The Reference Frame

Arctic stratospheric clouds unrelated to tropospheric temperature

2012-06-02T10:04:00.000+02:00

Radiative cooling (and warming) isn't a key effect: a piece of the man-made climate change "lore" is shaken

This particular paper which may have isolated a major mistake in the would-be mainstream "lore" of the climate science – and in all the climate models – hasn't gotten a sufficient amount of attention in the climate blogosphere. An article by The Hockey Schtick at the end of April and The Orange Punch yesterday are two exceptions.

A polar stratospheric cloud.

We're talking about a paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that studied the conditions under which the clouds form in an upper layer of the atmosphere above the Arctic (the stratosphere):

On the linkage between tropospheric and polar stratospheric clouds in the Arctic as observed by space–borne lidar (abstract, PDF full text for free)

If you need to know, a lidar is a radar that is emitting light waves instead of radio waves but it still looks at the reflected ones. For the same reason, a wadar is a garden hose.

The four authors, P. Achtert, M. Karlsson Andersson, F. Khosrawi, and J. Gumbel of Stockholm, actually try to do some proper science i.e. compare the predictions by various a priori possible theories/answers/hypothesis/explanations with the observations (instead of, for example, inventing interpretations of phenomena – arbitrarily contrived interpretations – that are compatible with a predetermined belief: I hope that 97%-98% of the "climate scientists" will appreciate my description of their corrupt work).

What did they find?

They found out that most of the Arctic polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) are linked with the tropospheric clouds that are underneath, especially with the deep-tropospheric clouds. So far so good. However, they also calculated the correlation coefficient between the occurrence of the PSCs and the top temperature of the tropospheric clouds beneath them.

They found no correlation!

What does it imply? Let me copy the last sentence of the abstract:

Thus, our findings suggest that Arctic PSC formation is connected to adiabatic cooling, i.e. dynamic effects rather than radiative cooling.

The global warming climate models predict that the troposphere is warming – there's a hot spot in it – and the stratosphere is cooling. Virtually all of these changes in these climate models are due to radiation.

In particular, the dominant "IPCC-endorsed" explanation of the cooling stratosphere is the following one: the tropospheric clouds absorb some thermal radiation emitted by the Earth's surface. Consequently, this radiation doesn't reach the stratosphere which is why the stratosphere is cooling. In effect, the lower-lying troposphere has stolen some heat (originally coming from the Earth's surface or lower troposphere) from the stratosphere.

A cooling of the stratosphere is also a key change that is needed for the formation of the stratospheric clouds. You create droplets if you condense the water vapor. This can be most easily achieved by cooling of the air in the stratosphere: the relative humidity goes up.

However, if this hypothesis describing the reasons behind the cooling of the stratosphere – either in the short run or in the long run – were right, it would imply that the cooling is correlated with the temperature of the tropospheric clouds. The warmer they are, the more radiation they have "stolen" from the stratosphere. The data falsify this hypothesis.

This really means that the radiative flux – which energy in the form of radiation goes up or down and which places it is able to reach – isn't a dominant factor deciding about things such as the changes of the stratospheric temperature, at least if we talk about the cooling that precedes the formation of the stratospheric clouds. That's a big news because the global warming "paradigm" is all about the radiative flux. The greenhouse effect is all about the change of such radiative fluxes and they're believed to be the primary quantities that decide about the temperature at various places.

But Nature doesn't seem to work in this way.

Instead, the Swedish authors argue, the data support the theory that the formation of the polar stratospheric clouds – a sign of a cooling of the stratosphere – boils down to a cooling of another, non-radiative type: adiabatic cooling. Adiabatic cooling is a cooling caused by a decreasing pressure of some body of the air. This body "pushes" the surroundings and does mechanical work on the surroundings. By doing so, it loses some of its internal energy. Each molecule loses some kinetic energy which gets translated to the decrease of the temperature.

At least in this Arctic context, the tale about the climate can't be described in the "IPCC-sponsored" way, "temperature change, radiation change, another temperature change, radiation change, and so on" but rather by "pressure change, temperature change, albedo change, pressure change, and so on". The players in the new story are more diverse and different from the narrow list that is needed in models claiming that the absorption by a greenhouse gas may be the most important primary effect driving the atmosphere. There's much more room for the pressure and humidity – and consequently for the internal variability of the atmosphere.

Of course, you won't see similar papers discussed in the media. Such papers are actually learning something about what really matters in the atmosphere; but they don't have the desired "societal implications" so the biased journalists just don't write about such things.

Instead, they write about topics that are close to this fresh article at the DeSmogBlog. The website has renamed the "climate change denial movement" to something even more damning: they have added the most insulting two-word adjective that the climate change alarmists could think of. Now, the climate realists are known as the "free market climate change denial movement". This gotta hurt! ;-)

Perimeter Institute says good-bye to Joy Christian

2012-06-02T09:38:00.000+02:00

In the final paragraph of a March 2012 blog entry, I encouraged the Perimeter Institute and Oxford University to cut their ties with an anti-Bell-theorem activist and the author of repetitive and smug, yet almost uncited (if you remove self-citations) and nonsensical papers irrationally assaulting this important theorem in particular and quantum mechanics in general, namely with Joy Christian.

They have listened – either to me or someone else who gave an equivalent recommendation.

In his new comment at Science2.0, Joy Christian wrote:

Richard Gill, you finally got what you wanted. I got fired by Perimeter Institute, and now Oxford has also started its proceedings against me. But my work transcends these institutes and it will go on. I long resolved to accept judgement from no man but Nature.

These are the words from a giant of physics who has been 800 years ahead of his contemporaries but who will only be celebrated by the future generations – assuming that people will have forgotten all mathematics and physics before the year 2812.

I think that Richard Gill is getting too much credit here but otherwise OK. The comment above is authentic. You may Google search for Joy Christian's personal page at the institute and the newest version of it will tell you Person not found.

It's plausible – and Joy Christian's message suggests – that Oxford University will follow.

This is the right approach. There are thousands of self-described revolutionary thinkers of the same kind who don't get any support from these leading centers of theoretical physics (neither financial support nor moral support or affiliation) so it is not clear why Joy Christian should have been an exception for too long. According to any objective or semi-objective criteria, he hasn't produced almost any valuable work in decades that were given to him as a testing period. For years, he's been stuck with a wrong idea that prevents him from doing further progress in science and these facts should arguably have consequences if there is at least some meritocracy in the hiring processes of the institutions.

I wish him good luck. He will need lots of it, especially because the primary judge he cares about is Nature who told him good-bye many years before the Perimeter Institute did. If you want to support Joy Christian, you may buy lots of copies of his book, Disproof of Bell's Theorem, at the top. But don't forget that there may be a billion of other folks in India and elsewhere (maybe even in Central Europe) who may be hungry and millions of them also believe that they have found the Universe's ultimate secret.

It's not clear whether the delisting alters anything about Joy Christian's finances i.e. whether he's been getting any money in recent years from the PI.

Joy Christian plans to supersede Niels Bohr as well as baseball champions and military pilots: he has already hired a coach and been accepted to the Air Force – and I haven't even mentioned that the high school is named after him, too. ;-)

The last transit of Venus in this century

2012-06-02T07:51:00.000+02:00

It may seem as though the 21st century is still just getting started. But there is one event that will occur on Tuesday night UTC and its next repetition will have to wait until the year 2117. And in the "hectic" 20th century, this event hasn't occurred at all. What is it?

The Venus will perforate the Sun: the sky is falling. Paul Krugman proposes to build high-speed rails to fight against the effects of the perforation, to triple the U.S. public debt, and to increase the government, the only entity that is allowed to spend big.

It's the rarest astronomical event among the predictable ones: the transit of Venus. The 2012 transit of Venus will begin on Tuesday, June 5th, 2012, at 18:09 Boston Daylight Savings Time (or 6 hours later according to the Pilsner Summer Time) and will last for 6 hours 40 minutes or so.

Incidentally, right in the middle of the transit of Venus, the IPv6 Internet Protocol will be launched and good enough internet services will become available both in IPv6 and IPv4 permanently – for many years in which both protocols will co-exist.

Some common sense disclaimer: Europeans will see almost nothing because the Sun can't be seen at night! ;-) Only an (extended/reduced) hemisphere will see (the-whole/at-least-part-of-the) transit of Venus.

You surely want a no-nonsense list of the "recent" years when it has occurred or will occur and here it is: 1639; 1761, 1769; 1874, 1882; 2004, 2012; 2117, 2125...

The rare event has been useful to determine the solar parallax (8.8 arc seconds) and therefore the distance between the Earth and the Sun. To show how it was done, let me repost my answer at Physics Stack Exchange.

Edmund Halley's method requires one to measure the timing of the beginning of the transit and the end of the transit; both pieces of data have to be measured at two places of the Earth's globe whose locations must be known.

The picture by Vermeer, Duckysmokton, Ilia shows that the two places on Earth have differing locations in two different directions (the differences in the distance from the Sun and Venus are too small to be measurable): one of them is parallel to the direction of the transit of Venus and will be reflected in the overall shift of the timing; the other component is transverse to it and it will actually shift the line along which Venus moves and crosses the Sun in the up/down direction i.e. it will make the duration of the transit longer.

Each of these pieces of data – overall shift in the timing arising from one coordinate's difference between the two terrestrial locations – and the difference between the length of the transit – due to the other coordinate – are in principle enough to determine the solar parallax. Because synchronization of clocks at very different locations was difficult centuries ago, I suppose that the latter – the difference between $\Delta t_1$ and $\Delta t_2$ – was probably more useful historically. But we're talking about $O(10)$ minutes differences in both quantities.

At any rate, Halley didn't live to see a proper measurement (the transit occurs about twice a century and the two events are clumped together with a 8-year break in between). The best he could get was 45 angular seconds for the parallax; the right answer is about 8.8 seconds. He knew that his result was very inaccurate. Note that the solar parallax is the angle at which the Earth's radius is seen from the Sun, i.e. the difference in the rays needed to observe the Sun from the Earth's center and/or a point on the Earth disk's surface.

When you convert 8.8 angular seconds to radians, i.e. multiply by $1/3,600\times \pi/180$, you get $4.3\times 10^{-5}$. Now, divide 6378 km by this small number to get about 150 million km for the AU.

Some orders-of-magnitude estimate for the numbers. Venus orbits at 0.7 AU so it's actually closer to the Earth during the transit. It means that a shift by 6,000 km up/down on the Earth's side corresponds to about 12,000 km up/down on the Sun's side. So the two horizontal lines crossing the Sun on the picture may be separated by about 12,000 km. Compare it with the solar radius near 700,000 km: you may see that we're shifting the horizontal lines by about 1% of the Sun's radius and the relative difference between $\Delta t_1$ and $\Delta t_2$ will be comparable to 1%, too. The last transit in 2004 took about 6 hours so the difference in the duration at various places is of order 10 minutes.

The 2012 transit of Venus on Tuesday night UTC will take over 6 hours, too; the timing and duration differs by about 7 minutes depending on the location, too.

If you've been dreaming about observing the transit of Venus, don't forget about Tuesday 22:49 night UTC; the following transit will occur in 2117.

Amelia Earhart's mystery may be solved

Some piece of early 20th century cosmetics – to suppress frickles, something she hated about herself – was found on an island in the Republic of Kiribati, Central Pacific Ocean. It seems likely that she landed there 75 years ago (during her attempt to fly around the globe), sent lots of radio messages, they were ignored as "not credible" by the ships around because this invalid description of the signals was convenient for the lazy folks on these ships (if you're a hero, you shouldn't rely on mediocre bastards), and she died on the island later.

Unless I am wrong, this hypothesis predicts that there must be a defunct aircraft somewhere around the island.

Toxique Girls feat. Ewa Farna

Milky Way will crash to Andromeda Galaxy

2012-06-01T12:19:00.001+02:00

The Sun will go red giant in 7.5 billion years but long before that moment, in about 4-6 billion years from now, "we" will be reminded of a neighbor we considered so well-known yet so detached.

As The Telegraph and others told us minutes ago, new accurate NASA measurements which employed the good old Hubble lead to a seemingly "scary" conclusion.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, will crash into the Andromeda Galaxy before the Sun will go red giant. The picture of the galaxy above will be getting closer and closer before it starts to merge with the Milky Way. At some point when the Andromeda stars get to our vicinity, "we" will see that the night sky is transforming dramatically. Each thousand of years, something changes substantially as the locations of many stars change by more than a light year. ;-)

But you shouldn't scream that the sky is falling. This collision of objects as diluted as the galaxies isn't much different from your country's entry to the European Union. It shouldn't really affect the individual stars and their solar systems substantially.

The Sun will be located and moving at another place in the future confederate Milky Andromeda Galaxy. But chances are high that neither the Sun nor the planets will collide into any intruders from Andromeda. Note that the Earth is just 8 light minutes from the Sun while the distances between adjacent stars are about light years. You should actually square the ratio to get an estimate of the probability that something important will perturb the inner corners of the Solar System.

The Andromeda Galaxy has about 1 trillion stars while the Milky Way has 3 times fewer; so we're the smaller guy, the DDR of the German reunification. But the ratio between the galaxy sizes is much closer to one than for typical collisions. The current distance between the galaxies is about 2.5 million light years so you see that since the birth of Jesus Christ, we have gotten about 1 light year closer to Andromeda.

Is that a really bad luck that our galaxy crashes another one or is it common?

The diameter of the Andromeda Galaxy is about 140,000 light years at the longest separation. The visible Universe contains between 100 billion and 500 billion galaxies. The visible Universe itself may be visualized as a ball of radius 40 billion light years. Divide it by the third root of 100-500 billion to see that each galaxy occupies a volume comparable to the ball of radius between 5 million and 9 million light years which is actually greater than the current distance between the two galaxies we care about, 2.5 million light years. So these two sisters are clumped together in a cluster.

The actual volume occupied by the galaxy whose radius is just 70,000 light years which is of course much smaller than that. But over the billions of years, the galaxies probe different relative positions and this motion increases the chances that they collide at some point. A relative position is changed by something like 140,000 light years in 280 million years or so. Each 280 million years, a galaxy gets another "fully independent" chance to collide with another one.

Well, the Universe will only be 20 billion years old so less than 100 of such "chances" are given to each galaxy to collide with another one. This number 100 still seems much lower than the relative volume occupied by galaxies, something like 70,000 divided by 7 million, everything cubed, which is 1 million.

So this uniform estimate suggests that it's indeed a bad luck, 1 in 10,000, that we collide another galaxy. However, the clustering of galaxies makes the odds substantially higher. However, I still believe that only a minority of galaxies experiences a similar collision.

Old Pilsen

This was about the future 4-6 billion years. Now, the past centuries. I spent quite some time by browsing pictures of the Old Royal City of Pilsen, and the Very Old Royal City of Pilsen, too. ;-) What may have inspired me was the demolition of the Palace of Culture, the "House of Horror", a socialist building that just didn't make it. The demolition was completed a week ago. It's just fascinating to look at places you know intimately well how they were changing throughout centuries and decades.

See George Krejci's collection (he's an old Czech American guy) and a smaller Tomato iToday collection. Pilsen used to be so elegant – and during socialism, it has looked like a city right after the war for 42 years. It's amazing how the communists screwed any visual decency and converted a city of proud aristocrat-equivalents to a city of barely alive workers who are satisfied with basic needs, something that was clearly improving after 1989 again.

How to avoid national redirect of Google, Blogspot

2012-06-01T11:44:00.000+02:00

Just open motls.blogspot.com/ncr (and manually add /ncr to the URL in your bookmarks)

Google began to redirect the blogspot.com traffic to specific national locations. So far, dozens of nations are affected, aside from the original three, especially:

Australia: motls.blogspot.com.au
New Zealand: motls.blogspot.co.nz
India: motls.blogspot.in

Canada: motls.blogspot.ca
United Kingdom: motls.blogspot.co.uk
Germany: motls.blogspot.de
France: motls.blogspot.fr
Spain: motls.blogspot.com.es
Japan: motls.blogspot.jp
Brazil: motls.blogspot.com.br
Mexico: motls.blogspot.mx
Argentina: motls.blogspot.com.ar
Italy: motls.blogspot.it
Portugal: motls.blogspot.pt
Sweden: motls.blogspot.se

Additions from early May 2012: redirected since June 1st

Czechia: motls.blogspot.cz
Slovakia: motls.blogspot.sk
Austria: motls.blogspot.co.at
Hungary: motls.blogspot.hu
Switzerland: motls.blogspot.ch
Denmark: motls.blogspot.dk
Netherlands: motls.blogspot.nl
Belgium: motls.blogspot.be
Romania: motls.blogspot.ro
Ireland: motls.blogspot.ie
Norway: motls.blogspot.no
Finland: motls.blogspot.fi
Greece: motls.blogspot.gr
Israel: motls.blogspot.co.il
Hong Kong: motls.blogspot.hk
Singapore: motls.blogspot.sg
Taiwan: motls.blogspot.tw
Korea: motls.blogspot.kr

See the diverse URLs in the last 100 TRF visits. The United States will keep their "global" dotcom suffix in order to appreciate that Al Gore, a child of America, has invented the Internet.

New countries are likely to be added into this list in the future. I hope that some readers who are keen tourists have already visited the branches of TRF in the whole world! My work shouldn't change; the only difference is that I will have to write every blog entry 193 times (assuming that countries outside the United Nations will have no TRF). Exactly one-half of the (7.2 million) TRF visitors came from the U.S.; TRF has been visited by people in 231 countries (see the last animated counter in the right sidebar of the TRF main page, play with it).

The purpose of these new domains is for Google to be able to impose legal restrictions of the content on a country-specific basis.

For example, if it were hypothetically illegal in the country of freedom called Iran to post blog entries informing the population that Allah is a silly superstition and the country's political and religious leaders are medieval bigots and jerks who should be shot, Iran may request Google to block a particular blog entry and only allow the rest of this blog which is totally kosher, even for hardcore Muslim bigots who really need everything to be kosher. ;-)

(I know it's "halal" in the truly kosher ternminology, it was supposed to be a joke.)

There's almost no problem with the new domains except for one thing: the Echo/JS-Kit "fast" commenting system (previously Haloscan) divides the commenting into different national groups, too. I will try to convince them to translate the URLs to "dotcom" but there's a fix now:

The only known fix for Australians and others who want to see the "global" discussion at motls.blogspot.com is to open the following URL:

motls.blogspot.com/ncr

where "ncr" stands for "no country redirect". You may also get to this URL by clicking at the big title "the reference frame" at the top of this blog at any moment. You may also prevent redirect for individual pages; "ncr" always comes right after ".com", e.g.

motls.blogspot.com/ncr/2012/03/what-skeptics-of-climate-catastrophe.html

By using this URL, you should be able to view the old-fashioned global The Reference Frame instead of The Australian Reference Frame or the Deutsch Bezugsssystem, and participate in the global discussions. I hope that the *.com address remains in place even if you click at something in the archive. Incidentally, the ncr trick also works for google.com itself. There are many more countries in which the Google traffic (the search engine) is redirected. If you don't want the google.cz where you're redirected from google.com in Czechia, open

google.com/ncr

Thanks to Tom of Perth

Matrix theory: a novel alternative to second quantization etc.

2012-05-31T17:37:00.000+02:00

I still consider Matrix theory (BFSS, 1996) one of the most conceptually original developments in theoretical physics of the last 20 years.

It is a relatively unusual way to describe physics in the 11-dimensional asymptotically flat vacuum of M-theory – and in other sectors of string theory. The physical phenomena are completely equivalent as in other descriptions; but the way how they're encoded in the mathematics looks very different.

There are several natural pedagogical ways to get to Matrix theory and I will try to sketch the following three of them:

try to study some obviously beautiful quantum mechanical models in extreme limits (the infinite number of colors) and try to find a simplified description of this limit;
start with M-theory whose explicit equations weren't known before BFSS 1996 and transform it via dualities and tricks into something that you may describe;
try to invent a completely new framework (different from quantum field theory and second quantization) to describe multiparticle states and interactions between the particles, among other things, that may lead to the same kind of physics.

It's the last approach that was used in the title of this blog entry.

Some hindsight is needed to describe the situation in this way and some of this hindsight is often missing in the pioneering papers; BFSS 1996 is no exception. But we have it now and we may look at the situation from various perspectives and avoid some speculative comments that were discussed at the beginning but that were found to be invalid.

The third approach seems to be the most conceptually valuable one but let me start from the first approach.

Maximally supersymmetric gauge quantum mechanics

This year, the $\NNN=4$ gauge theory in $d=4$ celebrated its 35th birthday. It's obviously a beautiful theory, the most supersymmetric non-gravitational theory in $d=4$ you may find. It may be derived as a dimensional reduction of the 10-dimensional supersymmetric theory; as a low-energy limit of the dynamics of D3-branes; and in many other ways.

