Geomagnetic 44-month cycle seen in the climate data

Roy W. Spencer, John R. Christy, and William D. Braswell – the team of pioneers of the satellite temperature measurements – have released

Version 6.0 [beta] of the UAH [AMSU] Temperature Dataset Released: New LT Trend = +0.11 C/decade [raw data]

which is more compatible with the RSS AMSU dataset. In fact, UAH now shows a smaller (by 1/4 or so) warming trend than RSS. The trend has been exactly zero in the last 18 years. In the past, I tended to slightly prefer RSS AMSU – partly because I wanted to avoid suggestions that Spencer et al. aren't impartial just because they're skeptics (I surely do think that they are impartial). I also preferred a more silent method with which RSS was fixing their small bugs.



But this new release convinced me to play with the datasets again – do all kinds of Fourier analysis, Fourier filters, predictions, and so on. And I just found something that I want to share with you because it seems pretty exciting.

An NMSSM explanation of the ATLAS Z-peaked excess

In March, ATLAS has moderately excited us with a 3-sigma SUSY-like excess in final states with a lepton pair, jets, and MET. At the end of another blog post, I mentioned a paper explaining it in terms of a light sbottom.

There's a different explanation on the arXiv now, extending the proposal by Ullwanger 3 weeks ago. It's been a lot of time after the Big Bang so Shang, Yang, Yang Zhang, and Cao (no kidding) have hung a new

Explanation of the ATLAS Z-peaked excess in the NMSSM

Fortunately, the author names haven't been sung which could make your face blank and unless you're a monk, you would stink link a skunk.

As I mentioned in the context of the sub-10-GeV, (after LUX) no longer convincing dark matter particle, the NMSSM is the "second simplest" realistic supersymmetric quantum field theory.

Dijkgraaf on quantum physics' gifts to mathematics

LHC: Collisions will begin mid June, despite the ULO in the tube (Unidentified Lying Object). The speed is disappointing to me.

One year ago, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton Robbert Dijkgraaf gave a public lecture at the Perimeter Institute.



The 1-hour video was posted one month ago so it's about time for the TRF readers to have the opportunity to watch it. The words written below are meant to be moderately disorganized notes – which will not be proofread – rather than a full-fledged TRF blog post nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Heisenberg's Nobel lecture

Two weeks ago, I discussed Max Born's 1954 Nobel lecture about the statistical meaning of the wave function – and the history of quantum mechanics. Many other fathers of quantum mechanics have received their Nobel prizes.



To avoid repeating Heisenberg's photographs, let's include a different hay fever sufferer. ;-)

When it comes to the basic character of quantum mechanics, the most relevant other Nobel prize went to Werner Heisenberg in 1932. Well, he only picked the prize in December 1933 – he was chosen as a winner retroactively because no candidate compatible with Nobel's will was proposed in 1932. OK, let us already look at the lecture

The development of quantum mechanics (PDF, 12 pages)

because I find it much wiser than what almost all people in the "foundations of quantum mechanics" are saying today, 82 years later.

Journalist Peroutka did, top intellectuals often do fail in crises

For three months, Czech newspapers have been regularly writing texts about a not too important detail while the deeper "story" underlying the detail has been almost entirely ignored.

In late January, president Zeman gave a speech (CZ) commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.



Ferdinand Peroutka

He said that people may agree that the Holocaust was terrible but most of the people love to oversimplify and flatten the actual reasons that have led to the Holocaust (and similar bad things). Zeman mentioned three respected people as his examples.

People's evolving opinions about quantum gravity

About nine years ago, a movement trying to (largely or entirely) "replace" string theory research with would-be "competitors" culminated. Unproductive critics and third-class researchers disconnected from the last 30 years in physics were often marketed as peer of top string theorists – and sometimes as something better.

However, aside from the cheap anti-science populism, there has never been any substance in their claims, and one can't really run on "promises" indefinitely. For a while, the theory group at the Perimeter Institute operated as a fan club of Lee Smolin's of a sort – a warrior in the "string wars". Thankfully, "string wars" are over and the crackpots have lost. Unfortunately, they have been replaced by lots of other nonsense. Did this replacement make things better or worse? I don't know.

