Unbounded ranks of elliptic curves: another premature faith

I generally don't like arrogant people who claim to be certain about something even though there is no solid basis for that certainty. Many climate fearmongers are textbook examples of these folks. The list of these arrogant people also includes Scott Aaronson – but also many other people in computer science – who claim (not only that the Earth will evaporate soon but also) that their word and influence is enough to be almost certain that e.g. \(P\neq NP\), even in the absence of a proof in either way.



Exactly 3 months ago, I discussed an interesting article by Kevin Hartnett in the Quanta Magazine that described an exciting story of Mr/Ms Ewin Tang, an ex-student of Aaronson's in Austin who is now a grad student at University of Washington. Tang was ordered to prove a proposition, basically a miniversion of \(P\neq NP\), as if it were a fact, except that he was finally led to prove the converse. Needless to say, lots of people had previously wasted their time with efforts to prove something that couldn't have been proven – and the activities done in order to prove X are often substantially different from those needed to prove non(X) which is why most of the mental energy was completely incorrectly allocated.

Now, the same Kevin Hartnett wrote another story with a similar lesson – in the absence of a proof, the mathematicians' belief in a certain conclusion may very well be a prejudice that is gonna be reversed. His text

Without a Proof, Mathematicians Wonder How Much Evidence Is Enough

talks about a 2016 paper by Melanie Wooden-Machete Trump and her 3 pals (OK, fair enough, I wanted to increase the number of views of their preprint page).

First, let me answer the question from that title. If the questions are of a purely qualitative, binary type, e.g. the question "whether the supremum of a set of ranks is finite or infinite", then no amount of "evidence" that is short of a proof is enough! If we can't complete a proof, we should really say that no other comments are truly relevant so the amount of evidence is zero.

CMS excess: a dimuon resonance of mass \(28\GeV\)

Well... the dimuon resonance depends on an extra bottom quark that has to be produced
Aleph at LEP seems to agree with the excess!



The Proton Smash (Halloween)

The Guardian just has published an article by Ian Sample that was useful for me,

Has new ghost particle manifested at Large Hadron Collider?

because I have missed the August 2018 preprint

Search for resonances in the mass spectrum of muon pairs produced in association with \(b\) quark jets in proton-proton collisions at \(\sqrt s= 8\) and \(13\TeV\)

You may see the excess on Figure 1, Page 5 (7/35) of the preprint above. For the invariant mass of \(\mu^+\mu^-\) slightly below \(30\GeV\), you simply see a clear excess. All the events are required to produce a \(b\) quark jet along with the muon pair. They divide the excess to two signal regions, SR1 and SR2, according to \(|\eta|\). When it's below or above \(2.4\), the local significance is 4.2 and 2.9 sigma, respectively.

Terror against gab.com is mind-boggling

The gradual liquidation of the freedom of speech in the European Union and the United States of America, not to mention other countries, is something that absolutely terrifies me. The pace has become so extreme that stories that demonstrate that this trend is real and accelerating take place every day. In recent days, I was most fascinated by the truly existential hassles that gab.com has to go through.

Gab.com is a competitor of Twitter but unlike Twitter and other social networks, it has a very solid and logical attitude to free speech. Everyone is allowed to write anything and the violation of the law is the only condition that allows to delete posts and/or users. If the judges couldn't rule that the law is violated, you may still dislike other people's posts. But if it is so, you can defend your sentiments by blocking the person and it's done.

There is no other defense against posts that make anyone uncomfortable – and no other defense is needed. It's simple and powerful.

By the 1930s, Western democratic nations should have loved Czechoslovakia

...they didn't and all of us paid the price once or twice...

Tomorrow, on October 28th, it will be 100 years from the moment when Czechoslovakia was created by declaring the independence. Austria-Hungary, guaranteed to lose the First World War, ceased to exist. The stellar Czechoslovak example allowed other nations to gain independence as well. For example, Yugoslavia declared its existence one day after Czechoslovakia did – it will be 100 years on Monday.



Czechs have lived along with Germans – Bohemia was the only legally allowed kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire – and/or Austrians for almost 1000 years, let's say from 1002 AD.

That millennium was a millennium of sometimes very negative and sometimes positive experiences with the German-speaking nations. Czechs and Slovaks are full-blown Slavic nations, don't get me wrong. But foreigners typically overstate the similarity between Slavic nations. Czechs have been so tightly integrated to the German-speaking empires largely because we have always had some respect for Germans and a degree of loyalty.