It has many cool symmetries including the $SL(2,\ZZ)$ S-duality group (which is able to exchange electricity and magnetism, the weak coupling and the strong coupling, electrically charged particles with magnetic monopoles), the superconformal symmetry, the dual superconformal symmetry, their infinite-dimensional extended and completed union, the Yangian, and others. For those reasons, various scattering amplitudes, while nonzero, dramatically simplify relatively to the form you would expect in a field theory with a similar Lagrangian but fewer supercharges. Many of those features may be exposed in the twistor-based approaches.

As I have mentioned above, this 4-dimensional theory may be viewed as the dimensional reduction of the 10-dimensional gauge theory whose action looks like this:\[

\eq{
S &= \int \dd^{10} x\, \LL,\\
\LL &={\rm Tr}\left[-\frac{1}{4}F_{\mu\nu}F^{\mu\nu} + i\bar\Psi D^\mu \gamma_\mu \Psi
\right]
}

\] It's an ordinary Yang-Mills Lagrangian for a gauge field associated with a gauge group we will take to be $U(N)$, i.e. $SU(N)\times U(1)$ including the $U(1)$. The unitary groups are the least complicated infinite family of simple compact Lie groups, and for a Majorana-Weyl (real-and-chiral) fermion field (covariant derivatives have to be used). This innocent combination is enough to produce an exactly supersymmetric classical (or effective) field theory. It's non-renormalizable in $d=10$ but its dimensional reductions to $d\leq 4$ are renormalizable.

By dimensional reductions, we mean that the "excessive" dimensions are compactified on a torus – they are made periodic – and the radii of the torus are sent to zero. For this reason, finite-energy excitations are forced to be constant in these dimensions. Moreover, the rotational symmetry between the compactified and uncompactified dimensions becomes badly broken. It is no longer sensible to consider the components of the gauge field $A_\mu$ along the compactified dimensions $\mu$ to be components of a gauge field. It's better to consider them scalars.

Off-topic but fun: A reader has pointed out that in the new version of the Hartle-Hawking-Hertog paper, your humble correspondent and HB are thanked for the innocent sign error whose impact so far looks isolated (but I still believe that there must be some other errors unless the paper shows some really important loophole in the Ehrenfest "theorem" way of thinking about the evolution in quantum gravity).

For example, if we dimensionally reduce from $d=10$ to $d=4$, six of the components of the gauge field (whole matrices in the adjoint of the gauge group) will become six scalars: they're the source of the $SO(6)\sim SU(4)$ "R-symmetry" of the $d=4$ gauge theory. Once we get some scalars, some gauge couplings for fermions also produce the Yukawa couplings as a result. It's convenient to decompose the fields under the unbroken $SO(d-1,1)$ i.e. $SO(3,1)$ Lorentz symmetry acting on the large dimensions which is a subgroup of the original $SO(9,1)$ symmetry.

This 2007 model was called Toyota Matrix M-theory. No kidding. Those East German engineers who refused the German reunification plan to produce a competing car, The Trouble With Trabant: Not Even Wrong.

The 35th anniversary article discussed the reduction to $d=4$ which gives the prettiest "descendant" of the 10-dimensional gauge theory, one that has the most amazing properties at the quantum level. But we may dimensionally reduce the theory to lower dimensions, too. For example, we may reduce it to $d=1$ spacetime dimension. That's the minimum you may naively think of even though the reduction to $d=0$ may actually be important, too.

What does it mean to have a $d=1$ quantum field theory? It has one spacetime dimension. We want at least one dimension of time. So a simple counting, $1-1=0$, implies that time is the only dimension on which our fields depend. What does it mean? Well, it means that it's not a full-fledged "quantum field theory" anymore. It's a quantum mechanical model. Instead of fields such as $\Phi^6(x,y,z,t)$, we have "fields" that may be renamed as $X^6(t)$. They're quantum observables. You see that the field content is completely analogous to the textbook models of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.

In similar contexts, "quantum mechanics" is often used as a synonym for a 1-dimensional quantum field theory. (Of course, "quantum mechanics" also means – and mainly means – the general framework of modern physics given by the Copenhagen school's postulates that all quantum theories, including higher-dimensional quantum field theories and string theory, obey.)

You might argue that quantum mechanics has advantages over higher-dimensional quantum field theories. It doesn't need any renormalization and similar stuff. The wave function is just $\psi(x_1,x_2,\dots)$ and obeys some partial differential equations in a finite number of variables. There's no room for infinities. Everything looks simple. Everything that annoys you about regularization, renormalization, renormalization group etc. is fundamentally absent here. (Well, it's not quite true because some of these things have nontrivial analogues in $d=1$ but it's still true that you may choose a fundamentally unequivocal, finite description of quantum mechanical models.)

Fine, so what is the quantum mechanical model we are considering here? Its Lagrangian looks like this:\[

\eq{
S &= \int \dd t\,\LL\\
L &= \frac{1}{2g}{\rm Tr} \zav{
\dot X^i \dot X^i + 2\theta^T\dot\theta+\frac{1}{2}[X^i,X^j]^2-2\theta^T \gamma_i[\theta,X^i]
}
}

\] You see that the Lagrangian contains some Klein-Gordon kinetic terms for the nine scalars $X^i$, Dirac-like kinetic terms for the 16 components of the fermions $\theta$, a quartic commutator-squared-based potential for $X^i$ that arises from the quartic terms in $F_{\mu\nu}F^{\mu\nu}$ in the 10-dimensional gauge theory, and a Yukawa term. All the terms are traces over the $N\times N$ matrices, just like in any other version of the $U(N)$ gauge theory with fields in the adjoint.

I should be more explicit in explaining how many degrees of freedom the theory actually has. Well, all the fields transform as Hermitian matrices – i.e. adjoint representation – under the $U(N)$ gauge group. Moreover, the bosonic fields $X^i$ arising from $A_\mu$ carry an extra index $i=1,2,\dots,9$ which corresponds to the 9 spatial dimensions we dimensionally reduced. The remaining component $A_0$ may be (but doesn't have to be) set to $A_0=0$ by the gauge redundancy.

So the fields $X^i$ are nine Hermitian $N\times N$ matrices. Because we ultimately want to study the quantum theory, all the components of these matrices are operators. Much like in normal non-relativistic quantum mechanics, we find out that there are canonical momenta $\Pi^i$, also nine Hermitian matrices, and they have the commutators\[

[X^i_{kl},\Pi^j_{mn} ] = i\hbar \delta^{ij} \delta_{nk}\delta_{lm}

\] where the pairing of the indices is determined by the $U(N)$ symmetry: just appreciate that in the index pairs $kl,mn$, one index is "lower" and one is "upper" (we suppressed the difference to streamline the notation only) and each Kronecker delta-symbol has to have one upper index and one lower index, too. I've restored $\hbar$ to emphasize that this is a "modest" extension of the undergraduate quantum mechanics models.

Now, we must also discuss the fermionic degrees of freedom $\theta$. They arose from the Majorana-Weyl (real chiral) spinor of the 10-dimensional gauge theory so they include 16 real components that now transform as a 16-component real spinor of $SO(9)$, the manifest rotational symmetry acting on the scalars $X^i$ as well. When promoted to the adjoint of $U(N)$, each component becomes a Hermitian matric again. Much like in the usual quantization of Dirac fields, these degrees of freedom are Grassmann i.e. fermionic variables that are canonical momenta to themselves (because the kinetic term in the Lagrangian only contains one time derivative):\[

\{ \theta^a_{kl},\theta^b_{mn} \} = \hbar \delta^{ab}\delta_{nk}\delta_{lm}

\] where $a,b=1,2,\dots, 16$ and the remaining commutators (all the anticommutators have already been written because they're only appropriate for pairs of fermionic objects) vanish.

So except for the high number of dimensions indicated by the indices such as $i,j$ that take 9 values and except for the extra degeneracy of the coordinates given by the gauge indices $k,l,m,n=1,2,\dots,N$, and except for the extra fermionic variables, this is a pretty normal quantum mechanical model similar to the non-relativistic toy models you know from your undergraduate course of quantum mechanics (or its equivalent if you are self-taught).

We really want to say that the state of the physical system described by this $U(N)$ quantum mechanical model may be encoded in a wave function $\psi(x,\theta)$. How many variables does it depend on?

Well, there are $9N^2$ real components in the matrices $X^i_{mn}$: note that the Hermiticity reduces the number of real (i.e. Hermitian, when treated as operators on the Hilbert space) components $2N^2$ exactly to one-half of that. The canonical momenta $\Pi^i_{mn}$ are just $-i\hbar$ times the derivatives with respect to the variables $X^i_{mn}$. And then we have the fermionic coordinates; out of the $16N^2$ components of $\theta^a_{mn}$, one-half of them are taken to be the coordinates and the remaining one-half may be taken to be the canonical momenta. So we have $8N^2$ Grassmann variables.

Because the Taylor expansion in the Grassmann variables terminates, we may rewrite the wave function in terms of components and their number is simply $2^{8N^2}$ because each of the $8N^2$ variables is either present or absent in the given monomial in the power law expansion. For example, for $N=5$, we have $200$ fermionic coordinates and the number of component functions is therefore $2^{200}\sim 10^{60}$. Each of these component functions depends on $9N^2=225$ real bosonic variables.

To solve the quantum mechanical model for $N=5$ by the brute force, you simply calculate some coupled linear partial differential equations for $10^{60}$ functions that depend on 225 variables. It's a trivial task you've been doing in your kindergarten, at least in principle, and you may totally avoid any complications with regularization and renormalization.

I am partly kidding because the number of components and coordinates looks horrifyingly high and for realistic simulations of the large $N$ limit, you really don't want $N=5$ but something like $N=100$. But it's just a problem for the naive brute-force approaches. If you understand the model well and you know some maths, you may find methods to calculate properties of the model which are doable on one line or two. Or several pages. It shouldn't shock you that the naive brute-force simulation is neither the only way nor the recommended way to attack a seemingly mathematically difficult problem although this claim might be controversial among many laymen including physics fans.

If it makes you happier, the number of independent variables on which the wave function for a physical state depends is effectively $8N^2$ and not $9N^2$ because all physical states have to be invariant under the $N^2$ generators of $U(N)$; well, only $N^2-1$ of these conditions are nontrivial. After all, it's a gauge theory and therefore this gauge-invariance condition for the physical states comes from varying the action with respect to $A_0$: the corresponding charge $Q=J_0$ – which is an $N\times N$ matrix – has to vanish.

Fine, we know a certain supersymmetric quantum mechanical model – a quantum field theory in 0+1 dimensions – that may be in principle studied. Remarkably enough, the union of the Hilbert spaces from all these $U(N)$ models for all integer values of $N$ gives you the Hilbert space of M-theory in 11 dimensions! It contains everything you expect in a consistent theory of quantum gravity, including gravitons and their superpartners, their interactions, gravitational force obeying the equivalence principle, the 10+1-dimensional Lorentz symmetry, evaporating black holes that preserve the information, M2-branes and M5-branes (and strings and D-branes in compactified, stringy versions of the matrix model, including the right stringy interactions), and other things.

The quantum mechanical model was known before it was conjectured by BFSS that the model was relevant for M-theory in 11 dimensions. It was known as the description of D0-branes, point-like particles moving in the 10-dimensional type IIA string theory, at low energies. Just like D3-branes in type IIB string theory give rise to the $d=4$ 35-years-old gauge theory at long distances, a similar statement holds for the D0-branes.

However, you should only say that you qualitatively understand what the model describes for a finite and small enough value of $N$. When some parameters such as $N$, the size of the matrices, are sent to infinity, the most important (and lowest-energy) objects and processes in the theory may describe something that admits (if not requires) a qualitatively different language. In this case, the particles originally viewed as D0-branes in a 10-dimensional string theory (where they're just a part of physics and interact with other objects) actually become the complete description of an 11-dimensional theory of quantum gravity, namely M-theory.

This conclusion may look shocking – how an ordinary undergraduate quantum mechanical model (which isn't even a quantum field theory, so we don't see how it could contain multiparticle states with indistinguishable particles and/or Lorentz invariance) could contain all the marvels of quantum gravity including Lorentz invariance, graviton scattering, equivalence principle, black holes? But remarkably enough, it does.

I will postpone the explanation why the matrix model includes the right building blocks of M-theory and why there's no detectable contradiction to the final section of this blog entry – about the conceptual leap. But before we get there, let us look at a proof that the matrix model is correct.

Seiberg's derivation of Matrix theory in DLCQ

The October 1997 proof was originally presented by Nathan Seiberg and, in a slightly less complete version (but more extended in some other directions we're not interested in here), by Ashoke Sen. So why is the matrix model correct?

Consider M-theory in the asymptotically flat 11-dimensional Minkowski spacetime parameterized by $X^0\dots X^{10}$. We want to find an explicit Lagrangian that describes all the objects in this 11-dimensional theory of quantum gravity – which may be obtained as the strong coupling limit of type IIA string theory or heterotic-E string theory.

It's useful to single out two light-like directions or coordinates,\[

X^\pm = \frac{X^{0}\pm X^{10}}{\sqrt{2}},

\] and use $X^\pm$ instead of $X^0$ and $X^{10}$. The light-like coordinates are very useful in relativity. For example, the expression $t^2-z^2$ appearing in the invariants may be rewritten as $(t+z)(t-z)$: the difference of two terms may be written as one term that factorizes. Correspondingly, it's useful to consider the light-like components of the momentum etc. such as $P^+$.

The states in M-theory have continuous, non-negative values of $P^+$. However, it's very convenient to put the theory in a certain "box" for the momentum to become discrete. However, we don't want the box to matter so its size has to be sent to infinity. More explicitly, we want to make the following identification of the light-like coordinate $X^-$:\[

X^- \approx X^- + 2\pi R.

\] As long as $R$ is huge – imagine that it is hundreds of billions of light years (although the citizens of the 11-dimensional empire don't necessarily use these units for the distances in their completely different world) – the identification doesn't affect the local physics. If a copy of your local experiment is happening hundreds of billions of light years away from you, it shouldn't matter in your lab. We implicitly use some "modest version" of locality in M-theory here.

However, the change of the $X^-$ coordinate isn't a pure translation in space; it contains a translation in time by the same amount. In fact, you should be worried about the consistency of this light-like compactification. If we made this periodic identification for $X^0$, a time-like coordinate, we would create closed time-like curves which would make the theory inconsistent. On the other hand, a spatial compactification of $X^{10}$ would be harmless. What about the marginal case, the light-like compactification?

Well, we may take it as the limit of spatial compactifications that are OK which should be enough for you to believe that it's OK, too. So we're taking an M-theoretical spacetime and identify points that differ by something like the vector\[

(M,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,M+\epsilon)

\] in the usual coordinates $X^{0\dots 10}$. It's a nearly null interval but it's a little bit spacelike because of the extra $\epsilon$ in the last coordinate. We may scale the huge $M\sim R$ and $\epsilon$ in such a way that the the proper length of the vector above is tiny, much shorter than the 11-dimensional Planck length.

However, if that's so, we may use the Lorentz symmetry of the 11-dimensional M-theory – an assumption supported by lots of evidence, including the Lorentz symmetry of the 11-dimensional supergravity, the low-energy limit of M-theory – and boost the vector above to a simple vector of the form\[

(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,\epsilon')

\] whose last spatial coordinate is much shorter than the 11-dimensional Planck length. Note that the momenta of all the particles in the original M-theory get boosted by a correspondingly dramatic boost. But we know the spacetime in which these boosted objects propagate: it's M-theory compactified on a very short spatial circle given by $\epsilon'$. But it's nothing else than type IIA string theory at a weak coupling!

Moreover, the null component of momentum $P^+$ which is the complementary variable to $X^-$ is quantized because $X^-$ is compact, \[

P^+ = \frac{N}{R},\quad N\in\ZZ

\] We wanted to describe objects with a fixed and finite momentum in the 11-dimensional Planck units, i.e. $P^+$ is finite, and because $R$ needs to be sent to infinity, the integer $N$ has to be sent to infinity for these interesting states, too.

However, as we boosted the light-like interval defining the light-like compactification to a spatial one, we have a new interpretation for $N$: it's the number of units of momentum in the direction of the short compactified coordinate $X^{10}\sim X^{10}+\epsilon'$ we mentioned at some point above. But the momentum in the extra 11th dimension is nothing else than the number of D0-branes. So the original state of M-theory is equivalent, via this boost and in the limit, to a state involving $N$ D0-branes in type IIA string theory.

When you analyze the right role of the $R\to\infty$, $\epsilon'\to 0$ limit, the relevant estimated magnitude of the energy of the D0-branes (as a function of the finite momenta and energies in the original M-theory spacetimes), the precision we need for this energy in the limit, and the states and objects that may be neglected in this limit because they're infinitely times heavier, you will find out that what you need to describe the original states with $P^+=N/R$ in the M-theory spacetime is nothing else than the low-energy limit of the dynamics of $N$ D0-branes in type IIA string theory at a vanishingly low coupling (because of the small $\epsilon'$).

It's nothing else than the supersymmetric quantum mechanics model we have already written above; for some time, the model was also referred to as the DKPS model because of a pre-matrix-theory paper that studied it.

So the Hilbert space of the modestly light-like-compactified M-theory is the direct sum of the Hilbert spaces of the $U(N)$ matrix quantum mechanical models for $N$ D0-branes. The Hamiltonian of the matrix model gets directly translated as the light-like Hamiltonian (generator of evolution in a light-like direction) in M-theory. The relevant value of $N$ for the generic states in M-theory with finite energies is the $N\to\infty$ limit.

As we have seen, there exists a proof that the BFSS matrix model is an equivalent description of M-theory. The proof only relies on the Lorentz invariance of M-theory; its well-known relationship with type IIA string theory; some elementary derivable properties of D0-branes in type IIA string theory; and the irrelevance of the near-light-like compactification if the radius is sufficiently long.

But we may still be shocked by the claim that this seemingly naive non-relativistic quantum mechanical model with 9 bosonic matrices $X^i$ describes an 11-dimensional, and not just 10-dimensional, theory that is moreover Lorentz-invariant in the large $N$ limit and includes gravity, gravitons, gravitinos, multiparticle states with indistinguishable particles, membranes, fivebranes, black holes, and their interactions including all the right loop corrections that could be derived from effective quantum field theories, among many other things.

Can we see that those things are present in the theory? This brings me to the final "megapoint" I want to make, namely that Matrix theory is a really cool and original way to mathematically describe many processes that used to be described – and are still being described, in most cases – by totally different mathematics.

All roads lead to string theory: describing quantum gravity in totally new, revolutionary yet consistent languages

In order to understand what kind of physical phenomena Matrix theory allows and implies, it's useful to start with small values of $N$. For such small values, the M-theoretical physics does depend on the details of the light-like compactification; we're away from the large $N$ limit. However, many things acquire their expected properties already for small $N$.

Start with $N=0$. The degrees of freedom are $0\times 0$ matrices. In other words, there are no degrees of freedom. There is a unique wave function (up to normalization) that depends on them, namely $\psi() = 1$. This state vector may be identified with the vacuum state of M-theory as it carries no energy or momentum.

That was easy: too easy. Let's continue with $N=1$. That's the last matrix model that will be easy and fully solvable, of course. This model should describe all states in M-theory that have $P^+=1/R$, the minimal positive value of the light-like momentum. We are dealing with a $U(1)$ gauge theory in 0+1 dimensions. The bosons $X^i$ and $\theta^a$ are $1\times 1$ matrices so they're not really matrices at all.

Because $U(1)$ is an Abelian group (you know it from electromagnetism), all the commutator terms vanish. So the Hamiltonian is just quadratic, namely\[

P^0_{\rm BFSS} = \frac{(\Pi^i)^2}{2}.

\] That's it. It's just like the non-relativistic kinetic energy – for a particle in 9 spatial dimensions. No potential because the potential terms vanish. No terms from fermions, either. You might be puzzled what this non-relativistic formula has to do with the relativistic physics in 10+1 dimensions. The answer is that the right interpretation of the energy in the quantum mechanical model is $P^-$, a light-like component of the energy-momentum vector that is treated as energy in the light cone quantization.

Massless particles' energy and momentum obeys \[

(P^0)^2-(P^i)^2 - (P^{10})^2 = 0, \quad i=1,2,\dots ,9

\] which may be rewritten, using the light-like components as\[

2P^+ P^- - (P^i)^2 = 0, \quad P^- = \frac{(P^i)^2}{2P^+}

\] which has the simple quadratic, non-relativistic form! So the light-like description which is the ultimate limit of the "infinite momentum frame" which described ultrarelativistic particles is mathematically analogous to non-relativistic physics. Note that $2P^+$ is just a constant in the sector with $P^+=1/R$ i.e. $N=1$.