Bureaucracy and corruption in European science and education

In recent years, I gave something like two dozens of public talks at various universities, high schools, and pro-science organizations – mostly about theoretical physics, some of them about the climate issues. Sometimes I got paid, sometimes I didn't. In the first case, there is often some bureaucracy. I was once requested to sign 53 times just because I gave a talk. On the other hand, I was once given a fair amount of money collected from the audience – with no strings or signatures attached.

But it has never happened to me that I was expected to fill 5 distinct multi-page documents because of a 90-minute talk. Well, that's what they asked me to do today because of a talk that was scheduled in the middle of May. Because of numerous reasons, I wrote "No, that can't work", to my former classmate from the high school, basic school, and kindergarten who is now a teacher at that school and who invited me. She won't be happy about my response but no one can force me to do something that I consider both an immense waste of time and an immoral act.

100 years of Noether's theorem

Sometime in April 1915, Emmy Noether was completing her groundbreaking theorem that links conservation laws with the symmetries of Nature.



Noether's father, Max Noether, was a German Jewish trader whose one leg was heavily damaged by polio. Instead of becoming a cripple who depends on others, he became a self-taught doctor of algebraic geometry – doing things similar to Alfred Clebsch.

He had 4 children and the oldest ones, Amalie Emmy Noether, was born in 1882. She was a clever but "ordinarily clever" girl and a popular kid who was lisping, near-sighted, took piano lessons, loved to dance, was taught to cook and clean. The latter two details imply that by preparing women "for the kitchen where they belong", men don't necessarily stop the career of the greatest female mathematician of all times.

Physics teacher takes over the Islamic State

Newsweek, Business Insider, and many other news servers remind us that the boss (and chalif) of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was injured in a March airstrike.



Consequently, it was time for the ISIS to pick another chieftain. It turned out to be a former physics teacher from Tal Afar, Iraq named Abu Alaa Afri.

Anti-quantum zealot T-shirts, sweatshirts, mug

On April 1st, armchair physicist and anti-quantum zealot Matt Leifer wrote a blog post named Luboš Motl is right whose most valuable part was the following picture:



He became the first anti-quantum zealot – which is how I called these people in 2009 and especially 2011 – who identified himself with the T-shirt. I didn't quite appreciate the commercial dimension of this enterprise so let me tell you. Since the beginning of the month, every anti-quantum zealot – Gerard 't Hooft, Sean Carroll, and thousands of other men (including many of you) – may have bought and may still buy their clothes or mugs, too.

Lack of surprises in discrete mathematics?

Surprises exist, are bound to become important, and therefore cannot be neglected

On his blog, in the announcement called "Is There Something Mysterious About Math?", Scott Aaronson of MIT has announced a longer essay on the "Ideas.Aeon.CO" server

Q: Is there something mysterious about mathematics?

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A: Why isn’t it more mysterious?

That text is sort of provocative.



First, Aaronson points out that it isn't sufficiently fulfilling to fight a straw man because he is filled with the air. However, your humble correspondent provides him with a more attractive straw man – one that is filled with flesh and blood. As you know, many people just love to constantly fight straw men with flesh like myself – because such straw men are actually right and many people simply love to be wrong and to be proud about it.

How to save refugees from drowning? Recolonialization

About 800 refugees – mostly from the black Africa – drowned off Libyan shores. Hot Air argues that this tragedy – much like numerous other harmful events – should be blamed on the U.S.-NATO coup against Moammar Qaddafi in Libya.

Some people predict 30,000 migrants to drown just in 2015.



But I want to offer you a more general idea. You agree that something is "imperfect" about the countries from which lots of people are fleeing, don't you? I think it should become standard that the countries that accept lots of refugees acquire a part of the territory – or a partial control over the whole territory – of the countries which are sources of lots of refugees.