UCLA makes reverse racism mandatory for tenure-track faculty

The U.S. institutions are getting very close to Saudi Arabia and Nazi Germany

In the afternoon, I had a chat with a physicist of my generation whom I knew very well as a fellow postdoc – although he's mostly worked in the West Coast (and Asia). We've been close enough, I think, and especially because he's one of those guys who really understand why string theory is precious while the verbal tirades of the theory's critics are not, we're still close through the Internet wires.

Well, from some perspective. So I asked him: Can you please explain to me why you have signed the anti-Strumia manifesto?

I was told he agreed with the text and he disliked Strumia's papers on the \(750\GeV\) diphoton excess. When having papers on diphoton excess and using citations as a measure of contributions to physics, one must be ready for some extra scrutiny, the guy claimed, so that's why they gave him a hard time, I was told.

I just couldn't believe my eyes. What's wrong with papers about the anomaly? And even if there were something wrong about them, almost all of Strumia's papers were earned from papers that have nothing to do with the anomaly. Even with this painful ad hoc censorship of his citation record, he would still beat the woman who was hired by an order of magnitude. So why the hell are you trying to create fog by these totally irrelevant comments? The point of the manifesto is self-evidently to hurt the career of an achieved physicist who is ideologically inconvenient for a certain extremist political movement. Every person with the IQ above 70 must be capable of seeing this elementary point.

On top of that, the first author of the manifesto, Matt Buckley, wrote a paper about the anomaly as well. The main difference is that Alessandro Strumia's papers, even those about this anomaly, are generally better than Buckley's. Is this superiority meant to be used as an argument against Strumia?

K3 metrics from counting in little string theory

I think that we are seeing another example of the day when the best new hep-th preprint is the first one. Although the ordering of the papers may look pointless to you and you could consider the fights to be at the top to be childish pißing contests, many authors – including some very mature and brilliant ones – are likely to place their good paper at the top because they're proud and they do some careful timing work to be at the top. To check this theory, I looked at the timing of the paper

K3 metrics from little string theory

by Kachru and Zimet (Stanford) and Tripathy (Harvard math) and it was submitted on Wed, 24 Oct 2018 18:00:01 UTC, i.e. one second after the point when it's guaranteed to appear today. I think that my theory has passed the test. Cutely enough, the first three or so hep-th and first three or so hep-ph papers were posted within two seconds after the critical point, too. If you want to win this game, you need to press "enter" at the right moment, within the precision of split seconds.



There's quite some intense competition when it comes to the timing and ordering of the papers! Should it be fought against? I actually don't think so. I think that the community benefits because the better papers' authors are really more likely to fight for the visible spots and that makes it easier for others to find the better papers.

Macron, scapegoats, and Visegrád

On Sunday, Czechoslovakia (despite its being formally dead) will celebrate its glorious 100th birthday. Today, Macron and Merkel will come to Prague to meet the president and the prime minister – and they will do the same thing with Slovakia, too. For Macron, it will be the first official visit to Czechia.



I hope that Macron likes this picture of the St Helena island. It's more appropriate than the place in the Slovak capital that Macron chose to talk to the public today: Primate's Palace where the Peace of Pressburg was signed to certify a triumph by Napoleon. Slovak press points out that this choice by Macron is, ehm, a bit pompous. ;-)

He gave an interview to "Hospodářské noviny" (a Czech WSJ) and three other dailies from the Visegrád Group (V4) countries (CZ, SK, PL, HU). The apparent goal of his verbal "gift" was to annoy us and he's really good at it. (The French and Czech press also claims that he wants to split V4 to the good guys, Czechoslovakia, and the bad guys, PL+HU.) Let me comment on his statements:

Czechs and other V4 citizens should embrace the slogan "Europe is us".

OK, first, the French president can't dictate what slogans Czechs and other V4 folks embrace. We're sovereign nations. On top of that, not even Czech or V4 politicians may dictate what slogan any individual citizen accepts – because we're nations of the free people.

Second, the European identity is clearly just a part – and probably a small part – of our identity. We're primarily Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks. After that, some of us also feel to be Czechoslovaks. And I think that many of us also feel to be citizens of V4 before we are citizens of the EU because we simply can't identify with many things that the EU stands for.