You could even say that the light-like momentum component $P^+$ plays the role of the non-relativistic mass $m$. Also, if you use the light-like coordinates, you may find a copy of the Galilean group that is embedded, without any deformation, right into the Lorentz group. At low speeds, relativity reduces to non-relativistic physics approximately; but at the speed of light, a copy of non-relativistic physics is embedded in the relativistic one exactly!

We see that the $N=1$ model describes particles with arbitrary values of the nine "totally transverse" components of the momentum $P^i={\rm Tr}(\Pi^i)$. The tenth component treated as a spacelike one, the light-like component $P^+$, is equal to $1/R$ which is a fixed constant. That's OK because we're considering a sector of the Hilbert space only; the states with higher values of $P^+$ will be found in the models with higher values of $N$.

The remaining component, i.e. the other light-like component $P^-$, is treated as energy and the BFSS Hamiltonian gives us the right dispersion relations already for $N=1$. We shouldn't forget about the fermionic degrees of freedom. There are 16 Hermitian objects $\theta^a$ transforming as the real spinor of $SO(9)$. They're serving as momenta to themselves so you may combine them into 8 Grassmann variables and their 8 Grassmann derivatives.

By Taylor expanding the wave function in the 8 Grassmann variables, you get $2^8=256$ components. That's exactly the number of polarizations in the graviton supermultiplet of 11-dimensional supergravity. Recall that these get decomposed to 128 fermionic components (of the gravitino) and 128=44+84 bosonic components including the physical polarizations of the graviton as well as those of the C-field three-form potential.

One may actually define the 32 real supercharges we expect in M-theory. 16 of them are nothing else than the 16 supercharges of the maximally supersymmetric gauge theory; the remaining 16 of them are trivial or kinematical and these generators are given simply by ${\rm Tr}(\theta^a)$. This decomposition of supercharges to the "complicated dynamical" ones (one-half) and the "trivial kinematic" ones (the other half) is a consequence of the light cone treatment. To get from the maximally supersymmetric gauge theory to the maximally supersymmetric supergravity, we needed to double the number of supercharges (from 16 to 32) and the existence of the kinematic or trivial supercharges did the job for us.

We have seen that already the non-interacting $N=1$ model knows about the number (and representations under rotations) of the components of the supergraviton multiplet and the right dispersion relation (relationship between energy and momentum). That's quite a success for such a simple model. Note that we only have one particle; our derivations tell us that there can't exist any multiparticle or otherwise complicated states that would have the minimal value of the longitudinal momentum.

Screws and Nuts by Mandrage, a Pilsner band, has been among the Czech radios' top 3 songs for more than half a year. The observation that men and women are like screws and nuts obviously has a sexual connotation but most physicists don't appreciate that the Czech word for nuts in this sense, "matice", is the same word as one for "matrices", and moreover, matrix strings are screwing around the matrices as the monodromy introduces a permutation. This breathtaking ignorance of rudimentary Czech among most physicists and their lacking sense of humor has led to the widespread but flawed terminology "matrix strings" for what should actually be called "screwing strings". ;-)

But the real fun only starts with $N=2$ when we obtain the first real matrices. Let us talk about all the values $N\gt 1$ simultaneously. The first observation we want to make is that the $U(N)$ matrix model does contain states composed of several objects.

In quantum field theory, one may create multiparticle states as\[

\ket\psi = a^\dagger_\text{here} a^\dagger_\text{there}\ket 0.

\] One simply acts with several creation operators at different places to create several objects. As long as the places are sufficiently distant, the Hilbert spaces associated with the places are independent and the whole Hilbert space isn't far from a tensor product of the Hilbert spaces associated with the individual regions.

However, the matrix model isn't a quantum field theory. It doesn't have any creation and annihilation operators for particles. How can it possibly contain multiparticle states? The right indistinguishability conditions and statistics? And other things? It looks like some fully well-defined but seemingly non-relativistic undergraduate quantum mechanical model.

The matrices are the answer. A funny thing about large (or any) matrices is that they may take special matrix values that are block-diagonal. Imagine that the matrices for all $X^i$ and similarly $\theta^a$ have the following form:\[

X^i = \pmatrix{ \text{WOLF}^i & \heartsuit^i \\ \heartsuit^{i,\dagger} & \text{BUNNY}^i }

\] Here, WOLF is a square matrix that contains the information about positions of particles that make up an object called WOLF. BUNNY is a similar square matrix whose size may be the same or different. And the hearts are some generally rectangular off-block-diagonal blocks.

We see that large enough matrices are capable of including several objects, such as WOLF and BUNNY. The longitudinal momentum $P^+$ is linked to the linear size of the matrices so $P^+$ of the WOLF-BUNNY composite states is simply the sum of the values of $P^+$ that these two animals would carry separately. And indeed, if we set $\heartsuit=0$ for a while, the Hamiltonian for the large matrices simply reduces to the sum of the Hamiltonians for both animals: just recall how a trace of a block-diagonal matrix behaves. The two animals evolve independently.

What about the heart? Because of the commutator terms in the Lagrangian, the off-diagonal elements of $X^i$ in the off-block-diagonal rectangles $\heartsuit$ (and their Hermitian conjugate ones) actually acquire a mass. By a mass, we mean the term in the Hamiltonian that you would associate with a massive field such as the W-boson field, $m^2 \cdot \heartsuit^\dagger \heartsuit/2$. The value of the mass is actually proportional to the distance between WOLF and BUNNY, assuming that their internal sizes are much smaller than their relative distance.

In other words, these off-block-diagonal matrix elements become harmonic oscillators with huge frequencies. The further WOLF and BUNNY are, the higher frequencies we face, the further the equally spaced energy levels of the harmonic oscillators are from each other, and the more we may neglect the possibility that the harmonic oscillator could actually be found in an excited state. We may approximate the $\heartsuit$ harmonic oscillators by assuming that they're in the ground state most of the time (or, classically, at the $\heartsuit=0$ point). Only when WOLF and BUNNY get close enough to each other, a significant chance that the harmonic oscillator gets excited emerges. The virtual effects of this harmonic oscillator – its propagators – transmit influences between WOLF and BUNNY. Of course, the interaction between them is love, a reason I picked $\heartsuit$. ;-)

Once again, we see that the matrices may have a block-diagonal form. The blocks on the diagonal remember the coordinates of particles in the subsystems while the off-block-diagonal blocks have $X$ mostly equal to zero but their ability to get excited or nonzero is actually the one and only source of the interactions between the subsystems!

I won't be proving that the interactions induced in this way are exactly those you expect from M-theory, e.g. that they reduce to supergravity at very low energies. But it's true. Instead, let us discuss some simpler but still very interesting issues.

We said that there were many harmonic oscillators with frequencies scaling with the distance between WOLF and BUNNY. Don't they give us huge zero-point energies $\hbar\omega/2$ that would also depend on the WOLF-BUNNY distance which would drive WOLF and BUNNY towards each other with a constant force? The answer is that such terms really do arise but they get exactly canceled!

The other compensating sources we haven't considered are the fermions. The off-block-diagonal elements of those 16 $\theta^a$ also behave as harmonic oscillators, but the fermionic ones. The zero-point energies will scale as $-\hbar\omega/2$ where $\omega$ is again proportional to the BUNNY-WOLF distance. And if you're careful about all the factors, you will find out that those 16 Hermitian fermions exactly cancel the bosonic oscillators from 8 matrices $X^i$ and that's exactly the right number because the ninth one is the longitudinal one, parallel to the BUNNY-WOLF separation, and it doesn't get massive at all. Supersymmetry actually plays a key role in making the individual separated objects independent and keeping their force low at very high separation. It's rather unlikely to find a non-supersymmetric matrix model that would have the same desirable properties.

That's great. We have multi-particle states. But do we also have gravitons and gravitinos with $P^+\gt 1/R$? The answer is Yes. They have $P^+=N/R$ and are represented by the $N\times N$ blocks. In other words, we may find such a graviton as the only object in a state of the $U(N)$ matrix model. Now, $U(N)$ and its adjoint representation roughly decomposes to $SU(N)\times U(1)$. The $U(1)$ part behaves much like the $N=1$ model, except that the value of $P^-$, our Hamiltonian, gets correctly rescaled: recall that $P^-$ is inversely proportional to $P^+$ and that's what a calculation yields (after the $P^i$ momentum is fairly divided among the $N$ entries to keep the trace constant).

The relative, interacting, $SU(N)$ degrees of freedom describe the relative coordinates of those $N$ D0-branes. And one may prove via index theorems that this model has exactly one state of a vanishing energy: there must exist a mathematically fascinating ground state wave function with a vanishing energy that solves a rather complicated differential equation in $9(N^2-1)$ bosonic variables even though no one can write how this wave function looks like too explicitly (the most understandable argument in favor of the state's existence that I know is based on the interpolation between the BFSS model and screwing string theory which is "more solvable" in the weakly coupled limit). When this state is tensor-multiplied with the degrees of freedom of the $U(1)$ model, we get the right single-graviton or single-gravitino states with all the required polarizations and all the required values of the momenta.

As you have noticed, the matrix model differs from non-relativistic multiparticle quantum mechanics by having the off-diagonal entries of all the matrices $X^i_{mn}$. Otherwise the diagonal entries $X^i_{nn}$ (no summing) behave in a very similar way to $X^i_n$ in non-relativistic quantum mechanical models where $i$ labels a direction in space and $n$ labels a particle. But the BFSS matrix model also yields the off-diagonal entries, whole matrices! There is a sense in which this extension of position operators to matrices is analogous to the conceptual transformation that was imposed by the quantum revolution. But we're doing it at another level: each matrix entry $X^i_{mn}$ in the BFSS model is an operator acting on the Hilbert space; we're just saying that there are many such operators so that one may organize them into new matrices whose matrix indices remotely resemble the indices labeling one of many particles in multiparticle quantum mechanics. But there are two such indices for each matrix of position operators!

Another thing you could worry about is the following issue: are the gravitons indistinguishable particles? And do they have the right statistics that depends on the spin? Once again, the answer is Yes. But the reasons are technically very different from those in quantum field theory. In quantum field theory, the multiparticle states are created by the creation operators constructed from the quantum fields. There's only one field for each particle species (and it commutes or anticommutes with itself at spatial separations) so the resulting states inevitably end up being symmetric or antisymmetric wave functions for commuting and anticommuting field operators, respectively.

How can the same symmetry and antisymmetry of the wave functions be realized in the matrix model? The answer is the $U(N)$ gauge symmetry. Some time ago, I have mentioned that the physical states also have to be gauge-invariant: the BFSS matrix model is a gauge theory, after all. We said that this effectively reduced the number of bosonic coordinates from $9N^2$ to $8N^2$ – well, it is really $8N^2+1$.

But we're dealing with a pretty large system and many interesting things follow from the $U(N)$ symmetry, too. For example, consider a system of $N$ gravitons such that each of them has the minimum longitudinal momentum $P^+=1/R$. A funny thing of the $U(N)$ group is that it has an $S_N$ subgroup, the permutation group. The physical states must be invariant under it, too. If you consider states that are only supported by simultaneously diagonalizable matrices, the invariance under $S_N$ condition simply means that the wave functions have to be symmetric! And if the graviton-like particles are actually gravitinos, you will get the antisymmetry because of some extra permutations of fermions that the permutation operator induces. You will get the right indistinguishability of the particles with otherwise identical quantum numbers. And the right spin-statistics relationship for the symmetry or antisymmetry emerges, too!

Needless to say, this (anti)symmetrization also applies to particles with larger values of $P^+=N/R$, represented by larger blocks: the permutation group exchanging equally large blocks is a subgroup of $U(N)$, too.

It's kind of incredible: the $S_N$ permutation of particles was a purely discrete operation, a bookkeeping device, in quantum field theory. But in the BFSS matrix model, it is actually enhanced to a much more nontrivial structure, a whole continuous $U(N)$ group. When particles of the same kind are far from each other, the $U(N)$ symmetry is broken to $S_N$ and the (anti)symmetry of the wave functions is the only residual condition. But Matrix theory shows that if the particles are coincident (or at least very close), the permutation group gets enhanced to a whole unitary group!

You may have believed that Nature is hiding some cool symmetries but they are broken to smaller symmetries. But would you be able to invent – by pure thought – that an important example of this phenomenon is a secret $U(N)$ symmetry that is broken to the permutation group exchanging particles? Nature and mathematics are clearly more creative than we are. We were literally forced to discover the matrix description of indistinguishable particles (much like if we observed it experimentally); attempts by arrogant but limited self-described "seers" to social engineer it in a man-made way would have almost certainly failed. Humans are pretty smart but there are just many clever mysteries and mechanisms that are much more likely to be discovered only once our skulls hit them.

This is the kind of a revolutionary description that was promoted from the very title of this blog entry. You could look for theories extending general relativity that are as similar to non-relativistic quantum mechanics as possible. If you were creative and lucky, you would ultimately introduce matrices of degrees of freedom, with the right commutators, and a simple enough supersymmetric Hamiltonians would be surprisingly found to describe not only a Lorentz-invariant theory in the large $N$ limit but actually a theory that has all the wonders of a consistent theory of quantum gravity.

For a while, you would think that you have found a completely new framework to understand quantum gravity, a competitor of string/M-theory. However, at some time, you would realize that it's actually exactly equivalent to string/M-theory or at least one of its Hilbert space's superselection sectors! That's not a coincidence; despite the great diversity and amazing phenomena how various things are related and represented, all these structures are just projections of a single theory as long as they are consistent. As Joe Polchinski once stated, all roads lead to string theory.

A moving human constructed out of screwing string theory (sometimes incorrectly called "matrix string theory").

Because this blog entry has gotten pretty long, I will wrap it up at this point. Sometimes in the future, I plan to explain why other objects with the right features – including (spherical, toroidal, and other) membranes, $E_8$ gauge bosons (and whole gauge supermultiplets) on Hořava-Witten domain walls, and strings with the right perturbative string interactions in the weakly coupled limit (in compactified versions of the BFSS matrix model, something I was fortunate to discover) emerge out of the matrix model description of string/M-theory.

So far, I thank you for your patience if you managed to penetrate up to this point...

FAQ on black holes and information

2012-05-31T14:05:00.000+02:00

Of course, the black hole information puzzle has been discussed in dozens of older TRF blog entries

Backreaction has posted a flow diagram that can't hide its similarity with the scheme of a female brain. Unfortunately, among lots of wrong answers to questions about black holes, it doesn't include the right answer to the question what happens with the information stored in an evaporating black hole.

So here are the questions and answers.

When a massive object of mass $M\gg m_\text{Planck}$ collapses (let's assume $Q=0$ and $\vec J=0$ although we don't have to), does a horizon form?

Yes, it does. When Karl Schwarzschild originally presented his solution in 1916, Albert Einstein had doubts about its validity. He believed that some forces would prevent a collapsed star from developing the horizon and the black hole interior, although these features were clearly suggested by Schwarzschild's solution. Einstein used to think that only the exterior, mild enough geometry of the solution could be trusted.

However, no such forces can exist for a large enough black hole. If you have a really huge conglomerate of matter, the density may be as low as the density of water and the gravitational force becomes large enough so that the collapse is inevitable. To derive this collapse, we only need to rely on the validity of Einstein's equations in each region – and they may be, locally speaking, totally unspectacular reasons whose density only matches that of water and the curvature is correspondingly low.

The inevitability of the emergence of the event horizon was proved by the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems of the 1970s. Why did they care about the singularity if it is the event horizon that defines the black hole? Well, the event horizon is the boundary of the black hole interior. And the black hole interior is composed of all the spacetime points whose future time-like geodesics can't get to the spatial infinity. They must get elsewhere; and the "elsewhere" means the singularity because there are not too many other options. (Let's assume that one can't form or connect to new infinite spacetimes by a collapse of a star.)

So they needed to prove that one actually forms a singularity, the alternative future fate of an observer. And indeed, such singularities arise rather generically when a massive enough object collapses. So black holes have to exist. Their existence has also been independently derived from string theory although this theory is based on an independent starting point from that of general relativity. And the evidence for astrophysical black holes – those in the real world – has become overwhelming, too.

Do black holes radiate?

Yes, they do. However, in this case, we don't have any experimental detection of the radiation to boast: the radiation from large black holes is negligibly weak and there aren't too many smaller black holes around us. That's a pity; if there were some black holes of this kind on the market, Stephen Hawking would surely get his hugely deserved Nobel prize.

The thermal radiation – whose black body temperature is equal to the gravitational acceleration at the event horizon (surface gravity) in certain natural units – was originally derived by Stephen Hawking around the mid 1970s. A simplified calculation for the Rindler space – a wedge of the flat Minkowski spacetime as seen by a uniformly accelerating observer – was later derived by William Unruh.

Hawking's and Unruh's calculations only rely on the validity of the semiclassical approximation; for large black holes, one may consistently ignore all effects and corrections that are of higher order in Planck's constant than those that are considered. The existence of the Hawking radiation may also be partly independently derived from string theory.

In the operator formalism, one needs to discuss the Bogoliubov transformation mixing creation and annihilation operators which is needed if we redefine the Hamiltonian from an inertial observer's one to an accelerated observer's one (and if we have to redefine the ground state in a corresponding way). In the path integral approach, the black hole temperature may be derived using the Gibbons-Hawking method.

Does the radiation at $M\gg T$ i.e. for black hole masses much heavier than the typical mass/energy of the Hawking particles (dictated by the temperature) carry information?

Yes, it does. It's the key insight that got settled in the mid 1990s. According to Hawking's original approximate calculation, the information couldn't be getting out because that would violate causality. However, the exact analysis that goes beyond the semiclassical approximation changes the answer to this qualitative question. Quantum gravity allows the causal restrictions of the black hole background to be surpassed.

(Alternatively, the external observer always has the right to imagine that the infalling matter got stuck at [or right above] the event horizon and there is no interior at all.)

This is in no contradiction with the validity of the semiclassical approximation for operationally meaningful questions: the code in which the Hawking radiation stores the information is incredibly subtle and scrambled and using the fat and awkward probes that are compatible with the semiclassical approximation, we can't decode the information. The semiclassical approximation gives the right approximate answers to arbitrary quantitative questions which have the form of continuous numbers (with small errors); however, it may fail and it does fail to give the right Yes/No answers to some qualitative questions.

The main theoretical weapons that allowed us to learn that the information is preserved were new approaches to string theory, especially the AdS/CFT correspondence and Matrix theory (that I plan to write about soon). These descriptions of string theory are manifestly unitary – they evolve quantum states in a one-to-one way from the past to the future just like your textbook models of quantum mechanics – but they may also be shown to incorporate (evaporating) black holes.

Stephen Hawking has admitted that he was wrong and he surrendered a famous bet against John Preskill. If quantum gravity is treated properly, the information comes out.

Do black holes leave remnants with a lot of information after they evaporate?

Because the Hawking radiation depends on the initial state – subtle correlations in this seemingly thermal radiation betray what the black hole was made of – there is no need for a remnant that would carry the information after the bulk of the black hole mass is evaporated away.

In fact, remnants – essentially point-like objects that may carry an arbitrarily high amount of information – would yield the theory (or Nature, if she suffered from the remnant illness) inconsistent. Remnants would violate the holographic entropy bounds: one can't really squeeze too much information to too small a volume. Also, there would be infinitely many types of remnants and their pair production would be infinitely frequent and it would correct many ordinary physical quantities by infinite amounts, and so on.

So yes, the information is getting out of the black hole as it Hawking-radiates. When the black hole gets very small, the higher-derivative terms in quantum gravity and various stringy/M-corrections become very important. In the very final stages of the evaporation, the evaporating black hole behaves just like an unstable elementary particle. The transition from a large black hole microstate to a particular elementary particle species is gradual; there is no qualitative difference between them.

These "unified objects" may be described as black holes (whose corrections to Einstein's equations are small) if they're much heavier than the Planck mass; and they may be described as elementary particles of different species (whose gravitational force may be neglected) if they're much lighter than the Planck mass.

The only region where the full quantum theory of gravity i.e. string/M-theory fully exposes its muscles (and the aforementioned approximations are not enough) is the regime in which the mass of the objects is comparable to the Planck mass. String/M-theory is the peacemaker that is needed for the smooth interpolation between the elementary particles propagating on a mildly curved, nearly flat background; and the general relativity that is needed for heavy black holes. Macroscopic physical phenomena in these two opposite extremes are captured by two copies of an effective quantum field theory (and in fact, the classical field theory limit is the most important part of them, especially on the black hole side); however, the interpolation required by consistency is inevitably a slightly more general theory than quantum field theory, namely string/M-theory.

Does the Hawking radiation carry nonlocal correlations that contain some information?