ATLAS: 2.5-sigma four-top-quark excess

ATLAS has posted a new preprint

Analysis of events with \(b\)-jets and a pair of leptons of the same charge in \(pp\)-collisions at \(\sqrt s = 8\TeV\) with the ATLAS detector

boasting numerous near-2-sigma excesses (which could be explained by vector-like quarks and chiral \(b'\) quarks, but are too small to deserve much space here) and a more intriguing 2.5-sigma excess in various final states with four top quarks.

Double slit experiment in the Heisenberg picture

What we observe is not the Nature itself but the Nature exposed to our method of questioning.

---

Natural science does not simply describe and explain Nature; it is part of the interplay between Nature and ourselves.

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The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist. But at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you.

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Werner Heisenberg

Even though wave mechanics was in no way the first or deepest formulation of quantum mechanics, it quickly became popular because the "wave function" looks like a classical wave and this fact makes it easier for the people to "visualize" what's going on. This "advantage" is actually a disadvantage because the visualization leads the people to the totally incorrect concept that the state vector is a classical wave or object of a sort, which it's not, and that it should be distinguished from (i.e. considered mutually exclusive with) nearby "similar" state vectors, which it shouldn't, and the popularity of the Schrödinger picture "helps" the people to preserve their anti-quantum misconceptions.

Greece near the abyss

Greece has survived April 9th, the first possible date of the default. Some people moved the deadline to May 9th (weekend), others to May 12th. We hear that it could come in late May or June, too. Check this debt timeline. The government could actually be able to raise cash from the Greek citizens, the patriots who want to support their communists in charge and who know that things will be even worse if and when the government goes bust. No foreigners are buying the new Greek debt anymore but the domestic lenders could be a factor that was underestimated.

Because Greece has vigorously pissed on the April 24th deadline and one may expect at most a "Hi" from the meeting in Riga, the EU commission has set a "decisive" new deadline at May 11th.

But whatever the exact dates are, it seems likely that the default isn't too far. The Syriza comrades' promises that they would be able to suck the financial blood (ever growing amounts of it) out of other European nations by a "clever" combination of blackmail and doublespeak isn't working at all. If they don't want to be remembered as the men who threw Greece into the third world, they may have the last days to admit that they have lost. They need to apologize to everyone whom they have offended, admit that Marx, Tsipras, Varoufuckis, Krugman and similar individuals are just worthless piles of stinky garbage, and immediately start reforms – much more systematic and deeper pro-market reforms than what Samaras was doing in recent years.

Doing "just the same as Samaras" may fail to be enough right now.

Hawking's disease kills Czechia's youngest prime minister (45)

Approximately one year ago, the public was getting increasingly certain that Mr Stanislav Gross was suffering from a very serious – and probably fatal – illness.



This is actually not a photoshopped image. He allowed to be photographed in this form.

For some time, media speculated he had cancer; or just a minor injury affecting the spinal chord, and so on. At some moment, the picture became rather solid. Gross was tortured by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The neurons controlling voluntary muscles start to die. You can't move, speak, and swallow too well, and at the end, you can't even breath.

I don't know why one can't replace the lung/breathing muscles by mechanical ventilators or pumps of some sort – but I am not a physician.

LHC: chance to find SUSY quickly

This linker-not-thinker blog post will largely show materials of ATLAS. To be balanced, let me begin with a recommendation for an UCSB article Once More Unto the Breach about the CMS' excitement before the 13 TeV run. Note that the CMS (former?) boss Incandela is from UCSB. They consider the top squark to be their main target.

ATLAS is more into gluinos and sbottoms, it may seem. On March 25th, ATLAS released interesting graphs

Expected sensitivity studies for gluino and squark searches using the early LHC 13 TeV Run-2 dataset with the ATLAS experiment (see also PDF paper)

There are various graphs but let's repost six graphs using the same template.

Dark matter self-interaction detected?