But yes, at some level, we feel the European identity. To some extent, "Europe is us". I will use this point soon.

A 2.8-sigma CMS hint of a dark matter mediator

Even small deviations from the Standard Model – at the LHC and elsewhere – remain rare so we must discuss as weak ones as those whose statistical significance is just 2.8 sigma.



Tommaso Dorigo has discussed various other channels and possibilities in which his CMS team found nothing. But let us focus on the pretty graph above. As you can see, the observed black curve jumps above the predicted green-and-yellow (1-and-2-sigma "Brazilian") band which means the excess of events that "look like" a certain signal.

Study: Swiss glaciers mostly melted before industrialization began

Hundreds of papers are being published that show that the "anthropogenic climate change" paradigm is incorrect, at least in its strong forms. But I think that the following paper is rather cute because it's so careful and it discusses one of the most obvious symptoms of "global warming" – the melting glaciers.



Six days ago, Michael Sigl and 5 co-authors finally published the paper

19th century glacier retreat in the Alps preceded the emergence of industrial black carbon deposition on high-alpine glaciers (PDF)

in The Cryosphere, a peer-reviewed journal about the frozen things on Earth. The paper was originally submitted as a "discussion paper" in February. It went through a peer review with 3 referees who looked at the paper rather carefully, wrote detailed reviews, and caught some missing commas, among other things. You may see the history of the paper if you click at the title above.

Trouble with Saudi Arab allies

It took me some time to figure out why the media were full of Jamal Khashoggi (JK), a disappeared U.S.-based journalist of Saudi origin. This confusion may be partly blamed on the many days it took to become sufficiently convinced that JK was murdered in an operation that was organized by some powerful people in Saudi Arabia – although it remains uncertain whether the Crown Prince was personally involved.

JK, a critic of the Saudi leaders when it comes to the approach to Yemen, human rights, and other issues, knew that he couldn't return to the Saudi Arabian territory because he could be easily murdered by the regime. Sadly, he failed to realize that the Saudi embassies are a part of the Saudi Arabian territory. He went to the Saudi embassy in Turkey – to get some paperwork in order to marry his Turkish fiance – and that was enough for him to be murdered.

Wolchover, Ball face armies of brainwashed anti-quantum NPCs

Nine and two days ago, the Quanta Magazine posted the following two articles that were "sort of negative" about some "alternative interpretations" of quantum mechanics:

October 11th: Famous Experiment Dooms Alternative to Quantum Weirdness (Natalie Wolchover)

---

October 18th: Why the Many-Worlds Interpretation Has Many Problems (Philip Ball)

Ball's article is an excerpt from his book Beyond Weird which is problematic but it's the least problematic book among the 10 or so "books on interpretations of quantum mechanics" that I detected and mentioned in the recent 5 years or so.



On this photograph, you may see the real Bohr (Niels, left) along with son (Aage, center) and grandson (Tomas, bottom). If you asked why the baby was writing Navier-Stokes equations on that blackboard, it's because the baby was going to become a fluid mechanic. And now, Tomas Bohr – along with George W. Bush's twin brother John Bush and others – discussed a weird paradigm that was hyped in recent years, namely that "oil droplets jump just like quantum mechanics".

Electron dipole moment: lessons

If you missed the second season of Young Sheldon and 12th season of The Big Bang Theory, it's about 2x 5 episodes to fill the gap. The S02E05 episode of Young Sheldon has a title involving "Czechoslovakian pastries" – Sheldon's dad eats some koláče from a wedding at the beginning (Texas and Nebraska are a top destinations for 19th century Czech emigrants) – and Sheldon and Missy undergo some twins testing under Dr Pilsen. A good greeting to the viewers and Sheldon's inspirers who live in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. ;-)

A few days ago, you could see reports about the new measurements of the electron electric dipole moment: Google News. The ACME II experiment published its findings in Nature

Improved limit on the electric dipole moment of the electron

and the upper bound is about 10 times smaller (more constraining) than measured a year earlier, namely\[

|d_e|\leq 1.1 \times 10^{-31} e\ {\rm m}.

\] The dipole moment has the units of "charge times distance" and with the natural charge factor of \(e\), the electron charge, the distance is just some 10,000 times the Planck scale! This distance is heuristically the separation between the electron's center-of-mass and its center-of-charge-distribution.