Yes, it does. Several researchers have offered their toy models of the code by which the correlations are stored and none of them has been convincing enough for everyone else so far. However, despite the absence of an easily calculable toy model, we know that the Hawking radiation does carry correlations of the most general type – i.e. non-local entanglement between all the Hawking particles – that stores the information about the initial (or later) state.

It shouldn't be shocking that the black hole is able to produce this subtle entanglement. The Hawking radiation itself may be interpreted as quantum tunneling. The information tunnels out of the black hole interior, too. In other words, the causal diagram that seemingly strictly tells us that the black hole interior is separated from the exterior shouldn't be taken too seriously because the metric tensor is a fluctuating observable. Much like the alpha particle can't be guaranteed to remain inside a nucleus – that's why we occasionally observe alpha-decay – Hawking particles can't be "totally confined" within the black hole interior and may appear in random directions outside the black hole. They're still coming from the same origin and may be entangled.

How to make the semiclassical limit nonlocal?

This question appears in Sabine Hossenfelder's chart but it is completely misguided. You can't change the properties of objects in Nature. It's up to Nature to decide whether some things are local or nonlocal; we can't "redesign" Nature. And while Nature produces nonlocal correlations that may be found in the exact treatment of an evaporating black hole, e.g. in AdS/CFT or Matrix theory if you want to be really explicit, the nonlocal correlations inevitably disappear if we reduce our description to the semiclassical limit.

The semiclassical limit is what Stephen Hawking calculated in the 1970s and he correctly determined that the radiation couldn't carry the information away in the form of (nonlocal) correlations because that would violate the locality. In fact, even if he calculated the exact answer to all orders in the perturbation theory in $\hbar$, it would still be right that the information can't get away.

The preservation of the information may only be seen if one goes beyond the perturbative expansion – beyond all orders in a Taylor expansion in Planck's constant. Because the question above appeared in Sabine Hossenfelder's chart, one must say that the right answer to the questions about the fate of the information in black holes isn't included in the chart, despite the plethora of wrong answers that are included.

Do black holes have hair, after all?

For general relativity in low enough dimensions and its simple enough extensions, one may rigorously prove that the black holes can't have hair. However, the black hole has many microstates so it surely does remember the information in some form of "hair". The only question is whether the hair may be visualized in some geometric way – whether the information carried by a black hole microstate gives the black hole some detailed complicated "shape".

Samir Mathur is behind the most convincing proposals that would yield a "Yes" answer to this question. His fuzz balls literally look like very complicated objects that totally change the character of the black hole interior – fill it with complicated fuzz that carries a huge amount of information. It should still be true from locality (validity of general relativity at long distances, for fat enough probes) that an infalling observer generically experiences empty space. This emptiness must result from some averaging over all the complicated types of fuzz.

In some simple enough contexts, Mathur and collaborators have constructed a literal "local" representation of hair – the microstates are genuine solutions of ordinary extended Einstein's equations. In more generic situations, however, the degrees of freedom needed to describe the hair probably need to be more nonlocal themselves.

These are cute constructions that didn't have to exist and many people still believe that they either don't exist or they're wrong. But whether such "visualizations" of the information carried by black holes (and by their Hawking radiation) may be found or not, the answers to the remaining questions listed in this blog entry are almost certainly irreversible at this point. What would many people love to see is some readable answer to the question "where in space and how" the information is stored on the black hole horizon or in the radiation. However, the exact description of these objects doesn't seem to have a form of a local field theory in the spacetime so the questions of the type "where do things live" may be misplaced.

On the other hand, it's conceivable that they're not misplaced. There could exist some "much more spacetime-local" description of the black hole evaporation than what you can get from the AdS/CFT correspondence or Matrix theory. It wouldn't be the first time when an "ordinary description" of a structure that was believed by many experts to inevitably transcend field theory was found: the membrane minirevolution found some explicit field-theoretical Lagrangians for theories that many people had believed to be inequivalent to Lagrangian field theories.

Bribed, stealing officials enjoy their $500k before they're caught

2012-05-31T11:37:00.001+02:00

David Rath, the main symbol of corruption of the Czech social democratic party, took most of the $500,000+ bribes in a major Czech corruption scandal, the grandest one at least in the last 20 years.

(He has obviously stolen much more money throughout his life, some of those millions of dollars are being investigated at this very moment. Just in his house, they found additional $1.5 million and then extra $0.5 million. Rath's father claims that those latter $0.5 million are just his – the father's – savings he earned somewhere in Emirates 20 years ago.)

Ex-governor of Central Bohemia Dr David Rath and Ms Kateřina Pancová, an ex-director of a hospital in the region.

He defended himself by saying he thought that the shoebox contained wine. This defense is truly ludicrous given the fact that every single place where he and his key collaborators – Ms Pancová, a director of a hospital, and Mr Rott, her partner who left the Czech Parliament after being totally drunk during an important vote – were meeting was eavesdropped for half a year.

Some of these impressive police's eavesdropping skills may have been inherited from socialism when it was normal to monitor the (suspicious and inconvenient) citizens.

So the police knows about – and can easily expose – his (and their) feeling about every penny and every motion of a penny during the last 6 months or so. Their discussion minutes before Dr Rath was arrested is kind of amusing. Well, at least now it seems amusing when we already know that they couldn't laugh to justice for too long (at least so far it looks so).

It took place in Ms Pancová's house in Rudná near Prague on Monday, May 14th, 2012. They're dividing over $500,000, most of which went to Dr Rath.

Via novinky.cz.

Pancová: ... what he has at his disposal. It would be nice of you. I would even love to have such nice cute money.

Rath: So nice little money. Shiny, so pretty yellow, yellowly glossy. So pretty, so goldish.

Pancová: Yup, yup, I would like to have them. It doesn't get spoiled or mouldy. One may hide them well.

Rath: Yup, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Kha kha kha kha (laughter).

Pancová: It's enough to hide them somewhere.

Rath: Where, into your little pocket?

Pancová: Into my little pocket, khi khi khi, so that I have them for the bad times.

Rath: Kha kha kha.

Pancová: I would be like that Tsar Nicolai II [of Russia]. His family was being shot at but they were not dying at all because they were covered by gold and those diamonds. They thought that the tsar family was protected by tsar, I mean God. But they had gold all over their bodies. Haven't you read it? [More than 1.3 kg of diamonds on Olga and Maria.]

Rath: No, I haven't read it.

Pancová: They were shooting into them all the time but they were still alive. Now, the chaps from the Red Army [sic] were already completely stunned by it, thinking: what's going on? What's going on? This tsar must really come from God. And only later, they found out that they were wrapped in gold.

Pancová: Look, you have one more suitcase here.

(Rath and Kott are leaving the room in the upper floor.)

Rath: Won't you kindly plaster it once more for me?

Pancová: Don't worry. Wrap it. Do you want one more beer?

Rath: Please, no, I must already leave because one more person is visiting me later [it turned out it was Mr Michal Pohanka, a socialist ex-lawmaker who switched and supported a center-right government in 2007; some people accused him of having been bought; he's a candidate for a mysterious person who may have been scheduled to receive 1/2 of Rath's $350,000 in the shoebox]. Ouch, so what do you say, Peter?

Kott: Well, I know one answer to this question.

Pancová: The world is a shitty place, my beloved little sister used to say.

[Informal conversations continue up to Rath's departure.]

Rath: On Friday morning, we will meet at your place. [The debate took place on Monday evening.]

Pancová: Yes.

Rath: We will agree about the Saturday plans later. So far, our plan is that you will pick me up.

Pancová: Right, at 8:15.

Rath: Sounds good, bye bye.

Kott: See you.

Pancová: Jesus Christ, what a chilly weather is over there... Don't leave! [For a few minutes, Ms Pancová believes that the climate is her and Dr Rath's greatest problem.]

The conversations took place in this house of Ms Pancová and Mr Kott in Rudná near Prague. Of course, all the three "top people" in this scandal have lots of other real estate. Most of them have already been sealed.

Rath is leaving. In two minutes, Pancová and Kott find out that something is going on in front of the house.

Kott: An urn [a special police car, URNA]! Don't do anything! Don't do anything!

Pancová: We're in deep shit, we're in deep shit.

Kott: Calm down, calm down.

Pancová: So we're in deep shit!

Kott: Perhaps. Calm down, calm down!

:-)) Sounds just like from some parodies and comedies except that this conversation is real. The degree of happiness that these folks experienced when they stole half a million dollars is high, indeed.

A few minutes later, Ms Pancová and her sex toy, Mr Kott, had to go to the cold weather, too.

So far, David Rath enjoys one of the toughest Czech prisons in Litoměřice. He decided to become a marathon runner to stay in a good shape. Photo via Blesk.cz

Knud Rasmussen pictures: Greenland is melting less quickly than 80 years ago

2012-05-30T13:06:00.000+02:00

Knud Rasmussen (1879-1933) was a Danish polar explorer and the father of Eskimology. By an accident, 80-year-old pictures of the Greenland taken during his expeditions were just found in a Danish basement:

Daily Mail, TG Daily, Nature, Live Science, Newswise, Science Codex

The pre-satellite pictures of ice shelves are rare. One may evaluate them in various ways.

For example, 55% of the retreating glaciers were retreating at a faster rate 80 years than in recent years. On the other hand, the average rate of retreat (in meters per year) is higher today than it used to be because there are some isolated very quickly retreating glaciers today.

So whether the retreat of Greenland's glaciers was faster 80 years ago than today may depend on the detailed specification of the "contest". However, one thing is clear.

And the clear fact is following one: the evidence convincingly shows that the dynamics of the Greenland's ice is qualitatively similar to what it was 80 years ago when the carbon dioxide emissions per year were 4 times lower than today.

Via helvio

Why $\NNN=8$ supergravity is probably divergent at 7 loops

2012-05-30T08:48:00.000+02:00

Arguments in favor of finiteness are much more sloppy

I have been discussing the maximally supersymmetric supergravity and its conjectured perturbative finiteness many times on this blog. But the immediate reason for a new entry is the following paper by my ex-adviser Tom Banks,

Arguments Against a Finite $\NNN=8$ Supergravity

In this text, I want to review the $\NNN=8$ supergravity in $d=4$, its field content and "other objects content", the arguments that have been raised for its perturbative finiteness, the explicit 7-loop counterterm that is allowed by all the symmetries, and the argument why its coefficient is probably nonzero.

As I discussed in the article about the royal status of 11-dimensional supergravity, 11 dimensions is the maximum number of large dimensions in which one may have a theory with unbroken supersymmetry and a nontrivial particle content at long distances. The theory was discovered in the late 1970s and is known as the 11-dimensional supergravity.

In such a high spacetime dimension, it's of course non-renormalizable as a field theory but we have known since 1995 that it is the right long-distance approximation to a theory that is fully consistent and finite, namely M-theory which is an important cousin of string theory. More precisely, M-theory is another vacuum or limit of string theory that, unlike the 10-dimensional vacua, has 11 spacetime dimensions. The 11-dimensional dynamics may be obtained by sending the string coupling $g_s$ to infinity either in the $E_8\times E_8$ heterotic string theory or (which is easier) in type IIA string theory. When we do so, a new, eleventh dimension of spacetime emerges and grows larger.

The elf-dimensional supergravity

This 11-dimensional M-theory may be compactified down to various lower spacetime dimensions. From the viewpoint of the bread-and-butter physics, the most important ones among these compactifications are compactifications on singular 7-dimensional manifolds of $G_2$ holonomy: it's one of the several major descriptions by which string/M-theory may describe the Universe around us and which has all the desired qualitative properties to agree with all the particles and forces we have observed in our world. These compactifications were recently promoted as the most canonical example of "generic string/M-theoretical compactifications" by Gordon Kane, Bobby Acharya, and their colleagues in their phenomenological papers. Edward Witten has played a key role in the discovery of this new "stringy scenario" a decade ago, too.

However, those compactifications are complicated and only preserve four real supercharges which is equivalent to the $\NNN=1$ supersymmetry in $d=4$, the usual extent of supersymmetry that is employed in the realistic model building. From a top-down viewpoint, the more fundamental are the more supersymmetric compactifications, especially the maximal i.e. $\NNN=8$ supergravity with 32 real supercharges, the same number as the original 11-dimensional theory. This theory is pretty much unique and so is its consistent ultraviolet completion, M-theory on a 7-torus.

The maximal supergravity: symmetries, field content

As we have recalled in the royal article, the 11-dimensional supergravity contains one supermultiplet of fields, the gravitational supermultiplet, which boasts $2^8=256$ physical polarizations for each (light-like) momentum. One-half of them are fermionic, they're the components of the spin-3/2 gravitino (a maximally constrained tensor product of a spinor and a vector), while the remaining 128 polarizations are bosonic ones. 44 of them are components of the metric tensor; 84 of them are components of the $C_{\lambda\mu\nu}$ three-form potential that couples to membranes and fivebranes.

What happens if you compactify the theory to 4 dimensions i.e. dimensionally reduce it over 7 dimensions? Some values of the vector-like Lorentz indices will become scalar-like. The spin as understood in $d=4$ will be smaller than the spin as extracted from $d=11$. How many scalar fields will we get?

We only get scalar fields from the bosons; the spin-statistics relation always holds in these and other theories. From the metric tensor, we get the components $g_{\mu\nu}$ where $\mu,\nu$ go over the 7 dimensions we have compactified on a tiny 7-torus. The number of such components is $7\times 8/2\times 1 = 28$. These components remember the radii and angles in the 7-torus defining the compactification. The gravitational excitations should be traceless but we will assign the task of keeping the tracelessness to the components in the uncompactified dimensions so there's no elimination of components here.

There are also now-scalar components of the three-form potential, $C_{\lambda\mu\nu}$. If all the indices are set to some of the numbers in the list of 7 compact dimensions, we get $(7\times 6\times 5)/(3\times 2 \times 1) = 35$. I would have to spend a lot of time to explain the complete justification but we must also count the components of the dual 6-form potential $\tilde C_{\lambda\mu\nu\pi\rho\sigma}$ that couples to the fivebranes. These six indices may be set to the seven compactified dimensions with one missing exception; so there are seven ways to do so. We get 7 new scalar physical polarizations.

In total, we have $28+35+7=70$ scalars in the four-dimensional $\NNN=8$ supergravity. If you were a very good numerologist, you would be able to realize that $70=133-63$ and because $133$ and $63=8^2-1$ are dimensions of the $E_{7(7)}\equiv E_{7(7)}(\RR)$ and $SU(8)$ groups, those 70 scalars could be parameterizing the coset or quotient $E_{7(7)}/SU(8)$ of a noncompact exceptional group and its largest noncompact subgroup.

The arithmetic check above is of course very far from being a full proof that the symmetries are relevant for the theory; but the conclusion is right. The supergravity theory has an exact, internal, noncompact $E_{7(7)}$ global symmetry. Its $SU(8)$ subgroup's action on the scalar fields is trivial; so the scalar fields inevitably parameterize the coset. There are various independent ways to see why the noncompact exceptional symmetry exists – a brute force algebraic calculation; arguments that the high degree of SUSY implies that the moduli spaces of scalars have to be cosets; reconciliation of partial stringy symmetries such as T-dualities – but just believe me that the symmetry is there.

Charged objects in the theory (its stringy completion)

To have some fun, let me show you one more numerological check that the $E_{7(7)}$ exceptional symmetry exists. Consider the stringy completion of our $d=4$ $\NNN=4$ SUGRA, namely M-theory on a seven-torus, and let's count the number of individual $U(1)$ gauge symmetries (each of them has a new kind of a charge and the corresponding charged objects, too).

First, remembering Kaluza and Klein 90+ years ago, we know that general relativity compactified on a torus produces $U(1)$ groups. We get seven of them; the gauge fields are $A_{\mu}^{(n)}=g_{\mu n}$ where $\mu$ is the 4-dimensional Lorentz index and $n$ goes over the seven compact dimensions and labels the seven different $U(1)$ groups. The charged objects are any particles that are moving in the directions of the compactified seven-torus; recall that quantum mechanics guarantees that the momentum on a compact space is quantized (and, consequently, so is the resulting electric charge).

However, we also have $A^{(m,n)}_\mu=C_{\mu mn}$. The indices $m,n$ take 7 possibilities each and due to the antisymmetry, they produce $7\times 6/2\times 1=21$ different $U(1)$ fields. The corresponding charged objects are M2-branes with both dimensions wrapped on a two-torus within the spacetime seven-torus.

Similarly, there are five-branes wrapped on five-tori that are charged under similar $U(1)$ symmetries whose gauge fields are $\tilde C_{\mu mnopq}$ where $mnopq$ form a quintuplet of indices chosen from the list of seven compact directions. We get "7 choose 5" which is 21 different $U(1)$ fields again.

There are some extra charged objects (and their corresponding $U(1)$ groups) I haven't counted yet. The charged objects are the Kaluza-Klein monopoles which are really 6-branes (we want fully wrapped ones) with 1 additional "systemic" compact spatial dimension. Any of the 7 spacetime toroidal dimensions may play the role of this "systemic" Kaluza-Klein direction so we get 7 independent Kaluza-Klein monopole charges.

In total, we may find $7+21+21+7=56$ different $U(1)$ groups. It's only 28 times and not 56 times more electromagnetic fields than in Maxwell's theory because in the 56-based counting, Maxwell's theory has two types of charges, the electric ones and the magnetic monopoles. Now, it is not a coincidence that 56 is the dimension of the fundamental representation of $E_{7(7)}$ – which is just a continuation of the compact $E_7$ Lie group. In fact, these charges do transform under the $E_{7(7)}$ non-compact global symmetry that I have already discussed.

The supergravity itself, i.e. the long-distance limit of M-theory on a seven-torus, doesn't admit any charged objects. The torus is infinitely tiny in this limit so the Kaluza-Klein particles are infinitely heavy and as long as we are at a generic point of the moduli spaces, the other charged objects are related to the Kaluza-Klein particles by the symmetry so they must be equally heavy. And in fact, you could think that in the supergravity, the charged objects and their precise charge quantization conditions don't make any difference at all.

However, in the full stringy theory, namely M-theory on a seven-torus, these charged objects – Kaluza-Klein particles (moving along the new dimensions), wrapped membranes and fivebranes, and wrapped Kaluza-Klein monopoles – are allowed, real, and they make a difference. Because the Kaluza-Klein particles are electromagnetic duals of the wrapped Kaluza-Klein monopoles and the wrapped M2-branes are electromagnetic duals of the wrapped M5-branes – it is not an accident that the list 7,21,21,7 was symmetric – we must remember the Dirac quantization rule for the magnetic charges.

When we impose this rule on all the charges we have, we find out that these charges must belong to a particular lattice. The lattice isn't quite unique but by $E_{7(7)}$ transformations, you may get all the solutions (all the lattices) from a particular one. It means that the 70-dimensional (real) moduli space labeled by the 70 scalars we started with\[

{\mathcal M} \approx E_{7(7)} / SU(8)

\] is nothing else than the space of all possible lattices which may be chosen as allowed charges of the 56 independent types of electromagnetically charged objects. In fact, the actual moduli space is locally equal to what I just wrote but its exact global structure has some identifications. The moduli space is\[

{\mathcal M} = E_{7(7)}(\ZZ)\backslash E_{7(7)} / SU(8)

\] It's a quotient taken from both sides. The extra discrete group at the beginning of the right hand side is the U-duality group; it's a group of the noncompact symmetry transformations that don't belong to the compact $SU(8)$ subgroup but that still preserve the lattice of allowed charges.

In other words, the full stringy theory of quantum gravity – which takes things such as the Dirac quantization rules into account – breaks the continuous noncompact $E_{7(7)}\equiv E_{7(7)}(\RR)$ symmetry down to its $E_{7(7)}(\ZZ)$ discrete subgroup. It's a good thing: quantum gravity morally prohibits continuous global symmetries so it's good that string theory only keeps a discrete subgroup of it – and this subgroup is actually a group of local symmetries if you look a bit more carefully. (The difference between global and local symmetries is subtle for discrete groups; the existence of monodromies and cosmic strings is what operationally decides about the right adjective.)

So string theory has a moduli space ${\mathcal M}$ of inequivalent vacua (in the old, quantum field theory era, we would probably talk about inequivalent theories) i.e. of different superselection sectors.

Now you should read two roads from $\NNN=8$ supergravity to string theory if you haven't read it previously. In that article, I argued that this supergravity theory has two basic bugs from a phenomenological viewpoint. It's too supersymmetric so that it can't produce a realistic spectrum; and it's divergent and inconsistent, at least at the nonperturbative level.

If you work hard to fix either of the two glitches, you are led to the full string/M-theory in both cases. To fix the excessive supersymmetry that forbids realistic quarks and leptons, among other things, you have to find out that the supergravity theory is really a compactification of a master $d=11$ theory and you have to consider more sophisticated compactifications on the $G_2$ holonomy manifolds.