Off-topic: My Facebook friend Vít Jedlička (SSO, Party of Free Citizens) established a new libertarian country, Liberland (To Live And Let Live), where the government doesn't get on your nerves. Before he elected himself the president, he had to carefully choose a territory where no one will bother him, where no one would ever start a war; he picked seven squared kilometers in between Serbia and Croatia because these two nations wouldn't dare to damage one another. ;-) There's a catch for new citizens, however: the official language is Czech.

Lots of mainstream writers including BBC, The Telegraph, IBTimes, and Science Daily promote a preprint claiming that they see the non-gravitational forces between the particles that dark matter is composed of:

The behaviour of dark matter associated with 4 bright cluster galaxies in the 10kpc core of Abell 3827 (published in MNRAS)

Richard Massey (Durham) and 22 co-authors have analyzed the galaxy cluster Abell 3827 – which is composed of four very similar galaxies (unusual: they probably got clumped recently) by the new Hubble Space Telescope imaging and by ESO's VLT/MUSE integral field spectroscopy.

Max Born's Nobel lecture

I decided to read Max Born's 1954 Physics Nobel Prize lecture,

The statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics (PDF),

in some detail. Even though it was written and spoken more than 60 years ago, it makes such a perfect sense. Unsurprisingly, the lecture is a combination of physics and history. Let's look at those 12 pages.

Cornell study in PNAS: women STEM faculty are 2-to-1 overrepresented

The fair fraction of female faculty is 2 times lower than the current one

Steven Pinker called it a shocker of a study but I am not surprised at all. The results coming from the paper I will discuss pretty much agree with my estimates based on the insider knowledge of similar mechanisms.



Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci (Cornell) just published a paper in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

Manifest unitarity and information loss in gravitational collapse

Guest blog by Prof Dejan Stojkovic, University of Buffalo

Dear Lubos,
First, I would like to thank you very much for his kind invitation for a guest post. I am certainly honored by this gesture.

We recently published a paper titled “Radiation from a Collapsing Object is Manifestly Unitary” in PRL. The title was carefully chosen (note the absence of the term “black hole”) because of its potential implications for a very touchy issue of the information loss paradox. I will use this opportunity to explain our points of view.

Smolin's lie about Dyson and Einstein

I need to apologize because my intuition about an episode of the history of science wasn't right. A commenter found a story about Dyson's and Einstein's interactions at Princeton on the Internet. And I found it totally plausible. Andrew of PopularTechnology.NET was skeptical and as of now, he has provided me with enough evidence that his skepticism was justified and my attempts to humiliate his skepticism were not substantiated.

What was it all about?

New wave of LHC alarmism

Nina Beety is a community organizer.



She has previously written a 170-page-long rant (plus a hilarious song) against "smart meters". But now, while the LHC is waking up again (protons have already circulated at 6,500 GeV, this time the news is for real), she wrote a detailed rant for the far left-wing website globalresearch.ca,

Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction.

You may want to read this stuff and laugh – or cry – because this loon may be a role model for what other similar folks – including male community organizers – actually believe. And it ain't pretty.

India freezes Greenpeace accounts

India has been a defining country of the "third world" and even though nowadays, we praise it not just as a cradle of civilization but also as an emerging market, a BRIC member, the home of Bollywood, many call centers, numerous excellent string theorists, and even a future second ITER-like fusion reactor, there is some sense in which India remains a canonical third-world country.



Unlike the communist-party-based regime in China, India is a democracy. One should be annoyed by the fact that a democracy such as India has GDP per capita about $5,000 while the adjacent non-democracy of China has over $10,000. Why is it so? There may be various reasons but I am afraid that at some level of development, some non-democratic control over the affairs may be beneficial.

Various harmful organizations such as ecoterrorist NGOs – and Greenpeace is the most famous one – have been freely doing their job and it didn't help India's economy, either.

Does fracking release radon and cause lung cancer?

The dark-on-light template didn't pass the one-week test. If you can't live without it, you may make it return for a month (or \(N\) months) if you send me $99 (times \(N\)) via PayPal.

In recent years, the United States have experienced the fracking revolution. The rock is hydraulically fractured by a liquid composed of water, sand, and chemicals. One can obtain cheap fossil fuels – mostly shale oil and gas – from geological layers that didn't look like nice fossil fuel reservoirs before.