Are NPCs catchy enough to supersede SJWs?

In recent days, a meme became very popular among people who are approximately right-wing, conservative, or pro-Trump and who want to mock the incredible knee-jerk mindlessness of the responses by... and the amazing group think of the far left, the SJWs – social justice warriors. The latter began to be called NPCs.



What is an NPC? It is a "non-player character", an entity in games whose decisions aren't determined by an actual human being with free will. They first appeared in Dungeons and Dragons, a 1974 tabletop game. But such NPCs are a part of most 3D video games today. They talk to you but what they say is scripted. The Wikipedia page nicely explains that these characters don't usually have real artificial intelligence, however (although true AI characters – a rare class – are mostly considered a subset of NPCs).

So there is a straightforward program/code that determines what they tell you when you play a game on your PC or smartphone. And to some extent, it feels like you're playing against other characters that look like they could be controlled by other human players – but they are not. Some work has been done to create the program but because that program is simple enough, it fails to emulate an intelligent behavior of a human being perfectly and the difference becomes strikingly obvious in some situations, see e.g. these awkward NPCs in Mafia II. Does it remind you of someone?

Cheeky girl demands moonwalker, geologist to shut his mouth on geology

Everyone can live his or her American dream in America, it's a country of great possibilities and amazing upward mobility. Some people say it's no longer the case but in some negative sense, I think it's still true. In particular, I am often shocked by the arrogance of some American nobodies. Many things are worse in Europe than in America but the arrogance of deluded American Niemands surpasses that of the European counterparts.

Willie Soon sent me the partial transcript and video of a panel discussion, Apollo Plus 50. For an hour, 3+1 panelists discussed the motivation for space research and various relationships between Americans' and Unamericans' curiosity and financial and other interests in various projects in the outer space – in the history, now, and in the future.

Petition urges CERN to rehire Strumia, end totalitarianism

Edwin has pointed out that two German pro-free-speech groups, Agens Die Miteinander and Cuncti (and Tom Todd of Hamburg is usually signed in the e-mail), have launched a petition at Science Censored:

CERN: Return Prof. Strumia to office!

It's formally a letter to CERN's General Director Ms et Dr Fabiola Gianotti which claims that there can be no research or freedom of expression when people are being existentially threatened for simply expressing their opinions. The signatories want Strumia to return to his CERN office as soon as possible. (See previous articles on Strumia.)

The first woman on the Moon

Czech feminist šitstorms are way more relaxed

A few days ago, the host of a Czech science Facebook group has posted the following cartoon:



It's the picture of the "first woman on the Moon". It's a joke which is funny because there's no atmosphere on the Moon which is why an engine based on a pressure deficit couldn't operate there! ;-) I needed to explain the joke right away to make the readers sure that there's nothing sexist about the joke – especially to please female readers who aren't trained in aerodynamics unless they are good at the blowjob.

A wonderful Catholic sermon against cultural Marxism

Less than 15% of Czechs are associated with a religious organization or church – and even most of these 15% are rather lukewarm. You don't expect Czechia to be the source of brave and inspiring sermons or a source of the truly conservative priests. But maybe you should.



On September 28th, the Day of Czech Statehoood and the anniversary of the murder of Good King Wenceslaus, our national patron, a very experienced priest [and linguist, Bohemist, and former minister of schools at a government led by Klaus] Prof et Mons. Petr Piťha delivered a sermon in the country's most recognizable church, the St Vitus Cathedral at the center of the Prague Castle, and the sermon turned out to be explosive.

You would expect such an old man to give another boring speech. You could think that such an experienced man is going to be excessively careful. But the speech gets truly powerful. John Archer may feel as a moderate sissy at some moments. ;-) Archbishop of Prague Dominik Duka has already defended Mons. Petr Piťha – while some Catholics have left the church in the middle of that sermon and some cultural Marxists, e.g. the Templeton-funded "priest" Mr Tomáš Halík, have attacked Mons. Piťha in the media. The priest has already been sued for "fearmongering" by a far left group (ČŽL, Czech Women's Lobby), too.

Analyzing a spooky anti-quantum article from Poland

Jitter informed us about a short popular article published on Thursday:

The Spooky Reality Behind the Quantum Universe –“We Haven’t a Clue What It Is” (Daily Galaxy)

Jitter has summarized the text as saying that "it's claimed that quantum mechanics is no longer required for a single particle" – a clearly incorrect claim.