To fix the problems with the divergences, you must include all the extra objects and excitations – objects moving or monopole-charged in new Kaluza-Klein dimensions; wrapped branes – which make the theory finite and consistent at very short distances in the same sense in which the W-bosons regulate all the divergences we know from Fermi's non-renormalizable four-fermion theory of the weak nuclear interaction.

There is no doubt that a fully consistent completion of this $\NNN=8$ supergravity theory has to include black holes, including the charged ones under the $2\times 28$ $U(1)$ groups (it's always possible to create charged black holes in electromagnetic fields, even classically or "astrophysically") and quantum mechanics dictates that the charges have to be quantized (Dirac quantization condition). If you think for a while, you will realize that consistency requires the small quantized charged objects such as the Kaluza-Klein stuff and M2-branes and M5-branes and all their interactions and properties are pretty much dictated by consistency, too.

Even if you assume nothing else than consistency, you are led to the full string/M-theory as the only "complete cure" for the problems of all the older theories that approximate string/M-theory.

Perturbative finiteness

The non-perturbative inconsistency of the $\NNN=8$ SUGRA without the stringy objects is indisputable: it either violates the rules of general relativity that give every region the human right to create charged black holes; or it violates the Dirac quantization rule for such charged objects. Or something else.

However, it has seemed possible to many people including your humble correspondent that the $\NNN=8$ theory could be perturbatively finite. You could calculate the scattering amplitudes of the gravitons (and their superpartners) in the perturbative expansion, adding one order after another, and you could never experience a divergence. All of them would cancel.

I no longer think it is too likely but let me mention two main arguments – which I consider too sloppy to be given too much weight at this moment. One set of these arguments are papers by Renata Kallosh such as this March 2011 paper. She has argued that the theory is perturbatively finite and has used various methods – including the light cone gauge (which I kind of like) and some "deformed" versions of the noncompact symmetry – to prove her point.

A more general reason why I was very open to the possibility that the theory was finite were the KLT relations: the $\NNN=8$ supergravity looks like the $\NNN=4$ gauge theory "squared". Because the gauge theory – coming from open strings – is (not only) perturbatively finite, it seemed plausible to me that the supergravity theory – arising from closed strings (in some moral sense, open strings tensor squared) – may be perturbatively finite as well. Various objects relevant for the supergravity case – including the Riemann surface moduli spaces in string theory – looked like the "squared cousins" of similar objects in the open string theory. So the finiteness of the gauge theory could have been squared and preserved, too.

But the relationship between the amplitudes at the loop level isn't exact so the argument is really sloppy, I think today. So I joined those who find it much more likely that the $\NNN=8$ supergravity is divergent even perturbatively. Simeon H. was among those who have been telling me it's the likely right answer for years.

Now, in the 2006 article about the finiteness of supergravity theories, I explained that at one-loop, the problems of the quantized Eistein's theory cancel. It's really because the would-be counterterms are of the form $R^2$, the squared Riemann tensor. There are just three independent ways how to contract the indices (an easy-to-see basis is the Riemann tensor squared, Ricci tensor squared, Ricci scalar squared). One combination is topological (the Euler density) which means that it doesn't influence the local physics (or equations of motion: it is a total derivative) and the other two combinations may be eliminated by a field redefinition that adds a multiple of the Ricci tensor (or Ricci scalar times the metric) to the metric tensor.

However, at two loops, there is a well-known divergence with a complicated coefficient. It must be cancelled by a counterterm. The divergent coefficient of the counterterm arrives along with a new residual finite coefficient that may be adjusted (and must be adjusted to make the theory specific). At higher loops, the vertices combine in infinitely many ways to produce infinitely many different types of counterterms whose values have to be determined. It's not possible using a finite number of experiments. So the quantized general relativity is totally unpredictive; that's the right description why its non-renormalizability is a problem.

If you consider supergravity with some supercharges, they may cancel some leading divergences but they usually just "delay" where the first divergences occur. In combination with other known symmetries, the $\NNN=8$ supergravity shifts the "leading" possible divergence to seven-loop diagrams. Be sure that these are complicated mathematical objects – one could say that they are sums of millions of complicated 28-dimensional integrals – but many people became very good in dealing with these objects.

The leading candidate 7-loop divergence

Although the supergravity seems to have many symmetries (noncompact symmetries, many supercharges), they don't seem enough to eliminate infinitely many types of candidate divergences. After all, there's just a finite number of such symmetry generators so it would be surprising if they could cure infinitely many diseases.

In this respect, the situation is different from the $\NNN=4$ gauge theory which celebrated its 35th birthday some months ago. This gauge theory has an infinite-dimensional symmetry that underlies it, the Yangian, and other structures. Although the supergravity theory has a doubled number of supercharges, it seems less constrained than the gauge theory.

At any rate, even when you impose all the symmetries, you see no reason why the theory shouldn't generate a particular leading 7-loop counterterm which may be written in superspace approaches in an extremely simple way: $\int d^{32}\theta$. It's just the integral over (i.e. total generalized volume of) the full 32-dimensional superspace!

Superspaces that are this huge suck for the other terms so you want to translate this schematic form into components. It turns out that in the language of the component fields, such a counterterm is equivalent to something like $D^8 R^4$, schematically speaking. So it's the eighth power of the superderivative acting on the fourth power of the Riemann tensor – with various orderings and contractions of indices.

See e.g. this 2010 paper by Elvang, Beisert, Freedman, and others that discusses these counterterms.

Dimensionally speaking, the superderivative $D$ has the same units as the square root of the curvature tensor (which is bilinear in the ordinary derivatives) so $D^8$ is dimensionally equivalent to $R^4$ and $D^8 R^4$ has the units of $R^8$. That's OK – thanks to kristan for corrections – because a $k$-loop expression should produce terms with units just like $R^{k+1}$. Recall that the tree-level (0-loop) Einstein-Hilbert action is proportional to $R$; we canceled the $R^2$ one-loop corrections; but the $R^3$ two-loop terms gave us the first lethal divergences in the quantized general relativity. Extrapolate this process to 7 loops and you will get the right units.

The only "hope for perturbative finiteness" could be that this candidate counterterm is produced with a coefficient that is zero. All the contributions to it should cancel. However, there's no known convincing reason why it should be the case; all the known "symmetry weapons" have already been used to cancel other terms.

Now, Tom argues that a problem must arrive at a finite order in the perturbative expansion of the supergravity because it's important for the consistency of black hole physics to break the $SU(8)$ symmetry, the maximum compact subgroup of the noncompact symmetry. I am confused by his argument because I have believed that the $SU(8)$ symmetry is exact even in the full string/M-theory.

Tom also writes, much like your humble correspondent, that the classicalization papers are wrong although I haven't studied his reasoning sufficiently carefully to know whether he has the same reasons, less correct reasons, or more correct reasons for the dismissal of these Dvali et al. paper as/than I do (there are surely some similarities in the strategies how to think about these matters).

Tom Banks mentions that "SUGRA has divergences at the 7-loop level" is a "consensus" of the experts. I am a bit surprised by his using this language because while Tom is left-wing, he is not a guy who would promote the "consensus science". After all, he refused to belong to various consensuses himself. ;-) But OK, he is making a sociological point, one that e.g. Renata Kallosh could disagree with.

Shmoits, Shwolins, and related feces

Finally, let me mention that some of the world's most notorious crackpot discussion forums such as "Not Even Wrong" have been running the campaign forcing everyone to believe that the $\NNN=8$ supergravity had to be finite (they don't understand the difference between perturbatively finite and finite at all so they couldn't discuss this subtlety). Of course, they have never had any arguments – and it seems to disagree with the evidence at this point. It was just decided by some crackpots-in-chief that such a conclusion is more convenient for the dishonest propaganda addressed to the human trash that reads "Not Even Wrong" – that it could be more helpful to invent stories that string theory is not needed.

This approach was not only dishonest but totally irrational at every conceivable level. First, these would-be folks have been irrationally attacking supersymmetry (and, therefore, supergravity as well) almost as intensely as string theory so it's nonsensical to suddenly worship its miraculous (and probably non-existing) properties of a supergravity theory. Second, it's obvious and it's been proven above that supergravity can't be nonperturbatively consistent: it would either prohibit the production of charged black holes (which must be allowed) or it would violate the Dirac quantization rules (making their wave functions multiply-valued etc.).

Third, and it's been also discussed above, the maximal supergravity can't lead to a realistic particle content and the less-supersymmetric versions of it would surely violate the finiteness properties, anyway. Fourth, it's nonsensical to try to put a less complete theory, supergravity, against string theory because the research of supergravity has been incorporated into the research of string/M-theory and everyone realizes that the former is an approximation of the latter. The latter is more complete, more comprehensive, and for many questions, it's totally needed for the consistency.

One must really be a very stupid, brainwashed pile of scum to take any of this dishonest Shmoit-like idiocy seriously.

And that's the memo.

Indus Valley Civilization destroyed by SUVs 3,000+ years ago

2012-05-29T17:45:00.000+02:00

Lots of media including Fox News have written about the Harappan culture, also known as the Indus Valley Civilization:

4,000 years ago, climate change caused massive civilization collapse

The news describe the opinions published in a new paper, "Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization", in PNAS.

The paper argues that the decline of the majestic civilization that once included 10% of the world population – between 1900 BC and 1000 BC – was caused by... climate change, of course.

During the millennium I mentioned, the large cities were fading away and people were apparently moving to the countryside and/or East Asia. I am not even sure whether I believe this basic proposition.

But the paper goes well beyond this level of speculation. The declared cause of the societal changes was climate change. Why? Because a comparison of the current sediments and ancient sediments combined with the modern satellite observations indicates that it was often warm, 43 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit). That's supposed to be it: the explanation. However, in contrast with the summaries in all the media, the paper actually talks about the decrease of the intensity and frequency of small floods which had been helpful for irrigation.

Whatever source you pick, these claims raise so many questions and so many surprised looks.

First, we may discuss whether they were able to determine the weather more than 3,000 years ago. But imagine it's possible and their reconstruction is fine. But does the rest follow? Would the ancient people be annoyed by the hot weather at all?

More importantly, why would people react to the warm weather by moving away from the cities? And if they reacted in this way, why wouldn't they try to move to the North rather than to the East?

The questions inevitably continue if you try to compare this claim with the global warming orthodoxy. We've been often told that the climate has been stable for tens of thousands of years and what's remarkable about the modern era is that the human activity began to change the climate in an unprecedented way. Suddenly, we're told that the climate change is still decisive but it's been around for thousands of years.

As you expect, I don't buy either. The modern climate change isn't unprecedented and the climate change hasn't been a major issue deciding about the fate of civilizations in the recent 6,000 years. The climate was changing only very, very moderately, by a degree or two or three, and such changes have a totally negligible impact on the societies and economies. More than 6,000 years ago, the warming trend was more intense as the Earth was coming out of the last ice age and there were still continental ice sheets waiting to be melted.

Just look at the world today. What is threatening the civilization? It's things like fiscally irresponsible governments in banana republics such as Greece. People from economically weaker countries easily emigrate to other countries where the temperatures are often different by dozens of degrees – or the same. The temperature is not the real issue. The survival of Greece as a state after June 2012 won't depend on whether the average monthly temperature in Athens will be 25 °C or 35 °C. It's almost totally irrelevant. It's always almost irrelevant.

Quite generally, it's also nonsense if someone claims that the temperatures in India or the Middle East are too high to allow a thriving civilization. These regions are exactly the regions where the most glorious ancient civilizations were born! Just think about Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Persia, and others. They were pretty warm places.

Some very rich countries of the modern world are located in the colder zones. But the survival of the people over there required some increased sophistication of the societies and their technologies. Apologies if those things sound racist to anyone – I am from the very middle of Europe so my comments may be viewed as impartial – but the nations in the North became more resilient and disciplined simply because it was needed for the survival. In other words, those who have survived in Scandinavia and elsewhere are inevitably descendants of those who could bear the unpleasant i.e. cold weather.

But it was still possible for them to survive even though the temperatures in Norway differ from those in New Delhi by 20 °C. A warming or cooling by 2 °C or 3 °C, especially if it is distributed to periods as long as 900 years, just doesn't make a detectable difference.

What is more important is the humidity and amount of precipitation but it's unlikely that they may really reconstruct those things for the year such as 1500 BC. More obviously, it's nonsense that monsoons could have been turned off. Monsoons are seasonal winds that result from unequally fast warming (or cooling) of the land and the sea. You can't stop these effects just like you can't stop the Gulf Stream (because you would need to stop Earth's rotation); you simply can't change the laws of physics.

The paper in PNAS is a seemingly innocent piece of abstract nonsense produced in an ivory tower that doesn't hurt anyone. Except that it does. Pseudoscientific gibberish of this type is being used by some people to make truly harmful proposed policies look serious and justifiable. As long as papers of this type are flourishing in the literature and their authors are viewed as anything else than what they are, namely crackpots, we can't claim that we have defeated the climate hysteria.

The painful situation is amplified by the media. News outlets including center-right ones such as Fox News are employing writers that deliberately cherry-pick peer-reviewed articles from this narrow subdiscipline – a pseudoscientific subdiscipline – because they can't really write about almost anything else. So the insane excess of the climate-change-causes-everything articles in the literature, one funded by those $1.8 billion in bribes, is made worse by an additional layer of politicization and distortion of overall message of the scientific literature, distortion that may be blamed upon the climate hysterical inkspillers and those who harbor them.

3(+1) new papers on stop squarks (and staus)

2012-05-29T08:35:00.000+02:00

On Monday, American particle phenomenologists celebrated the Stop Squark Memorial Day.

Their publication of three extremely similar papers on the search for light stop squarks could be viewed as circumstantial evidence for some extra common cause behind all these papers such as the LHC stop squark rumors.

At any rate, we have these three similar new hep-ph papers on the stops (plus one inequivalent paper that talks about stops and especially staus in the context of the Higgs diphoton decays):

Stops and MET: the shape of things to come (Fermilab/Madison)

(Light) Stop Signs (Harvard)

Searching for Direct Stop Production in Hadronic Top Data at the LHC (Maryland/MIT)

Light Stau Phenomenology and the Higgs γγ Rate (Illinois)

The last paper differs from the first three; it suggests that the superpartner of the tau lepton could be as light as 100 GeV and with a high enough tan beta, the light stau could be relevant for the explanation of the enhanced rate by which the 125 GeV Higgs boson at the LHC decays to a photon pair.

The first three papers mostly discuss the question whether the LHC may discover or rule out stop squarks whose masses are very close to the top quark mass during the 2012 run. If you read the papers, you will notice that the three teams knew about each other so they may have synchronized their submissions to occur on the same Memorial Day weekend.

The conclusions of the papers and the detailed graphs are almost identical. If stops are close to the top quarks when it comes to the masses, the LHC will be able to discover them in 2012 if their mass is close enough to 350 GeV or so and if the light neutralinos are light enough, at least substantially lighter than 100 GeV.

Imagine the point on the two-dimensional stop-mass/neutralino-mass plane and draw circles around the point (350 GeV, 30 GeV). The further you get from this point, the lower confidence level for a discovery you may get assuming that the superpartners have the properties suggested by this "search under the lamp post" distribution. But the confidence level near the center approaches the levels of a discovery.

Let me mention that if the stop squarks are a bit heavier, they may still be discovered but one must use different channels.

The third, Maryland/MIT paper still has somewhat more optimistic predictions for the discovery using 20 inverse femtobarns of the 8 TeV collisions expected in 2012. For some square-shaped bins, they get more than 8-sigma signals. That's also why they are the only team that suggests that the evidence for the stops may already be contained in the 2011 data. The first two teams don't seem to have such strong signals. My fast reading suggests that it's because only the third team uses the "fat jet" identification of jets arising from a top quark, aside from the universally exploited missing transverse energy (which is helpfully magnified by the boosts so it can be seen even if the LSPs are rather light).

Light (and even very light) stop squarks are still allowed but all these physicists effectively claim that with good enough search strategies, these stops can't hide for too long. Some people could suggest that it's so damn difficult if not hopeless to look for stops in these circumstances; all the Memorial Day physicists suggest that Yes, we can, assuming that we're neither lazy nor spoiled by a low creativity.

The big remaining question is whether the stops will actually be discovered in 2012. ;-) The LHC is working hard to discover whatever Nature allows it to discover. The peak luminosity is 6.7 inverse nanobarns per second i.e. 24 inverse picobarns per hour. One effectively has about those 40 "working hours" per week so the collider may be expected to produce about one inverse femtobarn every week. That makes those 20/fb until the end of the 2012 run an easy-to-imagine plan.

The current state of the collider looks like this:

Click to zoom in.

You may bookmark this page if you don't have a better access to the picture above.

Nature Climate Change: climate fear decreases with science literacy

2012-05-28T21:22:00.000+02:00

Fox News has just reviewed the content of an article in Nature Climate Change:

Global warming skeptics as knowledgeable about science as climate change believers, study says (Fox)

The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks (Nature)

Google News

Dan Kahan and 6 co-authors were testing the science comprehension thesis (SCT) claiming that the people who are not worried about "climate change" are less knowledgeable about science. They gave a science quiz to 1,540 Americans who were also measured when it comes to the degree of their climate hysteria.

What are the results?

Well, the science comprehension thesis was tested – and it was ruled out. In fact, the authors found something that seems obvious to almost all TRF readers, namely that the climate fear is a decreasing function of the science literacy and numeracy.

The left graph shows the prediction of the thesis that the climate skeptics are anti-science or less educated; the right graph shows the actual measurement. Can you spot the difference? ;-)

They explained the somewhat higher scientific literacy and numeracy of the skeptics (57% of right answers in the quiz, relatively to 56% of the alarmists) by the skeptics' communication with other skeptics i.e. other people who are also smarter than the alarmists and by the alarmists' communication with other alarmists.

Well, I would guess that the actual edge of the skeptic above the alarmists is much stronger.

Dripping crucifix vs Indian heretic

2012-05-28T12:37:00.001+02:00

Bombay is a city with some of the best string theorists in the world (or at least the best ones among those who aren't affiliated with the most prominent U.S. schools) – and maybe the highest theoretical physics production per dollar in the world.

There are many crazy things going on in the Western countries but it's plausible that things may be even crazier in the third world, if you allow me to use this term, and perhaps even in India, a country trying to get rid of the third-world label (although, historically, India was obviously the main condensation core of what became known as the third world).

Hinduism is the main religion in India but various other religions – and Christianity is an important one – are allowed to control their respective subenviroments in this heavily multicultural society.

Yesterday, AFP told us that a

dripping crucifix sparks Indian blasphemy row.

See also Courier Mail.

What happened? Well, some tears appeared on the sculpture of Mr Jesus Christ above. What's the right explanation? The scientific consensus was speaking a clear language. About 97%-98% of the experts on the streets of this suburb of Bombay determined that it had to be a divine sign from God: Jesus Christ is crying.

However, Sanal Edamaruku, a 56-years-old president of a skeptical society with more than 100,000 members, visited the spot and dared to suggest an alternative theory: a leaking toilet drainage. One of the recommendations that follow from this heretical theory is that it may be medically or aesthetically threatening to imbibe.

The reaction was swift, especially after an emotional 30-minute TV debate.

Apparatchiks in various Catholic organizations instantly filed complaints with police. They objected the skeptic's "very obvious and stridenly anti-Christian bias". The scientific consensus of the street says that it's not a miracle yet – an official Church pronouncement is needed to transform leaking urine to a miracle – but the same consensus also rejects the skeptic's explanation because it is inconvenient. So the complete explanation remains "elusive", you're obliged to say.

The laws in India are preventing you from saying anything that is inconvenient to any large enough religious group (while sane people who believe scientific or rational explanations are apparently not allowed to consider themselves religious). So he may face several years in prison. Of course, the skeptic feels elevated, important, and optimistic so far.

I just can't imagine how it works in cities such as Bombay which must reconcile not only many different religions but also the superstitious society of the 17th century (if not minus 17th century) with the theoretical physics research of the 21st century (where string theory accidentally fell from the 22nd century). The belief in the crying Jesus isn't just a common Western Catholic Christianity; it's hybridized with some of the old-fashioned pagan superstitions, too.

Those superstitious Catholics must be ignorant about the fact that there is e.g. the Tata Institute in their city or about the fact that everyone in that institute considers a urine leak to be a more likely explanation of the phenomenon than a divine intervention. In fact, those people are investigating theories that are a million times more advanced, ambitious, and reductionist – and therefore blasphemous, I guess – than anything that Edamaraku could have considered in his life. They are working on theories that explain not only the crying Jesus but also any other observation in the world as the vibrations, splitting, and joining of building blocks that make up sculptures, urine, and everything else: strings and branes.