Timelapse of drilling and fracking a well.

People can get the organic compounds which are diluted in the rock. As the video above shows, it takes less than 2 minutes to create the well, establish the company, do the paperwork, and start to make profits. America has become nearly energy independent, its trade deficit decreased, and several TRF American readers are happy about their investments into fracking. But just like the shale oil or shale gas is released from the rock as if it were a sponge, so can some other, less desirable elements and compounds.

What about radon?

Switzerland's 10-year yields drop below zero

We learn from the Wall Street Journal and everyone else that Switzerland has sold $0.4 billion of CHF-denominated 10-year bonds with the yield minus 0.055 percent. It's the first time in the human history when 10-year bonds went negative although Northern European and German (and, update April 14th, Czech) yields of 5-year bonds have already looked below zero.



Also, Mexico sold $1.6 billion worth of EUR-denominated bonds with the yield 4.2% which is sensible – but the shocking part is that it is a 100-year bond, also the first one in the human history. So far, the most futuristic was a 1%-yield Austrian bond maturing in 2062. These unprecedented numbers open a couple of questions.

Freeman Dyson on the gas that we call life

If you can sacrifice 23 minutes, here is a fun interview with Freeman Dyson (who is 91 now)

Video: Conversations that matter - Earth is actually growing greener (Vancouver Sun)

They introduced Dyson as a monster mind. In fact, he is so smart that he was once in the same building with Albert Einstein, they say. ;-)



In 1981-2006, a quarter of a century, the Earth was mostly getting greener (green color on the map).

Dyson argues that CO2 has many direct and staggering consequences for the life on Earth that are more important than the indirect and questionable influences via the climate. For example, the 40% rise in CO2 since the Industrial Revolution meant about a 20% increase in the agricultural yields per unit area (in average: results vary). I like to use the same square-root formula.

And make no mistake about it, this is a big deal. If you use a naive estimate, you could expect that there would be 20% less food, and perhaps 20% of the world population (over a billion of people) could die of hunger if CO2 quickly returned to the preindustrial levels! Fortunately, the carbon dioxide won't drop quickly, and even if it did, the value 20% could be significantly lowered by better trade, redistribution, and transition to more efficient (although sometimes less tasteful) crops etc.

Fallacious thinking in Hugh Everett's thesis

In Spring 1959, Hugh Everett traveled to Denmark in order to convince the Copenhagen school that he has found something important about the foundations of quantum mechanics. Did he succeed? Léon Rosenfeld, a close collaborator of Niels Bohr's, probably summarized not only his but also Bohr's and others' opinions when he said that Everett was "indescribably stupid and could not understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics".

Off-topic, Czech LHC: a neat article about the 2015 run, your humble correspondent is mentioned a few times, e.g. when it comes to my $10,000 supersymmetric bet against Adam Falkowski. Use Google/Chrome Translate. BBC told us that the LHC is aroused and erect again, too.

I strongly believe that this appraisal was fair and accurate and I want to elaborate on some details by discussing the first eight pages of Everett's dissertation, the incorrect assumptions, and the intrinsically unscientific way of thinking that Everett and his fans symbolize.

Toronto-based Euromaidan fascist cult censors web's favorite pianist

In the morning, several e-mails that I received have shocked me.

The pieces played by Valentina Lisitsa, a Kiev-born pianist often nicknamed "web's favorite pianist", have been dropped by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from a planned concert for an insane reason: because her tweets were critical of the current government in the city where she was born!



She was told the reason of her silencing and offered the full compensation for her concert if she won't reveal the political motivation behind the censorship to the world. Thankfully, she can't be bribed so easily so we have learned what happened. The corrupt organizers replaced her with a more politically convenient Stewart Goodyear. See Google News.