Let us look how stupid the claims are. Most of the irrational statements are actually being included in a majority of similar anti-quantum and spooky quantum articles.

Mathematics is the "human right" not to deal with cases one by one

Cafeinst has commented on the previous blog post about the alleged supersymmetric proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. There can't be a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, we are told, because there are infinitely many roots of the zeta function and we don't have infinitely many workers who would check all of them, he basically told us.

In fact, it wasn't the first time. Cafeinst made the analogous point about the Collatz conjecture as well. There are infinitely many sequences to check, so it is an undecidable statement, he taught us. Holy cow. Niki di Giano either shares Cafeinst's misunderstanding of mathematics – or he was just mocking him – when he added a similar comment. No proof by induction may work because there is an infinite amount of work with each of them. I am eagerly expecting an explanation from Niki whether he was joking or whether he is Cafeinst's soulmate. (Update: Niki's comment was ironic, good news.)

I can't believe that some children – e.g. Cafeinst – were left behind so completely. On the other hand, I feel that among non-readers of this blog, such basic misunderstandings of mathematics and rational thinking is very widespread and probably dominant. And I believe that some "methods to teach mathematics", including Hejný's method that I've been fighting against for some time, encourage this misunderstanding actively. Facts must be solved, computed, and internalized one by one, it's the only politically correct method to teach according to this ideology. The "amount of mathematics wisdom" is measured by the Marxist theory of value, "thinkers" such as Mr Hejný preach.

Make the kids happy by repeating some low-brow problem of recreational mathematics many times (and never dare to correct them or teach something to them) – and they will become great humans and intellectuals. No, they won't.

Das, Kalauni claim to have a 3-page SUSY proof of Riemann Hypothesis

Cafeinst has pointed out that one week ago, Ashok Das (Rochester) and Pushpa Kalauni (Oklahoma) have published a 3-page preprint

A simple derivation of the Riemann hypothesis from supersymmetry

on the math.GM arXiv. So I immediately opened it. And yes, you can immediately see that the authors are less than 89 years old.

No one listens to the IPCC fearmongering anymore

The boys have cried wolf too many times

A decade ago, I would probably read the press release in its entirety – plus several pages of the full report that I would pick as important or representative. The climate hysteria was already perfectly understood to be pseudoscientific hogwash promoted by left-wing activists. But there was still something new in it, something that provoked us, something we were afraid of.

I am no longer reading this garbage – and neither does an overwhelming majority of the people. There's absolutely no true, useful, or original content in this stuff. Almost identical predictions have been proven incorrect hundreds of times. Self-described "climate scientists" and their public faces such as Al Gore have been predicting the end of the world for 2000, 2009, 2010, 2015, and every other year. Jehovah's Witnesses can no longer compete in the number of these failed predictions of the end of the world. Nothing that would even remotely resemble their doomsday predictions has ever materialized.

These days, similar claims are on par with the spam about penis enlargement. Who was interested in such things has probably undergone the procedure, whatever it is. Others just treat it as the pollution in their mailboxes, newspapers, and on TV screens.

First dominant pure Czech bank may be being born

For centuries, Czechs have been savers who were conservative when it came to their finances. A consequence was that they trusted "our" currencies, preferred all payments and savings to be done in the domestic currency, and the currency was correspondingly stable. Relatively to our communist comrades, we had a hard currency during communism, too. Westerners have usually no clue about the huge differences between the individual post-communist countries. For example, Hungary has accumulated a huge debt and their forint has always been inflating and weak; Czechoslovakia has never had these problems.



Air Bank, the standardized interior

Our beloved emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria introduced the crown in September 1892, as 1/2 of the "gold coin" that had been a nearly stable unit of wealth since the Middle Ages. (As of 2018, Czechs still use the ironic term "pětka", or "the number five", for the 10-crown coin!) In 1918, exactly 100 years ago this month, Czechoslovakia kept the name of the currency and after 1927, Czechoslovak crown, which was introduced at par. After 1927, it was the only successor state of the monarchy that still kept the crown.

