn't really be a conservative party.

Fine. These things are probably obvious to most readers. But Kerry Emanuel paints himself as a heroic climate alarmist inside a party that rejects the climate hysteria. Is he really brave? Is his formal political affiliation the most important fact he has to consider when he decides what opinions he should promote?

Chinese airlines refuse to pay EU climate change levy

Before the Christmas, I discussed the EU plan to introduce a climate protection racket on all airlines whose flights end on the EU territory. (You may decide whether the three-word term is derived from "climate protection" or from "protection racket".) The companies should pay money for every pound of CO2, including the CO2 emitted away from the European airspace.



We knew that it should have come into force since the beginning of 2012. The civilized world, the third world, as well as China and India protested against the EU intents as examples of organized crime that contradicts the international law.

Now it's 2012. What happened with this explosive global warming proposal?

Smolin, Woit throwing Lisi under the bus

On November 7th, 2007, Garrett Lisi celebrated the 90th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution (yes, he is a commie!) by posting his notorious "theory of everything" to the arxiv.org website.

This blog has explained why the paper was invalid – and why the author was ignorant about very basic facts in particle physics – long before the media storm about the "new Einstein" began. The paper claimed to have a grand unified theory based on the \(E_8\) exceptional Lie group; however, there can't be a GUT theory based on an \(E_8\) because this group only has real representations and therefore doesn't admit chiral (left-right-asymmetric) fermions which are known to exist in Nature, especially when the weak nuclear interactions are looked at.

The paper has claimed to unify bosons and fermions; but it didn't have any fermionic symmetry (such as supersymmetry), which is a necessary condition for linking bosons to fermions.

Lisi has been ignorant about some basic properties of the \(E_8\) group, including its \(SU(5)\times SU(5)\) subgroup, many of which have been known since the 19th century. Moreover, Lisi was confused by the difference between the local Lorentz symmetry and the diffeomorphism symmetry when he thought that he could also "add" gravity to the grand unified force (one could perhaps add the former, not the latter, but the latter is needed for gravity); he is not the only person in the world who is confused in the same way. Gravity can't be added to Yang-Mills forces just because \(SO(3,1)\) looks "similar" to \(SU(5)\) etc. All the papers talking about graviweak unification are as wrong as Lisi's paper.

Nevertheless, the media storm about the "new Einstein" who is a "surfer dude" knew no limits.

RSS AMSU: 2011 was 12th warmest year out of 33

Lamentations and panic overtook Al Gore's terrorist training camp as the most recent year dropped out of top ten

The final RSS AMSU satellite rankings for the year 2011 are exactly as I predicted them a month ago but let me repeat the figures nevertheless.

The RSS AMSU satellite temperatures have been updated repeatedly. Let me just add the new data and refresh the rankings.

Why some people demonize Ron Paul

The 2012 U.S. presidential primaries have begun. Barack Obama is nearly guaranteed to get the Democratic ticket. The G.O.P. race started with the Iowa caucus. Just to be sure, a caucus is a gathering of the party members who discuss the most appropriate candidates and at least in the case of Iowa, the electors are being picked at a proportional basis.



Recall that at various points, Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty, and Michelle Bachmann (today) dropped from the race. Rick Perry may join Michelle Bachmann soon.

Gibbons-Hawking and Euclidean path integrals

The Euclidean version of a black hole solution naturally encapsulates a lot of black hole wisdom

The Euclidean spacetime with signature \(({+}{+}{+}{+})\) is a natural arena for Feynman's path integrals in which many mathematical objects become more well-behaved than they are in the Minkowski spacetime. See Wick rotation.

In the Euclidean spacetime, you don't need to worry about signs of \(i\epsilon\). Moreover, Feynman's path integral may actually be rigorously defined in the Euclidean setup while the Lebesgue-like functional measure may be "rigorously" shown not to exist in the physical, Minkowski signature.

Also, spheres are more compact (and lead to more convergent momentum integrals) than hyperboloids, their Minkowskian counterparts.

In string theory, Riemann surfaces with the Euclidean signature are more easily parameterized and described as genus \(h\) surfaces with \(h\) handles, \(b\) boundaries, and \(c\) crosscaps: discussing and computing with Minkowski-signature world sheets would be a mess.

Physical effects are linked to some properties of the objects in the Euclidean spacetime. We may view the Euclidean spacetime as the "intrinsically primary one" while the Minkowski-signature spacetime is a mere physical reflection of the "truly fundamental spirits".

I am sure Stephen Hawking would agree about this point.

That's one of the reasons why, in 1977, Stephen Hawking teamed up with Gary Gibbons (see the picture above that I took in what used to be my office, as demonstrated by my blue jacket as well haha), extended a paper by Perry and Gibbons (sorry, this more important paper for this blog entry won't be discussed in detail because they don't celebrate 70th birthday!), and studied the Hawking radiation of the black holes in the Euclideanized setup:

Cosmological event horizons, thermodynamics, and particle creation (PRD 1977)

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Google books version of the article (via Laurent)

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Russian pirate text version (full text), Wikipedia

This Euclidean way of looking at black holes – and de Sitter space-like cosmologies – brings us a new perspective that has arguably not been fully exploited when it comes to our understanding of the information preservation and other things.