U.S. ambassador Schapiro: persona non grata in Czech president's office

BBC, WSJ (a highly tendentious anti-Zeman, anti-Czech rant), Google News

I talked to the new U.S. ambassador to Prague Andrew Schapiro (and shook his hand) in early November 2014. This Harvard Law School classmate [and fundraiser, $700k] of Obama's is a pleasant chap who claims to enjoy trips all over Czechia and whose task is to spread the – mostly counterproductive – foreign policies of the Obama administration. So I disagree with him that it's right to wage a trade war against Russia; I disagree that the U.S. should be helping NGOs (like "anti-corruption NGOs") that directly influence the internal Czech politics; and I disagree with his and Obama's idea that the Islam and the Middle-East-style terror have nothing do with each other.

OK, but it's not just about voicing opinions. It's been increasingly clear to me that the Obama administration is obsessed with the regime change, including the regime change in allied countries (such as Israel and Hungary) and that my Czech homeland has made it to the short list of the targets, too.

I do admit that I would be less angered if similar things were being done by a U.S. administration I would largely agree with. But even in that case, I would feel a strong discomfort when the U.S. government would be trying to remove the legitimately elected Czech president.

John Napier: an anniversary

For decades, my Australian uncle lived in the Napier Street, Melbourne. I guess that the street was named after a different Napier than John Napier, however.

John Napier, the father of natural logarithms, was born on an unknown day of 1550. He died on April 4th, 1617 i.e. 398 years ago.

This Scottish laird of Merchinston (a member of gentry) was known as the Marvellous Merchinston and his education may serve as a good model for everyone. Why?

He only entered school when he was 13 years old. He dropped shortly afterwards. And then, at the age of 24, he bought a castle at Gartness. You may see that Peter Thiel is right when he says that schools are pretty much useless. ;-)

Risky developments: Iran+Israel, Yemen, Greece+EU, Baltics+Russia

Many recent events make me moderately worried about the political future of the world and the global peace.

First, Obama and his comrades "celebrate" the deal with Iran. "Only" 500 if not 1,500 centrifuges should keep on running at one center (Natanz), other centers (Fordow) should be turned into nuclear physics research facilities, and so on. Just like Obama celebrates, people on the streets of Persia celebrate, too.

On the other hand, Israel is deeply worried. The deal is an existential threat for Israel, the Israeli cabinet unanimously opposes it, and I tend to agree. Israel at least demands that the final deal will include Iran's recognition of Israel's right to exist. I doubt they will get even this seemingly modest thing. (Update: Wow, Kerry's office instantly rejected the task to defend Israel's right to exist. I thought that it would only be the Iranians who would be the problem.)

Feynman on silly "philosophical implications" of quantum mechanics

He criticized the flawed idea that good scientific theories should only work with experimentally accessible concepts

I was sent this 14-minute audio recorded during the original "Feynman lectures in physics".



With a somewhat combative common-sense voice, Feynman talked about the generalized "philosophical lessons" that people extract from quantum mechanics, or at least they claim to do so.

Well, almost all this stuff is just junk. The actual physical content is almost always distorted beyond recognition and the resulting essence is just silly.

ER=EPR derived from PR state dependence

It's a special day of the year. You may expect some pranks from some people; on the contrary, other people who are wrong 364 days a year may happen to be right today.



Concerning the first category, Adam Falkowski has calculated which muppets are identical to which physics bloggers. TRF readers may be interested in the identity of your humble correspondent; well, you must first divide your humble correspondent to his or its even-day and odd-day portions.



Armchair physicist Matt Leifer should send this appropriate T-shirt to his fellow anti-quantum zealots including Gerard 't Hooft plus 87 other Gentlemen whose list I can provide him with.

Concerning the second category, Matt Leifer has finally realized that I am right when it comes to the foundations of quantum mechanics (as well as other things). But to be sure, he has still used the relevant T-shirt that he deserved until yesterday. This armchair physicist is an anti-quantum zealot, indeed.

Because I am very generous, I will postpone suing him – "anti-quantum zealot" is my registered trademark. I hope that Stephen Hawking® who has registered his name as a brand (somewhat distastefully emulating a TV pseudoscientist named Brian Cox) will be equally generous.