Men who missed out on the Nobel prize

A woman shared the 2018 physics Nobel prize for laser tricks, 55 years after the previous (2nd after Curie) woman, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who was celebrated in 1963 for the nuclear shell model. (The number of Nobel prizes given for applications of lasers is just pathologically high, and I've been saying it long before this new addition. Note that neither Einstein nor Bose have even gotten the prize for the Bose-Einstein statistics.)

Before the committee has made its choice, the media were full of requests that "this time, a woman must be there" and the Nobel committee was surely under amazing pressure. There's no good reason to think it was temporary – so we may conclude that the physics Nobel prize has been downgraded to an ideologically driven and politically abused farce, much like the peace Nobel prize and others were some decades earlier.

Dr Donna Strickland is nice, modest, and she is not really responsible for this feminist Nobel insanity – which also included a selective worshiping of her as a hero as well as the media stories in which her senior collaborator, Dr Gerard Mourou, was painted as a sexist pig because he recorded a music video with much younger female lab coat dancers in 2010. These double standards are really insane given the very likely fact that she couldn't have had a chance to win such an award without Dr Mourou.

Municipal elections: our only oligarch loses Prague, shock, and awe

One-half of the TRF readers are American citizens where the two-party system is alive and kicking. I think that all of the Yankees must be puzzled about the following map of the results of our local elections that took place between Friday 2pm and Saturday 2pm:



This is Czechia (in the heart of Europe), not Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia split up in 1993 because Slovaks didn't drink enough beer. In the "eye of the Bohemian fish" on the left side, you can see the blue Prague. In general, the map shows the political party that won the largest number of votes in each district. The "number of votes" may be a rather confusing quantity, however, because the number of representatives at the local city halls as well as the number of candidates that were running for a party may affect it.

A cultural Marxist edition of "100 scientists against Einstein"

Pro-freedom researchers may turn this pamphlet into the Battle of Stalingrad that shows that 100 is too little to intimidate everybody

Although way too many Germans (and Austrians) wanted to present themselves as victims while Adolf Hitler was the only culprit of wrongdoings in the Third Reich, the actual history was very different. Hitler was mainly a symbol, a symptom of political and emotional preferences, frustrations, and wishes that were almost omnipresent among Germans of that time. He was a tip of an iceberg – the whole iceberg of the German society was a problem caused by an ideological phase transition that the society underwent sometime in the early 1930s.



In particular, anti-Semitism was powerful within the scientific community, too. A bunch of activists who sucked in theoretical physics have invented the "Aryan/German Physics" which was an ideology that basically prohibited modern theoretical physics as we know it. This ideology within physics still exists – the members call themselves "critics of string theory" instead of "Aryan physicists" but when it comes to the scientific methodology, the content is exactly the same.

During that time, in fact, in 1931 i.e. two years before Hitler took power, a bunch of anti-Semitic German scientists also wrote a notorious book, "100 scientists against Einstein". The number of authors of diverse and ultimately irrational criticisms of relativity was high, 28+19, which was rounded to 100. Einstein wisely responded by saying that if they were right, one scientist would have been enough.

Musk and the proposed ban on shortsellers

On August 7th, Tesla's boss Elon Musk famously tweeted that he had secured some $70+ billion to buy all the Tesla stocks for $420 a piece.

The bold statement was a complete lie, as sane people knew right away and as was getting explicitly but gradually confirmed in the following days. And this lie was rather demonstrably motivated by Elon Musk's desire to financially hurt the shortsellers – people who bet that the Tesla stocks are overvalued and bound to drop.

Within a day, the shortsellers were made $1 billion poorer by that tweet – while Elon Musk got $1 billion wealthier. Clearly, the law says that untrue statements by the CEOs that have a tangible effect on the prices are called "securities fraud" and considered criminal acts. For a good reason: by lying about the nature of the asset, the CEO is effectively offering something else to the investor than what he is actually giving to them. This simply has to be illegal – otherwise everyone would be deceiving the other side all the time.

Well, that jump after the fraudulent tweet was obviously not the last change of the price. In the following 2 months, the stock went up or down by more than 10% several times. For example, last Friday, Tesla lost 14% after the SEC's "guilty" verdict and on Monday, it gained 17% after the SEC punishment was seen to be symbolic.

Leon Lederman: 1922-2018

Leon Lederman was a giant of the 20th century experimental particle physics. Sadly, he died on Wednesday in a care center in Idaho, due to the complications from dementia (not so shocking at age of 96).