Your humble correspondent sincerely hopes that none of the weird bigots in Bombay will be able to surpass the expected intellectual level of sources he is reading by more than five sigma. If someone managed to include himself among the TRF readers, the Tata Institute and many others could be in trouble. ;-)

Electric shocks under high voltage power lines

2012-05-27T20:48:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, I experienced something that I've gone through many times in my life and probably regularly (at several "best points"): when I ride my mountain bike which has a hole in the seat and a metal right underneath (which may probably be in contact with my slightly wet shorts), I am terrified by an electric shock – some tingling comparable to a dozen of stinging ants attacking a square decimeter of my skin – for a second when I am crossing some high voltage power lines – maybe 400 kV or so – perpendicularly.

The power lines between villages called Druztová and Dolany in Greater Pilsen (approximately in the middle of this map) represent the most frequent place at which I have encountered the sensation. As far as I remember, I've never felt the effect with my "ordinary" tracking bike which has no hole in the seat (so the metal beneath the hole is isolated away).

Take the right mountain bike (a picture from Gross Arber, the highest peak of the Bohemian forest on the Bavarian side, where I rode some time ago). The detailed situation is described on the Physics Stack Exchange.

The sensation is always so strong and so unpleasant that I have never continued to do further experiments; thinking about the parts of the body that could have been burned had a higher priority. In my family environment (and among some real-life friends), I was told it was impossible for the normal people and the only explanation was that I was a homeopathic seer, diviner, and psychic – a witch of a sort. ;-)

I am not able to convince anyone around me about this particular scientific insight but there aren't any real witches of psychics in the same sense in which there is no genuine Santa Claus: there are just fraudsters, nutcases, and gullible and brainwashed uneducated consumers of the paranormal superstitions.

In particular, I am no psychic at all: together with my bike, we are just two objects that obey the laws of electrodynamics, much like everything else. The current is so intense that I am sure that every person with the same bike, the same humidity of the shorts or whatever is needed driving in the same direction has to experience the same thing.

On the Physics Stack Exchange where I asked for some qualitative description of the relevant electromagnetic effects and some estimate of the currents and/or voltages, Anna V game me the most constructive answers so far, encouraging me to approximate the situation by a shorted antenna. I still hadn't time to estimate the electric fields and currents that may have been running through my body. Can you try to do it for me?

The frequency of the AC current is hopefully 50 Hz. The height of the wire above the road may be lower than the height of the mast because the wire is hanging – in an U-shaped way – maybe the wire is 15 meters above the ground. Assume that the voltage is 400 kV although it could be less or more; I don't remember the exact power lines and even if I did, it could be nontrivial (although in principle possible) to determine the voltage out of the shape.

Is the voltage enough for you to estimate the currents running through my body or the wires? Or do you have to know the current going through the wires as well? If you have to know it, please try to make a sensible estimate of this quantity.

Anna V has linked to this art installation with hundreds of large fluorescent light bulbs stealing the electricity from the electromagnetic field:

HTML and pictures supplementing the video... Some additional cool pictures.

So if someone says that there is less than a milliampere running through such gadgets (or my body), then apologies, I just don't buy it's a correct calculation. Another, more physics-oriented video about catching the electricity under the power lines (with spark gaps) is here:

At the Physics Stack Exchange, I've linked to a few cyclists' forums where people have reported a similar effect although the body parts could have been different (probably depending on which parts of the bike are isolated and/or metallic).

What I will say now may be very stupid but doesn't the alternating current at 400 kV about 15 meters above the soil mean that there must be the average electric field about 400/15 = 27 kilovolts per meter changing 50 times a second? That would be a pretty high voltage if you shorted it in some way, right? Or is the field compensated by some charges on the top of the soil? And if that's true, won't I feel the effect of these changing charges, anyway?

Be sure that I've solved many similar problems correctly but they were already "more carefully stripped" of the real world mess so that I knew what I was calculating. Here, I am not sure what I should start with.

My subjective reading of the effect suggests that the effect is so strong that with the right geometry and length of a metal, the power lines could easily kill someone. I am looking forward to the voices of folks who are more experienced and more self-confident when it comes to electrodynamics in the real world.

By the way, another user of the Physics Stack Exchange mentioned a paper that could suggest that my having enough body hair could be necessary for the effect, too. ;-) Too many questions here.

CIP has proposed Faraday's electromagnetic induction. The changing B field goes from the left to the right, through the "loops" in the bike's skeleton, so it has the right orientation to induce voltage around the metals and the body.

However, Art Brown at the Physics Stock Exchange wrote something that looks very plausible to me. At frequencies as low as 50 Hz, the wavelength is just huge and all effects of electromagnetic radiation must be negligible. So it must be possible to use the static electric fields to analyze the problem. The naive field is 10 kV/meter or so but it's reduced to 1 kV/meter by the higher distance from the cables and by the imperfect cancellation between the wires that have different phases. Art Brown still ends up with some 700 volt potential differences between the bike and skeletons which he considers enough for a small shock. It's probably right but I am not getting a trivial issue: why is it dangerous to touch the (lower voltage) 120 V or 230 V power outlets then?

Gene wrote some thoughtful explanations. A low humidity is probably helpful for the effect to go because it's about "sparks" at the end.

Assassination of Heydrich 70 years ago: details could have been different

2012-05-27T08:15:00.000+02:00

Exactly 70 years ago, on May 27th, 1942, Operation Anthropoid took place; see also BBC's article about the anniversary; Mr Alois Denemarek of those special units (who is still alive) remembers his friends.

This fencer, swimmer, violinist, tyrant, and an obsessed jerk spoke German, English, French, and Russian. That's too bad because a Czech leader should speak Czech. Also, it is not a good idea to be a vice-head of a terrorist organization, the SS.

The Czechoslovak government located in our temporary capital called London – due to some bureaucratic chaos in Prague of that time – sentenced a political crackpot, a key father of the Holocaust, and one of the most notorious leaders of the so-called Nazi Germany to death penalty for his role in the death of numerous Czech citizens, for his crimes against humanity, and his attempts to behave as a Czech political leader ("a protector") despite the obvious absence of any democratic mandate.

This execution was the only successful execution of a top Nazi apparatachik organized by a nation harassed by the Nazi regime. It helped us to increase our self-confidence because, let's admit, most Czechs were cowards and they were almost as compatible with the Nazi regimes as Danes, Dutchmen, and many others.

It wasn't logistically possible to hang him properly so we had to use some creativity to actually perform the execution of the "blonde beast". Trained agents equipped by the expertise of the British Special Operation Executive were sent from London and parachuted to Bohemia a few months before the operation.

The critical maneuvers, Operation Anthopoid, was scheduled for May 27th. Two key agents, Jozef Gabčík who was Slovak and Jan Kubiš who was Czech got a straightforward task. They should wait for Heydrich's "SS-3" Mercedes in the Holešovičky neighborhood of Prague – just hundreds of meters from the physics buildings of my Alma Mater in Trója – and eliminate him with a gun or a grenade.

(It seemed like the last chance to get rid of him. On that very day, Heydrich was apparently scheduled to meet Hitler in Berlin and he could have been appointed a master of France. So our speedy execution could have saved the French folks from quite some terror. Thanks us. You're welcome.)

The key minutes are usually presented as in this video (or this one, to to 6:00, or this one). Reinhard Heydrich was commuting and his Mercedes had an open roof – in order to show how self-confident he was feeling in his job of a fake Czech prime minister and how the Czechs "love" him. They knew exactly the regular trajectory he followed.

So near a sharp turn, at the crossing (Google Maps, an arrow) of the current Zenklova Street and V Holešovičkách Street, Gabčík started to shoot. However, his gun got jammed. So they had to employ the plan B. Kubiš threw a grenade. Heydrich survived the attack for a while but he died in a week due to blood poisoning caused by a shrapnel.

For seven decades, people would believe this story in which a technological glitch made the execution more complicated than it could have been.

Now, military historian Mr Eduard Stehlík studied some intelligence sources in London - and he was also thinking and asking folks from special units etc. – and he decided that the standard material taught to the agents in 1941 was different and it's possible that there was no glitch at all.

What is his story?

Based on these historical documents, he believes that it was actually expected that one uses a grenade as the first weapon and the gun was just a safety device prepared for plan B. He actually thinks that the most kosher and strategically sensible diplomatic protocol assumed that one should first throw two grenades in such situations. One of them should explode in the front of the car and stop it because it's safer and more convenient to work with a stopped car containing a dangerous toxic waste than with a moving one; the other grenade thrown in between the passengers should kill the unprotected "protector" and perhaps his driver Mr Johannes Klein (SS), too. The gun would only be used afterwords and they may have determined that it wasn't needed.

That was probably the original technical plan engineered by British experts. But it's plausible that they changed it because the Czechoslovaks were not too confident about their ability to throw grenades, especially after months of humiliation in Great Britain that they don't know how to play cricket. ;-) (The British coaches were some of the best British cricket players or their relatives so it just wasn't fair to criticize someone for being worse in a game we don't play at all.)

The broader strategic but still technical details of such plans were probably masterminded by (Czech) colonel František Moravec (in the military headquarters). Moravec's favorite ex-boss, general Josef Bílý, was among the first 13 high officers murdered by Mr Heydrich after he declared himself the "protector". So the execution of Mr Heydrich according to Mr Moravec's plan had a personal dimension, too. It was a punishment for our fallen officers as well as civilians, part of whom could have been attributed to Mr Heydrich. Czech readers may watch the 1964 movie "Assassination" with lots of details.

(It's known that alternative methodologies to execute him were considered, including poisoning, derailing of a train, and a massive bomb suicide attack.)

During the funeral (German-language historical video), Adolf Hitler complained that Heydrich had been an irresponsible fucked-up asshole. How could he have been exposed in this way even though Hitler has had such big plans with him?

After introducing the martial law and catching the executioners in the Cyril and Method Orthodox Church (which had to be flooded), the Nazi mafia continued to revenge for the death of their big boss. In June 1942, two villages – Lidice and Ležáky – were fully flattened and exterminated due to (flawed) reports that they had something to do with the execution of Mr Heydrich. About 5,000 if not 15,000 Czechs (including about 300 relatives of the assassins; but the thugs would kill you just if you approved of the execution) died because of the execution which may seem as way too many for one SS beast.

But I agree with those who say that the actual casualties caused by allowing this beast to operate could have been much higher. See e.g. Heydrich's speech shortly before he died about the need to settle the whole space (including Bohemia) by Germans only. Aside from disallowing Heydrich to pursue similar plans, the execution had other positive consequences. Britain (and, less consequentially, official non-Nazi France) retracted their shameful signatures under the 1938 Munich "Betrayal" Treaty and they declared Czechoslovakia an ally.

There are many lessons to be learned from those events. One of them is that if you're doing something unjustifiable with a whole nation and some very measured and decent people suggest that you may deserve the ultimate punishment for your deeds, they may be right and they may be able to turn this opinion into a reality. You shouldn't trust complacent words by the asslickers who surround you. Heydrich's fate shouldn't be forgotten by various global warming alarmists and similar people.

In the words of gen. Moravec,

In a society which lives by normal rules, assassination cannot be morally justified. But when a nation is enslaved by murderers and fanatics, assassination may be the only means of destroying the evil.

Krugman: scientists should falsely predict alien invasion

2012-05-27T06:26:00.001+02:00

...in order to increase the government spending...

Apparently, global warming hasn't worked as a tool to promote Krugman's left-wing agenda (and some agendas that are much worse than his).

So similar types are looking for a more "serious proposal" than the global warming and one of them thinks that the threat of a looming alien invasion is the answer!

See also a Summer 2011 monologue in which Krugman defends scientific lies as well as budget deficits, inflation, and various things that wars cause.

Imagine that: a Nobel prize winner for a social science openly calls for the creation of a whole new fraudulent scientific discipline with a "bunch of scientists" publishing papers about a non-existent alien threat – a movement that is politically motivated.

I agree with Noel Sheppard that even if you were insane enough to believe Krugman's "scientists'" prophesies, which would be even much crazier than to believe a CO2-induced climate change threat, the proposed solutions would make no sense even within these assumptions.

Can you really save your butt from extraterrestrial aliens by jumping on a high-speed train?

The real extraterrestrial alien who endangers our civilization is Paul Krugman – and many other obsessed ideologues. And those who not only allow this troll to fill their servers with rubbish (greetings to the New York Times) but they even give him awards for that.

Now, you must wonder: how is it possible that the "evil deniers" even dare to suggest that the global warming hysteria is nothing else than a fabricated left-wing plot to change the society? Needless to say, many other alarmists are pretty much open about this point – so often emphasized by Czech President Václav Klaus – too.

For example, look at this cartoon by Joel Pett:

It seems pretty clear from this cartoon and many others that these folks consider a world with a big government emitting lots of clichés how it is important and helpful (thanks, I know this absurd stuff about healthier children from communism way too well), a world with kilotons of regulation, almost no authentic private commercial activity, and five times higher energy prices as a "better world" and they're eager to repeat any lie that an allied Nobel prize winner or not even Nobel prize winner invents as a tool to bring this "better world" closer.

Via News Busters.

Marc Morano has also mentioned a new proposed sane legislation that would lead the government bodies to use the historical sea-level data, and not prophesies by Krugman-like scientists, to determine the long-term construction planning. It would be a good idea to eliminate the advisories by all the scientists who haven't ever repudiated Krugman and similar fraudsters.

Do I believe that a wrong prediction could improve the life or the economy?

In an isolated case, it perhaps accidentally could. But I just don't understand the world envisioned by Krugman to be a better world. And more importantly, once your policymaking starts to build on lies, it is guaranteed to be counterproductive because lies suck and hurt much more often than they help. And I must emphasize that the policymaking considerations are just a small part of the issue from my perspective. I actually do care about science and a relatively uncontaminated, honest institutionalized science in a discipline is much more valuable than 50,000 miles of Krugman railways. Krugman doesn't take this comparison into account because science and the truth mean nothing to him.

And that's the memo.

Is the "follow the money" argument correct?

2012-05-26T08:54:00.001+02:00

In the climate science, the answer is Yes. Why?

I count arstechnica.com among the most thoughtful sources of science news for the most well-informed non-expert readers. However, what John Timmer wrote on Thursday (and what was mindlessly endorsed by Hank Campbell) simply looks unbelievable:

Accusations that climate science is money-driven reveal ignorance of how science is done (also at Wired)

Timmer primarily attempts to criticize the 2009 document by Joanne Nova (yup, it's 2012 now: it doesn't look like the likes of John Timmer are too up-to-date or fast when they try to follow what's going on):

Climate money: The climate industry: $79 billion so far – trillions to come (PDF, Jo Nova for SPPI, 2009)

The figure refers to the money spent by the U.S. government "directly" to combat "climate change". It seems obvious to me that the actual costs of the policies – including the indirect costs paid by private subjects (that were forced to do things inefficiently and buy more expensive equivalents of various products and energy) – is already counted in hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. (and almost certainly trillions of dollars globally).

But we want to talk about the effect of the smaller, more direct part of the money which is close to the core of this question: the effect of money on the researchers. Timmer thinks that there's almost none.

Wow.

Timmer admits that the green industry has gotten into the same situation that's been previously attributed to many other industries: it has a financial interest to influence the beliefs in a certain way.

(In this respect, the only difference between the green ideology and the claims naively expected to be good for the oil industry is that the alarmists have gotten about 1,000 times more money than the skeptics.)

But Timmer's key claim is that the money can only influence the public perception, not the actual research. Give me a break!

He says that the sensible people "misread" the following graph of the funding:

The direct climate change expenditures went to $7 billion a year. Timmer tries to create fog by saying that most of the money goes to technologies, primarily to ludicrous sources of energy such as the pinwheels and solar panels. You see that in recent years, the light blue "climate technology" curve has been increasing more rapidly than the red "climate science" curve as the climate change investments started to switch from bad science to the actual bad policies, from theory to practice.

But Timmer ultimately admits that the funding for the research is still about $2 billion a year these days but, he emphasizes, it hasn't grown too much since the early 1990s. But note that the previous sentence contains the words "since the early 1990s" and that's the very main point in this discussion.

In the scientific community, the corruption began exactly in 1988±1. It began with James Hansen's notorious 1988 testimony in the U.S. Congress in which he predicted a 3-times-faster warming for the following 25 years (take e.g. the 1985-2012 jump in the scenario A – which was followed because the CO2 emissions continued to rise exponentially – by 1.2 °C) than what was actually observed later (0.4 °C in the 27-year window).

You may see that as early as in 1989, the funding for the climate change research stood at around $200 million a year; the 1989 budget hasn't reflected Hansen's testimony yet. It grew discontinuously and it grew purely because of the politicization of the discipline. The funding got tripled within a year, quadrupled within two years, and grew by an order of magnitude within 2 decades. The climate change hysteria continued to grow exponentially between the early 1990s and late 2000s (a few years ago) but it was mostly a growth in the media; the scientific community got already bribed and reshaped in the late 1980s and very early 1990s.

Is John Timmer really unable to see this trivial fact encoded by the graph?

Is he unable to draw the obvious conclusions? It was people like James Hansen – I don't claim it was only Hansen – who convinced the politicians, the sponsors of this "applied research" that doesn't really have any practical applications except for the psychological ones, that the climate science was an important discipline which it's not. And the only argument in favor of the importance of the discipline was the ludicrous claim that we should be actually afraid of some global warming in coming decades and the scientists may tell us what awaits us and/or how to save ourselves.

Whether you believe this superstitious pseudoscientific apocalyptic claim or not, pure logic should be enough for you to see that all the "premium" that the climate research is getting today above those $200 million – OK, it could be $300 or $400 million including the "ordinary" increases that would have occurred before today even in the absence of the climate panic – critically depends on the opinion that there exists an important and potentially dangerous process called "global warming" or "climate change" or "climate disruption" or "capitalism" or whatever word the climate change alarmists are using for their caricature of what is going on.

If people agreed that there is no problem here, the funding would stand at (or go back to) something like $200 million a year. Does anyone really deny it? Is anyone really ignorant about this elementary impact of the "problem" on the funding? It's basic school maths.

This is the macroscopic explanation of what's going on with the money and what the increase may be explained by. Everything is totally clear. However, one may also analyze the changes in the funding and their correlation with the changes of the character of the research microscopically, by considering the behavior of individual scientists, bureaucrats in funding agencies, journalists, and others.

Everyone who has worked in science knows that most professional scientists do care about the money. It is surely not the only thing they care about but it doesn't change the fact that it is a major thing they care about – much like most people, after all. When they're offered jobs, a huge part chooses the job with the highest or near-highest salary. Many scientists write grant applications most of the time in order to get additional funds. Some of them even enjoy it, a fact I find perverse but it's how the reality works.

When I said that $2.0 - $0.2 = $1.8 billion out of the $2 billion (i.e. 90%) in funding depends on the acknowledged existence of a "problem", it was the overall description that adds the belief in a "problem" at all relevant institutions and that adds the money paid to all the researchers. But of course, the causation works microscopically, too. One may figure out the small terms that add up to those $1.8 billion paid for the distortion of the climate science every year.

A climate scientist looking for a job knows that he or she may have a problem if he or she openly admits the belief that there is no "climate problem". Because "some" people want a job, most of them choose to say things about the big questions ("Is there a problem?") that give them a vast advantage on the job market over those who say the truth. Everyone knows that the politicians pay the climate research mostly because of the rather widely spread opinion that "there is a problem". The change of the funding between the 1980s and 1990s is no coincidence.

This consideration – by almost every person on the job market and everyone who wants new grants which is almost everyone – distorts the statements by people who may believe other things. However, it doesn't mean that the hypocrisy explains 100% of the relationship between alarmism and funding.

Many people who are employed as climate scientists aren't hypocritical; instead, they really believe the superstitions about the climate problem because they're honestly stupid or amazingly brainwashed or other things. There's no hypocrisy here so you may say that science is preserving its integrity etc. But it's not really the case. Aside from the hypocrisy of some "bribed" researchers, the problem here is that most of these "genuinely believing" researchers shouldn't have become scientists at all.

They're incompetent, they're stupid, they're amazing morons; they could be fine as activists climbing the trees or sleeping in front of the power plants but they're simply not good as scientists. In a meritocratic community, they wouldn't have been hired. Everyone who is afraid of the end of the civilization caused by climate change in 2055 or so is a breathtaking moron. Many of those folks were hired by someone else because such an employee – despite his or her incompetence as a scientist – was convenient for the ability of the research teams to preserve or increase the funding from the politicians to those who study the "problem". In the existing environment of grants, a stupid believer who will obediently say the things that are expected is (imagine some kind of Alexander Ač if you need to think about a specific example) – in the role of a new employee – a better bet for the funding of your team than a smart big shot scientist whose research could end up with inconvenient results or who could be able to extra inconvenient interpretations out of some research that could be the same.