UAH AMSU: 2011 was 4th coldest in this century

2011 occupies the 9th warmest rank since 1979

Despite the similarities, one may find differences between the two satellite temperature datasets. While RSS AMSU will almost certainly declare 2011 to be the second coldest year of the 21st century so far, after 2008, the year that just ended looks relatively warmer according to our fellow skeptics at UAH AMSU.

It's the 4th coldest year since 2001 after 2008, 2004, and 2001.



Roy Spencer informed us about the UAH AMSU December 2011 global temperature anomaly: +0.13 °C (almost no month-on-month change). That's enough for us to list the averages for the years 1979-2011 (ignoring the bonus month, December 1978):

Stephen Hawking: 70th birthday

Congratulations!

On January 8th, 2012, the most famous living scientist Stephen Hawking celebrates his 70th birthday. That's despite the fact that various doctors were predicting his imminent demise as early as 35 years ago.

I love Hawking's ability to show that the doomsayers' predictions may be ludicrous even in such situations and that life has many more ways to thrive than what various doctors may imagine in their narrow-minded skulls. I am sure that Hawking has the same sentiments. ;-)

Your humble correspondent has never co-authored a paper with Stephen Hawking but our collaboration distance is 2 because we share a co-author, Andy Strominger.

I have only met Stephen Hawking (I mean encounters when the distance is below 2 meters) in Santa Barbara 10 years ago – he gave a talk instructing the audience to get friendly with the ghosts (in quantum gravity) – but I didn't know how to talk to him.

Ice: TV series (2011)

TV Nova, the largest Czech commercial TV, just aired the first of the two episodes of Ice, a 2011 U.K.-Kiwi TV series. After some time, I watched a hardcore climate alarmist movie (in the Czech dubbing).

Let me admit that when a movie is done convincingly enough, even when it's relatively cheap and superficial such as this one, your humble correspondent passionately supports the alarmist heroes and roots for the end of the villains. ;-)

How do you respond to the heroes and villains in alarmist movies where everything is upside down, my fellow deniers? :-)



Spoilers are found below

It's the year 2020 and Southern Europe has been crippled by a huge wave of global warming for several years. Everyone uses video calls on their mobile phones. Northern Europe including England has established tough anti-immigration laws to fight against the annoying people from the South. Meanwhile, people also live in an energy crisis. A company named Halo is going to save the mankind: they drill oil in the Greenland.

Satyendra Bose: 118th birthday

Because of modest festivities, I didn't have enough time and energy to celebrate the anniversary of Satyendra Bose, an eminent theoretical physicist who was a kind of Indian counterpart of Albert Einstein – because of the Bose-Einstein statistics he is famous for. He also played esraj, the Indian counterpart of violin, the instrument that Einstein played. ;-)

Satyendra Nath Bose was born on January 1st, 1894. Yes, physicists may be born on January 1st, too. (I find it painful to celebrate the January 1st anniversary of the Velvet Divorce of Czechoslovakia. Do you celebrate the anniversary of your divorce with your spouse? Or the January 1st anniversary of the tax hikes in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000?) This piece of data tells you a lot about the personality of his Bengali mother. She may have been an audacious woman who patiently kept her reproductive muscles in check (is that possible?) to avoid a birth in 1893 because she wanted to appear on local TV and in the local newspapers, under the headlines:

The first kid of 1894 is born in Calcutta, British India. Satyendra Nath Bose will become a peer of Albert Einstein.

Unfortunately, his mother forgot that there was no TV in India yet. Moreover, no one knew Albert Einstein who was a less than 15-year-old South German teenager. The young physicist was virtually unknown at that time even though he had already found a big part of relativity by that time. ;-)

Despite her imperfect planning, she didn't give up and she brought Satyendra 6 more younger siblings later. Together, the family could have starred as the Bollywood version of "Snow White And Seven Dwarfs".

Of course, that would be the case assuming that we subtract Satyendra's father who was an engineer in the East Indian Railway Company, later known as the IPCC.

Happy New Leap Year 2012

The most urgent challenge facing mankind is that every 3,200 years, we move Spring by one day :-)

Happy New Year! The United Nations declared 2012 to be the International Year of Cooperatives (a communist-style collective ownership format) and the International Year of Sustainable Energy For All (a contradiction with the energy conservation law) which are so stupid labels that I won't bother to discuss them.



After four years, we are entering a leap year. Just to be sure, why do we have leap years?

Gell-Mann on evolutionary linguistics

Murray Gell-Mann gave a very interesting one-hour talk at CERN:



The topic is a favorite one for Murray Gell-Mann as well as for Tom Vonk and perhaps other TRF readers. In Santa Fe, Gell-Mann's favorite (mostly Russian) scholars have been working hard to reconstruct the tree of languages spoken on Earth.