He was born to a Russian Jewish family in 1922. He was the key man in teams that discovered the neutral \(K\)-mesons (do you remember Feynman's discussion about the two-state Hilbert space of \(K^0\) and \(\bar K^0\) that may be mixed as the superpositions of long-lived and short-lived kaons?), the bottom quark \(b\), and the muon (i.e. second) neutrino.

For the muon neutrino discovery, he was given the 1988 Nobel prize in physics, along with two other men.

Three scholars mass-produce Sokal hoaxes

Publication of the numerous papers proves that "grievance studies" are worthless and ludicrous parasitic pseudosciences

As The Wall Street Journal and dozens of other outlets (including an Areo Magazine essay written by the famous trio itself) describe in detail, three self-described "left-leaning liberal" academics have had lots of fun since Summer 2017.

Peter Boghossian (philosopher at Oregon), James Lindsay (PhD in mathematics), and Helen Pluckrose (English literature) have managed to get seven hoax articles – they termed them "grotesque exagerations" at the end – accepted for publication in journals dedicated to grievance studies such as gender "sciences". Incidentally, their term grievance studies is a serious contribution (not published) that has the value of pure gold by itself. I think that I will use it.

Martin Rees becomes an LHC alarmist, publishes a book

These days, the LHC has celebrated its 10th birthday. Almost no one has celebrated because, despite the Higgs boson discovery, there is a widespread feeling that the number of new things discovered by that collider has been disappointing.

A decade ago, and even right after the Higgs discovery, lots of us were giving numerous popular talks about the collider. One of the laymen's questions that kept on reappearing was: Will the LHC destroy Earth? Will it eat all of us?

It may sound ludicrous but the energy of the collisions is extreme enough and physicists have been obliged to think seriously about this question. And many physicists did. Well, they have thought about it already a decade before the LHC.

Czech readers react to lynching of Prof Strumia

Last night, the prestigious Czech right-wing news server Echo24.cz joined the plurality of the world media that wrote about the cultural Marxist-McCarthyist lynching of the prominent CERN phenomenologist Alessandro Strumia.

Here is the translation – so that you may get some Czech black humor and some idea whether the Czech taxpayers (who still contribute to CERN – but I already began to work on changing this situation) stand on the side of Strumia or on the side of the lynching mob.

Professor questioned discrimination of women in science, CERN ended cooperation with him
Echo24, ZD, 123 comments now

The Italian professor Alessandro Strumia from University of Pisa and a researcher affiliated with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was suspended due to his lecture where he disputed the discrimination of women in the field of particle physics. The affair was reported by the BBC, the suspension was even confirmed by the official press release [link] of CERN.

Check a gallery.

Physics was invented and built by men

Activists at CERN turned an excerpt from Sexmission into reality

CERN has updated the statement to say that all Strumia's CERN ties were suspended, at least during the ongoing Inquisition trial ("investigation of the conference"). I was hoping it wouldn't happen but I was prepared to see that it would happen. What do you want to investigate, idiots? Strumia has made some elementary and some elaborate comments about women in physics and a bunch of brain-dead wannabe fascists and mental cripples found the truth inconvenient. That's it.

However, things are much better in Italy where Alessandro is primarily employed. The rector of the University of Pisa Paolo Mancarella (IT), after he got some complaints from the totalitarian cultural Marxists and after he looked at the 26 slides, refused to start ethical proceedings against Strumia. That looks better although something will be "investigated" over there by an ethical committee, too. But maybe the page says something else and Mr Mancarella doesn't really speak English.

Poles are our Western Slavic cousins. They generally love us, Czechs, more than we love them. (We're their #1 favorite foreigners but it's not true for Poles.) They're great but I surely don't think that they're good e.g. in the sense of humor. (See my answer to What Poles do better than Czechs and vice versa.)



You need to click at a link and play the video outside TRF.

However, I became a great fan of a 1983 or 1984 Polish cult film, the sci-fi comedy named Sexmission. Max and Albert, two men from the 1980s, volunteer to (earn some bucks and) undergo a hibernation experiment (designed by Prof Wiktor Kuppelweiser). There's a war (whose special weapon selectively attacks men) and they are only waken up in a relatively distant future (well, 2042) in which no men are alive anymore. The rest of the mankind – purely women – live in a totalitarian society underground while their propaganda says that radioactivity makes it impossible to live on the surface.