There are many other detailed mechanisms by which the funding pressures are influencing what is finally published in the climate science literature – and what the climate scientists say about this literature to the media (the latter may be even more important for the "cause" than the former). When you add all the effects, you obviously get the overall counting we have deduced at the very beginning: 90% of the money in the climate change research is paid to the people for helping to support the idea that there is a "climate problem".

Let me emphasize that this claim doesn't mean that 90% of the sentences in climate papers are sentences about a "problem" or "man-made global warming" or "evil CO2". Of course that it is not the case. It would be really silly to pay $2 billion for writing these sentences billions of times a year. Not even the most stupid laymen would think that it makes the case for the "theory of a problem" more convincing.

Instead, what those 90% of the climate research money is paid for is to create the illusion that the "climate problem" is a serious science backed by people who look just like proper, honest scientists and who are able to say and write other sentences than just the "sky is falling" – and the illusion that the claims about the "climate problem" are actually supported by serious science. They may look like proper scientists to you but if they do, it proves that you have no clue. Many of these folks aren't doing serious good-quality science at all and those who do have no results that would support the idea of a "climate problem".

Timmer tries to attack Jo Nova's words about the solar research, too:

But maybe that money is somehow being directed in a biased manner, distributed in a way that ensures the current consensus is supported. "Where is the Department of Solar Influence or the Institute of Natural Climate Change?" Nova asks, elsewhere claiming, "Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite."

This displays an almost incomprehensible misunderstanding of how science research works. There are institutes that are dedicated to studying the Sun—the Naval Research Laboratory has one, as does NASA. But those institutes are focused on learning about what the Sun actually does, not squeezing what we learn into some preconceived agenda.

But this asymmetry is the real problem, the very reason why the climate science is a corrupt field. That's exactly the reason why Jo Nova criticizes the situation! As Timmer repeats, there are no full-fledged institutes that consider the influence of the Sun etc. on the questions about "climate change" because it's been pre-determined (without research) that "the Sun shall not mess up with the climate that was created to our image" even though the climate change that has a solar origin is obviously at least as important as the climate change that has a CO2-related or any other origin.

So the funding is distributed in such a way that the effects involving the Sun cannot be officially studied – or they cannot be interpreted when it comes to their impact on the big "climate debate" – while effects involving the CO2 not only can be studied and interpreted but such (bogus) research and (mis)interpretations are openly encouraged and that's what the U.S. taxpayer's $1.8 billion a year are really paid for.

That's why this entire amount of $1.8 billion a year is being paid for distortion the people's – and scientists' – opinion on the question whether there is a "climate problem" (in the U.S.). Timmer's paragraph continues as follows:

For decades, solar activity has been trending downwards, even as temperatures have continued to rise. It's not that the researchers are being induced or compelled to some sort of biased interpretation of the data. Reality just happens to have a bias.

But this is just a layman's opinion, an opinion of a John Timmer who has no idea about these scientific matters; it's just one of the numerous results of those $1.8 billion a year on the laymen's perception of science.

Science says something completely different. The impact of the Sun's internal dynamics on the Earth's climate is well-documented. It's been relevant on very long time scale; it's been almost certainly responsible for the majority of the climate variations between the medieval warm period and the little ice age; lots of correlations between the 20th century global mean temperature and various quantities parameterizing the Sun strongly suggest that the influence of the Sun's activity is significant even at the decadal time scale. The evidence doesn't boil down to some ad hoc correlations in graphs; actual mechanisms behind these influences are roughly known and have been demonstrated in the lab.

Timmer reveals his flagrant dishonesty and predetermined answers by every single piece of his sentences. For example, he says that the solar activity has been trending downwards. First, it is not really true that it's been "trending downwards". The solar activity primarily changes in approximately 11-year-old sunspot cycles. The graph of sunspot observations shows a clear rise started in 1810 or so (when it was really cold) and then around 1880 (another local minimum) and the changes of the solar maxima were somewhat chaotic. But the only "recent clear decrease" occurred between the 1950s and the 1960s; and indeed, the climate saw some cooling at those times. In most of the century, the solar activity went up; the trend is positive. It may have been stable or go down in a recent decade but that's also OK because, despite some misinformation in various news outlets, there hasn't been any warming in the last 10 years.

This sunspot graph's correlation with the global mean temperature is rather high but it doesn't mean that it's the best explanation that heliophysics may offer for the temperature changes in the 20th century. There are other quantities describing the Sun than just the sunspots – various ways to measure the Sun's magnetic field and its detailed properties. Some of them may be better proxies for the temperature. There's a rich literature on these issues and it's being studied by some of the top experts in climatology – and, in fact, also by the only climate scientists at CERN (at least whenever the CERN climate scientists become able and courageous to circumvent the CERN boss' order not to draw inconvenient conclusions from their research).

Those insights about the Sun's (and cosmic rays') influence on the climate (much like the influences of pretty much all other factors that have been deciding about climate change for billions of years) just don't make it to journalists such as John Timmer – because, you know, there aren't $1.8 billion funds every year to achieve such things – and if these insights ever get to the science writers etc., these science writers are already so preconceived and brainwashed that they turn off their brains and refuse to learn any science. So people like John Timmer continue to have no clue about climatology – they keep on believing in the Young-Earth-creationism opinion that the climate change began a century ago or so – and even though this would normally disqualify them as general science writers, no one really cares because this deliberate ignorance and bias has become the new normal and tons of other people defend similar Timmers against everyone who just points out that as a climate science writer, Timmer totally sucks.

I also want to say that even if the solar activity were "trending down", it wouldn't follow that this change can't be the cause of the rising temperatures e.g. in the last 35 years. There also exist negative numbers and the true mechanisms could have the opposite sign than the naive one. Similarly, we know that some clouds are cooling the surface but other clouds prefer to heat it. The analogy in the solar radiation may discriminate between the solar radiation (and cosmic rays) at different frequencies or energies, and so on. Even if the solar activity were "trending downwards", it wouldn't be a reason not to study the influence of the solar activity on the Earth's climate. So even in that case, Timmer's explanation why the solar institutes shouldn't study the influence of the Sun on the Earth's climate would be scientifically flawed.

But arbitrarily weak, shaky, or downright illogical counter-arguments or talking points are always enough for the folks such as John Timmer to instantly abandon any theory that is inconvenient from the "big picture" viewpoint while arbitrarily weak, shaky, or downright illogical excuses are also enough for them to protect their belief that the CO2-dominated theory of the climate change is the right one even though its strong forms have already been falsified by thousands of observations. They have already decided what their "reality" looks like. Their "reality" has a liberal bias. Many of those people declare this belief openly and repeatedly. It's the basic assumption that determines the way how they look at any evidence and whether they look at it at all.

But the genuine reality doesn't have any political bias. It is unbiased. Individual collections of scientific insights in the past may have been closer to some philosophies or ideologies than others; but there is absolutely no way to know whether such correlations will be preserved or will be reverted by the discoveries that science makes tomorrow or in 2015 or in 2050. Only unbiased scientific research may decide.

Again, Timmer's (and other people's) refusal to even consider scientific explanations that disagree with their thesis that "reality has a liberal bias" is not just about some cute childish religious belief in which someone doesn't want to abandon her belief in Santa Claus. It's also about those $1.8 billion a year that get redistributed for the promotion of a "climate problem" in the U.S. every year. The money flows – and the flows of influence, power, and social status in general that people care about as well (and various ad hoc coalitions meant to preserve the interests of the global warming orthodoxy) – are very complicated and multi-dimensional but the overall amount of money paid to distort the big questions of the climate science is known. It is $1.8 billion a year. We could estimate the fraction of Timmer's own income that was paid for his being compatible with the theory of a "climate problem". In absolute dollars, the amount would be rather high.

John Timmer, Hank Campbell, and others should be ashamed.

In proper science, money doesn't have to distort the research at all. Money is actually important to do lots of hard work etc. Especially hard and boring work in science is just like any other work and the money is what stimulates it and helps it to make progress. And this description is almost entirely the case of many disciplines that haven't been corrupted yet, at least not "throughly". To find out X reliable scientific insights costs some money, Y, and X is an increasing function of Y for every "uniform type" of insights.

However, the amount of money one gets has to depend on the quality, accuracy, and quantity of the work one does; when it primarily depends on the character of the answers and their correlations with the thesis that "reality has a liberal bias" or with the "new official religion of the Western society", which is how the global warming doctrine was called by our president Klaus, then the money is clearly a factor helping to distort the science – as well as journalism, government's technological investments, and many other things.

Audits and progress

At the end of his article, Timmer says that science doesn't proceed by auditing and by neverending discussions about the past results; it creates new, better results that supersede the old ones. I largely agree with that.

But I would also like to point out that it's not happening in climate science. There are no real improvements – for example, the climate sensitivity isn't getting any more accurate. So the new research isn't getting better. And the main reason is that it is preprogrammed to repeat all the mistakes from the past because they're considered universal constraints: the "reality" has to have a liberal bias, after all.

Because some results from the past research are being intensely used, it's important (for genuine science) to check them and verify them – and science needs to verify things it builds upon, whether Timmer likes it or not. That's where "auditing" is needed. The word "auditing" surely sounds more business-like than science-like but it's just about the unusual word; Timmer hasn't shown that the essence of Jo Nova's approach is deficient.

Science surely has to check and crosscheck past results, look for the wrong ones, and adjust the new research according to the findings. If the verification weren't done or if its results played no role, it wouldn't be science as the new papers would be building on assumptions that are as likely to be wrong as that they are right. The body of research would resemble noise – or noise "pushed" in a direction dictated by something else than the truth. And the latter is what has described 90% of the climate science since 1988.

And that's the sad memo.

Merkel's Drang nach Osten: Berlin belongs to Russia

Something less sad, via Alexander Ač. In an open geography school, Angela Merkel was asked to show Berlin on the map. This is how she scored:

Suggestions that she is well educated could be a bit exaggerated.

Iran, AGW: useless summits in Baghdad, Bonn

2012-05-25T12:22:00.001+02:00

...and African migrants in Israel...

In recent days, two major cities starting with a "B" witnessed futile negotiations about important topics.

In Bonn, the ex-capital of West Germany, some bureaucrats were trying to prepare a post-Kyoto agreement to regulate the greenhouse gases that could be signed in Durban in December 2012. Surprisingly for them, they found out that:

Rich-poor divide reopens at UN climate talks

Some poor countries were promised by the environmentalist i.e. Marxist activists that they would be given piles of wealth after the civilized countries are deconstructed with the help of the global warming lies.

Suddenly, some Western negotiators realized at least the fact that whether or not it is a good idea to reduce the CO2 emissions, the CO2 emissions can't decrease if the developing countries will keep on developing: the CO2 production would simply shift to the currently developing world.

Of course, the poor folks just wanted the money and some of them wanted to damage the West: these were the only reasons why they would support the climate change hysteria a few years ago. They don't have the slightest interest in hurting themselves. So the talks can't lead anywhere.

One should try to appreciate what kind of money is proposed to be wasted for these insane policies. Greece is an astronomical black hole that eats a hundred of billions of euros of foreign "loans" (wasted donations) every year. I don't have to explain to you – especially if you possess some stocks – how devastating the impact of this small, unstable, and irrelevant piece of land on the world economy already is.

However, the carbon regulation policies already eat more than that. In the background, something is hurting the global economy at least as intensely as Greece and no one talks about it. Of course, these policies haven't achieved any reductions of the CO2 emissions yet – not even a reduction of the exponential growth rate of these emissions. To do so, the expenses would have to increase at least by an order of magnitude. That's financially equivalent to imagining that all of Spain, Portugal, and Italy will become exactly as hopeless as Greece. Try to visualize how the world economy would behave in this way; some people have no problem to deliberately propose such suicidal policies. (While these policies already eat hundreds of billions of dollars from the world economy every year, the negotiators don't know where to find a few million dollars for their next conference.)

And this would only start to make a "detectable" impact on CO2 emissions. Maybe.

Global warming is being praised for saving the once-rare British Argus butterfly (and pretty much all other species in the world) from extinction. What a horror. To compensate for this fact, green activists repeat that global warming drives polar bears – whose number has quadrupled in recent 50 years – to extinction.

Needless to say, even if the growth of CO2 emissions were visibly slowed down or reverted, there won't be any observable and demonstrable influences of this "success" on the world climate, at least not for the next 50 years, and even if there were such influences, they wouldn't have a positive sign.

The people who still discuss carbon regulation policies in 2012 are insane psychopaths and must be treated in this way.

Instead of being given beds in asylums, these psychopaths improve our lives by stories about the warming by 3.5 °C and similar stories every day. Note that not only an error margin is absent (the error margin of all such figures in the IPCC report is of order 100 percent so it is really absurd to list two significant figures); they don't even say what is the period of time in which the temperature increment could be 3.5 °C and what's the probability that this speculation "could" turn out to be right (be sure that it's nearly zero for any time scale shorter than two centuries).

Rational reasoning has totally evaporated from these segments of the society. These negotiators, the activists pumping hormones into the movement, and the would-be journalists who hype all this nonsense in the media are dangerous lunatics.

Incidentally, if you want some good news, Bavaria's stock exchange will end the trading of carbon indulgences next month as the prices dropped 60% in a year and the trading volumes converged to practically zero.

Iran

There are of course other dangerous lunatics in the world, too. Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, has seen another round of useless and failed talks between Iran and the Western powers that want to stop the ever more dangerous enrichment of uranium in the Persian nuclear facilities. Today, the U.N. will announce that Iran has beaten its previous record and enriched the uranium up to 27 percent.

Make no mistake about it: there are lots of lunatics in Iran, starting from Ali Khamanei, the bigot-in-chief who officially calls himself the supreme leader. Some of them literally believe that Allah, the virtual bigot-in-chief, will give them all the virgins and demands that they eliminate the infidels. On the other hand, I must say that the rumors that Iran is thinking rationally are based on a rational core, too.

There is of course a lot of civilian, non-religious, non-military activity in Persia. It's a country that has been Westernized to a large extent, especially during the Shah's reign. Much of it hasn't evaporated yet. However, I am not talking just about semi-sensible semi-socialist industrialists or scientists who work at random places of Persia (some of whom I know).

I am talking about their negotiators, too.

It seems to me that they have totally understood the emptiness of much of the Western politics, its inability to see the most obvious things, its focus on the form instead of the substance. So they sent a Saeed Jalili, a Persian top-tier security bureaucrat, to Baghdad. I think this guy in particular may be more rational than many of his Western counterparts. His job is simple: to have a nice time with third-rate politicians such as the EU foreign minister Catherine Ashton and make her sure that everything is fine and we may talk and talk and talk. We may talk next month in Moscow, too. It's so pleasant.

Meanwhile, the Iranians know very well that any delay is Persia's incremental victory. The reason is simple: the centrifuges are running. The research that allows Persia to develop and install ever more dangerous missiles with ever more dangerous warheads is recording some progress every month, too.

It seems to me that lots of people similar to Catherine Ashton simply have no clue. They're always ready to be led into thinking that the problem may be delayed by another month or another year and we're making progress towards security. Except that a rational observer, much like the Iranian religious bigots, sees very clearly that the progress is zero and, when the developments in Iran are counted, it's negative (=positive from the Islamic Republic's vantage point) after every new round of negotiations.

People like Jalili are capable of dancing with their counterparts such as Ashton in circles. Ashton enjoys the dancing so she believes that she's moving forward. But she's not. She's rotating in circles and the Persian centrifuges are doing the same thing. The only difference is that by rotating in circles, the Persian centrifuges are pushing the Iranian power-thirsty bigots forward while Ashton's dances with Jalili don't move us forward. One may actually see that Ashton herself has moved backwards; Iranians noticed that Ashton had a more conservative, Islamists-pleasing wardrobe than she had last time. Will she wear a burqah in Moscow next month?

Cross the Jordan River [the river of all the hopes], a courageous enough 1968 song celebrating emigration of Czechs after the 1968 Soviet Occupation (although formally talking about the ancient Jewish exodus), by Ms Helena Vondráčková who gradually became a pillar of the pro-Brezhnev totalitarian entertainment industry (but who made a big comeback after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, anyway). Funnily enough, the "peasant" with the mule e.g. around 1:33 is Mr Waldemar Matuška, a singer who really did emigrate in the 1980s. Ms Helena's fate was very different from that of her fellow singer, Ms Marta Kubišová, a much stronger moral character who was really harassed by the communists, had to work as a clerk in a vegetable shop, and couldn't protect her youth and image so well... I propose the song as an anthem for the Israeli (and American?) pilots who will be given the task to bomb Iran.

America has declared that it is ready to strike Iran and I don't believe there is any room left for any other than military solution at this moment. Persia should be urged to evacuate the vicinities of the labs, especially in Qom that may have to be treated by thermonuclear devices due to the stubborn, annoying, and dodgy fortification of the facility, and Obama should distribute the orders. If this operation "just" delayed the Iranian nuclear warheads by 5 years, it would be an amazing success that should be regularly repeated every few years.

Israel: immigration

Meanwhile, the ordinary people in Israel aren't thinking about Iran too much. Instead, what they see are African migrants. An Iranian nuclear bomb sent to Israel would be very visible but it doesn't mean that there can't exist much more gradual but possibly more harmful processes that may harm Israel – and, analogously, others.

What happened with Africa and Israel?

Last year, the West failed to protect Hosni Mobarak, one of the most enlightened leaders of an Arab country. In fact, most of the people in the West didn't even have the will to do so. Several groups of Islamic bigots (groups that, fortunately, dislike each other as well) took over Egypt, together with lots of anarchy. In particular, the Sinai Peninsula is a mess, too.

Lots of African migrants from Eritrea, Sudan, and a few other countries are using this chaotic land adjacent to Israel – with the help of local Bedouins – to penetrate into the most advanced country in the region. Of course that for most of them, the reasons are purely economical. In this respect, Israel faces the very same immigration problems as those we know from many Western countries. As the crime rate goes up (rapes etc.) and there are many other problems, strong words are being used. The Zionist dream is disappearing, and so on.

Israel is trying to erect a physical barrier on the border with the Sinai Peninsula (African workers are sometimes employed for the hard work) but it's not something you can do within an hour. A thousand of new immigrant enters the Jewish state every day, sending the total number to 60,000 or so.

Let me say something. I believe that a civilized country should be able to deal with a problematic minority that represents 1% of the population. Many other countries are forced to solve similar or larger problems. So if the increase stopped, I do believe that decent Israeli should stop their hysteria about the Africans, too. I agree that the inability to tolerate 1% of a traditionally poorer race is a symptom of racism. On the other hand, one should introduce some policies that will guarantee that the percentage won't grow substantially above 1%. The Israeli Arabs already represent a sufficiently large source of problems for the country and Israel just can't afford "too much more" of such problems.

Worries about visible things – such as the nuclear Holocaust in the Middle East – may be popular and attractive for our imagination. But we shouldn't forget that there are many other, less spectacular and gradually creeping events and trends that may screw our lives and our civilization equally or more efficiently. So people should stop fighting (and wasting time and money for) virtual problems such as global warming and they should start to seriously discuss genuine problems such as destructive technologies in the hands of uncontrollable bigots or the uncontrollable inflow of illegal immigrants into various countries.

And that's the memo.

BaBar: 3.4-sigma excess in tau-nu decays of B

2012-05-25T07:02:00.001+02:00

This is just a simple link with a comment. The BaBar collaboration located at SLAC just published a preprint

Evidence for an excess of $B \to D({}^*) \tau \nu$ decays

in which it announced the measurement of the ratio of branching ratios of decays of mesons\[

{\mathcal R}(D({}^*)) = \frac{B(B\to D({}^*)\tau^- \bar \nu_\tau)}{B(B\to D({}^*)\ell^-\bar\nu_\ell)}

\] in 426 inverse femtobarns of their data where $\ell=e$ or $\mu$. You may see that they measure the decays of the $B$-mesons to $D$-mesons or their antiparticles which also include a charged lepton and the corresponding neutrino in the final state.

They want to know how many of these decays choose the $\tau$ lepton and its neutrino from the choice of three possible generations.

Their results are\[

\eq{
{\mathcal R} (D) &= 0.440\pm 0.058\pm 0.042\\
{\mathcal R} (D^*) &= 0.332\pm 0.024\pm 0.018
}

\] which correspond to excesses by 2.0 and 2.7 standard deviations, respectively. When combined, the excess over the Standard Model predictions stands at 3.4 standard deviations. It's surely not a proof of new physics but it's intriguing.

Note that in August 2011, I mentioned a smaller excess, 1.8 sigma in the same ratio of branching ratios (PDF). It seems that the excess has grown stronger as you would expect if it were a sign of a real new thing.

The authors claim that the excess isn't compatible with the explanation involving an intermediate charged Higgs boson from a 2-Higgs model, type II 2HDM. It is not clear to me whether this may be interpreted as a disagreement with the MSSM in general as well.

The reason for the disagreement is that they may quantify the required $\tan\beta/m_{H^+}$ that produces the excess (see Figure 2). When they do so, they get incompatible results from the decays with a $D$ meson – $0.45/\GeV$ or so – and from those including a $D^*$ meson – $0.75/\GeV$ or so (the error is of order $0.05/\GeV$ in both cases).

Note that the BaBar's competitors at LHCb have announced some results on B decays that are compatible with the Standard Model as well as a new 3-sigma hint of new source of CP-violation that would go beyond the Standard Model.

In this experimental search for anomaly in meson decays, the signs of new physics start to emerge but it may still be too early to say that they're something else than fluke or human errors.

Old Town Square isn't a zoo

This is what happened to the 600-year-old Prague Astronomical Clock yesterday. A foreign chimp apparently wanted to impress those pretty attractive babes.

He broke and stole a piece of the stone, too. Police caught him but the media didn't tell us about his nationality. I kind of agree with many of the commenters that instead of terrorizing our citizens for minor traffic violations, they should pay a few cops as snipers who guard similar historical places 24 hours a day.

Update: He was a young American. He told the Czech cops that the reason why he climbed there was that there was no table saying "Don't Climb at the Astronomical Clock" around. ;-) TRF strongly advises U.S. readers not to climb at the Prague Astronomical Clock.

Science on anti-GOP bias of the NAS

2012-05-24T13:46:00.000+02:00

Science Insider has printed a courageous article about the left-wing bias of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences yesterday:

A Partisan Look at U.S. Science Policy

The academy invited the former and current science advisers to the U.S. presidents to a symposium. All of the attendants turned out to be Democrats who served for Democrats, starting from Frank Press who served for Jimmy Carter.

How is that possible? Haven't there been some Republican U.S. presidents after Carter, too?

John Marburger – who was a physicist and a Democrat himself but who served to George W. Bush – may be forgiven: he died in 2011. In the same way, Allan Bromley who worked for George H.W. Bush, died in 2005. But there has been at least one more Republican president after Carter, right? Don't you remember his name?

His name was Ronald Reagan.

When he was asked why this guy's science adviser wasn't invited, the current NAS president and a namesake of Marcus Tullius Cicero replied rather arrogantly that "they didn't want to go that far" (after all, Carter is much closer to them). And that's despite the fact that George Keyworth, the adviser, is not only alive but he represented many of the key and worthy values of science and the major positive developments in the world's history of the late 20th century.

First, Keyworth, a physicist, was an important spokesman who was defending Reagan's Star Wars against some critics, including the communists within the U.S. scientific community. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was an important player that helped the democratic world to defeat the Soviet bloc – which got overheated in the arms races and decided to surrender. Paradoxically enough, this defeat was followed by the explosion of Marxists and other leftist activists within the U.S. scientific community itself.

But Keyworth wasn't about the Star Wars only. (I don't want to discuss his recent membership in the Hewlett-Packard board which ended after Keyworth was too open about the Hewlett-Packard internal data.) He insisted on the value of the basic research. That's why he has also been a backer of Reagan's collider, the 40 TeV proton-proton collider with circumference of 87 kilometers, the Superconducting Supercollider. (The LHC may be viewed as an SSC divided by three and thank God for that.) The collider project got stopped by the U.S. Congress in 1993 during the Clinton-Gore administration.

However, those were not the only activities he was doing. Already in the 1980s, Keyworth noticed the growing infatuation with applied research, especially with ill-defined multidisciplinary research projects. All of us see the amazing cancer that has grown out of this obsession (research which, when done properly, doesn't really need to be funded by the government at all) – as well as the dropping attention to the basic research (where the role of the governments is justified). Keyworth is now sorry that he couldn't do more in the fight against this harmful trend before it was too late.

Keyworth surely wanted to be invited to the symposium of the U.S. presidential science advisers. He wasn't invited as the National Academy of Sciences has increasingly resembled the Soviet institutions in the recent decades. Ideologically biased leftists are everywhere. So instead of Keyworth, the Science Magazine observes, the symposium was full of worthless and colorless "blend-into-the-background" leftists who have had nothing to say.

(Of course, if I don't count John Holdren's musings about the need to sterilize the mankind and barcore everyone at birth so that anonymity is eliminated, each exhaled CO2 molecule is attributed to someone, and soldiers may be safely and immediately killed. Or whatever this loon is saying these days.)

That's sad but the U.S. scientific community will probably need some foreigners to ignite their own Star Wars and bring some life and meaning to the National Academy of Sciences.

Psychology of dark matter denial

2012-05-24T09:41:00.000+02:00

Sean Carroll mentioned some developments concerning dark matter that have been discussed on this blog, too. His short text is another example of the fact that his comments are sometimes right, however rare these events may be.

A month ago, the media overhyped a paper by Chilean astronomers who claimed that their measurements show that there was no dark matter in the vicinity of the Solar System. However, Bovy and Tremaine showed that with a more realistic model for the velocities of the galaxies, the corrected method seems to yield a dark matter density that is fully compatible with the value obtained by more common methods.

Among the media, only Universe Today, Phys Org, and Nude Socialist mentioned the new article which arguably is – unlike the previous, overhyped one – correct. The ordinary non-scientific media remained silent. Theories that work are not too interesting for the journalists; they prefer to write about things that don't work, especially if these "don't work" claims are untrue.

These days, many people – or at least a sufficiently large number of loud people – are literally obsessed by attacks against some key theories contained in the very foundations of modern science. String theory may be just too mathematically abstract for a number of amazingly aggressive "critics" if I have to avoid the term "imbeciles". Quantum mechanics brought the most profound conceptual revolution in the history of physics.

One could perhaps understand the existence of these people – because these theories really dramatically differ from our everyday understanding of the reality or from the expected amount of mathematical depth that is needed to to describe the observations properly.

However, the anti-scientific movement reaches corners of science that seem totally conventional. The existence of dark matter is an example. Many people just get unbelievably emotional when you say something about dark matter. They're as certain as any other religious bigot that dark matter shouldn't exist: it's so dark and blasphemous! The adjective "dark" surely means that it's just a collection of fudge factors that the cosmologists and physicists have to apply in order to hide the truth. The cosmologists and physicists must have signed a contract with the Devil if they promote dark matter.

The actual fact is that dark matter is just pretty much ordinary matter from a physics viewpoint; it's just composed of yet another type of an elementary particle. There are many types of elementary particles. We encounter some of them frequently, some of them less frequently, but all of them are just examples of particles that also behave as waves, quanta of some particular quantum fields which are intrinsically vibrating strings if weakly coupled string theory applies to the real world.

Where are those conspiracy theories about dark matter that surely has to be a fraud coming from?

A part of it may boil down to the name and the hype in the popular science media that dark matter is something totally shocking. People just don't like "dark" things. They're connected with the devil, they feel. And many popular science writers love to oversell the topics they're discussing so they stress that dark matter is something totally unusual, completely otherworldly, crazy. But it's not. It's as conservative as muons or Higgs bosons. It's just a different material but the difference doesn't really require any dramatic paradigm shift away from quantum field theory, our "theory of nearly everything" (TONE), or string theory, our "theory of everything" (TOE).

Many of the anti-scientific movements, whether we talk about quantum mechanics, string theory, or dark matter, boils down to an unbelievable degree of naivety of the critics. They just want all the objects in physics to look like a tree – or something else you encounter in your everyday life. It shouldn't be too small, it should reflect an amount of light that is neither too low nor too high, it should sit in the space without fluctuations, it should only have three dimensions, it shouldn't contract or get heavier when it's moving, and so on.

Except that the fundamental objects and concepts in physics simply aren't any trees! They are different. They get shorter and heavier when they're moving. They may be constructed out of new particles, the particles' internal structure may expose a one-dimensional string or higher-dimensional branes, all these objects live in extra dimensions and follow the probabilistic logic that must be described with the maths of quantum mechanics. The fundamental objects in physics have many properties that differ from the properties of a tree. Get used to it.

Those people can't get used to it. But even smart kids in the kindergarten must be able to understand why these people's criticism is utterly irrational. There is no reason why fundamental things should look like trees – just like there is no reason why the entity that has created the Universe has to look like a grandfather sitting on the cloud. Other possibilities are mathematically consistent so they may be realized in Nature. And indeed, the right ones are realized in Nature. We are just some composite objects, animals that evolved in a particular way and have been trained to perceive and evaluate a certain kind of empirical information. But it's surely not all the information, information in all the forms, that may exist in the real world.

In particular, a big part of the elementary particles (counted as a fraction of the total mass of particles) may be invisible through light. And in fact, we know that a majority of the localized mass/energy in the Universe is invisible via light; that's why we call it dark matter. It just doesn't interact with the electromagnetic field – or the interaction is so impressively weak that the practical outcome is the same. We don't see it.

In the Universe, 73% of the energy density seems to be composed of dark energy which is not localized and has no internal structure. It seems that it's just Einstein's cosmological constant adding some curvature – just a number – to the vacuum (spacetime) at each point. The remaining 27% are composed out of dark matter, 23%, and baryonic i.e. visible matter, 4%, most of which (counted as mass) is composed of protons and neutrons. Among those 27% assigned to localized matter, 85% of it is dark matter.

Is it a large percentage? Is it small? Well, I don't know. There is no a priori, philosophical calculation that would tell you what the right percentage should be. The Universe as we see it is consistent and allows life at this moment. One can show that if we changed some percentages but not others, certain things wouldn't work anymore. There wouldn't be any life at this moment, for example. Some other correlated changes could still be compatible with life at this moment but these alternative possibilities are simply not realized in the world around us even though they could seem acceptable. Our world has unique answers to most of such questions.

Spectrum of rainbow

But the fact that there is matter we don't directly see – by our eyes – just shouldn't be shocking. Our eyes only see light whose wavelength is between 0.4 and 0.8 microns. At the log scale, it's just some interval corresponding to one doubling. Inside the huge interval of interesting wavelengths of electromagnetic waves, going from $10^{-25}$ to $10^3$ meters, the visible interval is located at a seemingly random place in the middle – well, it's not too random: the frequencies we see are close to those that are mostly emitted by the Sun and that make it through the atmosphere. We are directly sensitive to the type of light that is widespread on Earth (although our devices are able to detect the remaining frequencies in the wide interval, too).

It's not an accident that our eyes became able to see the frequencies that are dominant on Earth. It's easier to evolve an observing optical apparatus – an eye – if it doesn't have to deal with one problem, the shortage of light of the detectable frequencies. And at the end, the eyes use similar chemical and electrical processes to detect the light that are employed during the emission of the light by atoms. So you shouldn't be shocked that the frequencies had to be close.

Evolution of the not-only-human eye. Sorry if clicking will produce a creationist page; they were just successful enough to be high-scorers with Google and the picture (in which they present a serious theory) just passed my tests.

However, one simple conceptual point that you should appreciate – and the "critics" of dark matter arguably don't appreciate it – is that the eyes got evolved to adapt to the environment and the composition of the electromagnetic waves in this environment. What I want to say is that the causal relationship wasn't going in the other way around. Some people seem to think that they decide what is the preferred way how they should be seeing the world and things in Nature are obliged to adapt so that they may be seen in this "user-friendly" way.

But Nature isn't obliged to obey such conditions. In particular, it doesn't have to be "user-friendly". Nature isn't obliged to obey any ad hoc man-made conditions whatsoever. By definition (of "natural" and "man-made"), there aren't any fundamental physical processes in Nature that would be man-made, a trivial fact that could drive the climate alarmist crackpots up the wall but that is true, anyway. If we want to understand Nature, our beliefs and our science has to adapt to what has existed in Nature for billions of years, not the other way around. Nature just won't adapt to your beliefs. Feel free to complain against Nature's totalitarian attitude and team up with a few billion of other crackpots who will demand Nature to surrender. She won't.

The electromagnetic spectrum: click. Note how narrow the visible band is on the log scale. And it still allows us to have so much fun with colors, to distinguish millions of them, etc.

Just like there are objects and processes that emit or absorb light at frequencies that are very different from the frequencies of the visible light, there are particles that aren't able to emit or absorb light at all – at least not at rates that would be significant and detectable. That's not shocking.

Light itself (or a photon) is just one elementary particle. Others aren't obliged to interact with it. In particular, electrically neutral particles don't interact with electromagnetic waves and there are many electrically neutral particles. Neutrons and atoms are examples of electrically neutral particles that still interact with light (emission spectra, magnetic moments etc.) because they're made out of electrically charged pieces – pieces that are sufficiently distant from each other. However, elementary particles such as neutrinos or neutralinos are both neutral and tiny so any substructure involving charged sub-particles is unobservable at achievable frequencies. So they just don't interact with light.

There isn't any a priori calculation of the fraction on the Universe's particulate mass that these invisible particles should constitute. It seems we know a lot to conclude that it is a majority of the matter (not counting dark energy). This conclusion is deeply incorporated into our modern picture of cosmology – I mean to the publicly available version of the CV of our cosmos.

The visible matter – protons, atoms etc. – is just a cherry on a pie, some parasitic exceptional stuff that decided to live, get ignited, and burn on the peaks of dark matter halos, the primordial environment where the galaxies were born. You could say that the visible matter is a "higher species" than the dark matter; after all, life is composed of visible matter. But the mass stored in the dark matter, the lower species, may be naturally larger. The number of insects is higher than the number of humans, too.

(I apologize to insect American readers and their environmentalist advocates for my suggestion that the insect Americans are a lower race than homo sapiens.)

We may observe the motion of stars in our galaxy and compare it with the theoretical predictions – either from Newton's theory or Einstein's theory i.e. the general theory of relativity. Without the dark matter, we find a disagreement. The Milky Way is rotating almost like an LP, with a velocity that doesn't depend on the center from the center. According to Newton's theory, the motion should be much closer to the Solar System in which the innermost planets are much faster because their centrifugal acceleration has to compensate the much stronger Sun's gravity they feel.

There are two classes of solutions to this discrepancy: the theory – Newton's or Einstein's theory – is fundamentally wrong; or we have just overlooked some sources of the gravitational field. Of course, the latter option – one leading to the concept of dark matter – is much more conservative from a physics viewpoint. It is favored by detailed observations, too.

But even if we're open-minded about both possibilities, we could try to reconstruct the metric tensor in our galaxy. Just imagine that you try to find a configuration of the metric tensor – the geometry – whose geodesics coincide with the observed world lines of the celestial objects. Assume that this task has a solution and our (imperfect but already nontrivial) observations suggest that it does. So we have something like $g_{\mu\nu}(x,y,z,t)$. Out of this metric tensor, we may calculate the Ricci tensor $R_{\mu\nu}(x,y,z,t)$.

We may use this Ricci tensor to calculate the stress-energy tensor from Einstein's equations,\[

R_{\mu\nu} - \frac 12 R g_{\mu\nu} = -8\pi G T_{\mu\nu}^\text{includes c.c.}

\] In our treatment, you may view Einstein's equations above to be a definition of the stress-energy tensor $T$ which I have defined to include the dark energy term $\rho g_{\mu\nu}$, too. (More often, it would be written as an extra term and moved to the left hand side.) You see that in this approach, we may always obey Einstein's equations. We just define the stress-energy tensor to be the usual multiple of the Einstein tensor constructed out of the curvature components.

In this setup and so far, the question whether the dark matter explanation is the right one remains vacuous. We may always calculate the stress-energy tensor and the difference between this gravitationally calculated stress-energy tensor and the stress-energy tensor from the observed matter may be called the stress-energy tensor of "dark matter". A pure fudge factor.

However, if we assume that the stress-energy tensor of the dark matter is really calculated out of some particular form of matter – such as a cloud of new particles, WIMPs, behaving as a particular kind of dust – which have some particular relations between the pressure and energy density and which evolve according to the same laws as the visible matter – we may already make nontrivial predictions about the stress-energy tensor contributed by the dark matter. And what we observe is already a nontrivial consistency check: the observed cosmology is compatible with the idea that the dark matter whose distribution was decoded from its gravitational influence – i.e. from the motion of the stars etc. – does seem to obey the otherwise known laws of physics, too.

This check is a huge argument in favor of the dark matter paradigm. Analogous consistency checks trying to verify the MOND theories – theories that want to avoid dark matter and blame the anomalous motion on Nature's hypothetical refusal to obey Newton's or Einstein's laws at cosmological length scales – don't work this well. One may continue with other, more detailed checks and the dark matter paradigm just seems to work fine. In fact, it allowed us to decide that most of the dark matter should really be a cloud of a new particle, either WIMP or axions or their mixture or something similar. These theories seem to make sense. Their implications for the early cosmic history seem to make sense, too.

The only "new thing" about this dark matter is that it is dark: we can't observe its presence via light. But we may still observe its presence by other tools, especially by its gravitational influence on other celestial bodies – and if we're lucky, also from its impact on the direct search experiments such as LUX discussed in the previous blog entry.

So where does the emotional opposition to the dark matter come from? There is no observation that would really contradict it; the theory has passed many nontrivial consistency checks; the overall cosmological picture including dark matter makes sense; and the very assumption that some particles don't interact with light is no heresy because it obviously follows from pretty ordinary theories in particle physics. After all, we know that neutrinos have the same property although they're too light to account for the relatively compact and "slowly changing" dark matter halos. But the neutrinos may have heavier cousins. There's clearly absolutely no simple enough way to show that the dark matter paradigm is insane or impossible. All the people who try to convince themselves that they have such a proof are just deluding themselves and others.

In these dark matter discussions, I still think that most of the people's irrational attitudes boil down to their dogmas, to their inability to impartially and rationally compare competing hypotheses that are assigned comparable prior probabilities. All the "critics" just start with the assumption that the dark matter paradigm has to be super insanely unlikely for some emotional reasons – some completely unjustifiable would-be argument that there is something contrived about dark matter – and no amount of evidence is capable of convincing them that the answer differs from their dogmas.

It's very important that qualitatively different theories must be given non-negligible, mutually comparable prior probabilities. You may only falsify theories by showing that they disagree with the evidence; you may only falsify them a posteriori. Many critics – and this is true for the dark matter denial just like it is true for the staggeringly shitty anti-stringy imbeciles or for the anti-quantum, anti-Copenhagen zealots - just don't want to obey this basic rule of science that falsification has to boil down to the evidence and not some a priori emotions.

If one has a theory that tells you something about every element of a class of phenomena, the only way to weaken this theory is to find a disagreement between the theory and some observations; or to show that it is totally vacuous and doesn't have any implications whatsoever. This is clearly not case of the Copenhagen quantum mechanics; it's not the case of the dark matter paradigm; it's not the case of string theory. All the people who say that they have some evidence against those things are just lying to themselves.

And that's the memo.

South Dakota's LUX will join the dark matter wars

2012-05-23T20:49:00.002+02:00

Many articles on this blog were dedicated to the war on the existence of dark matter.

Some research teams claim that they have already detected a proof of a dark matter particle, a WIMP, whose mass is of order 10 GeV. Other teams disagree equally vehemently.

The Homestake Mine

In the Fall, a new big player will enter this conflict; see a list of other participants. Its name is LUX: Large Underground Xenon detector. Phys.ORG just dedicated a fresh article to the experiment:

Lying in wait for WIMPs: Researchers seek to increase the sensitivity of Large Underground Xenon detector by orders of magnitude

But much of the data were already available to readers of the Symmetry Magazine in April 2012.

The project is located almost a mile beneath the surface, in The Homestake Mine, a gold mine that closed in 2002 and opened for science in 2007.

Cylindrical titanium thermos ("the can") will hold liquid xenon cooled to –108 degrees Celsius. In many respects, you could think that the experiment is similar to XENON100 in Gran Sasso, Italy which is a cornerstone of the "dark matter is not seen" axis.

Lead, South Dakota, 3,000 people. You see the mine at the top.

But there's one important difference: XENON100 only has 100 kilograms of xenon, as the name indicates. LUX will have 350 kilograms of xenon and there already exist plans for a bigger LUX with 3-5 tons of xenon.

Slightly off-topic: Dennis Overbye of the New York Times wrote a sad article called American Physics Dreams Deferred explaining that there is no funding for hard physics but there is a lot of money for fraudulent climate Marxists, thieves, fraudsters, and criminals for whom a decent government should only pay for the nooses

Because the signals per unit time are pretty much proportional to the mass, you may calculate how much time LUX will need to beat the results of XENON100. Size matters here.

The LUX detector, to be lowered to the gold mine.

So expect either faster discoveries or more stringent exclusion limits. But we will have to wait what they will observe. Don't expect any substantial data before 2013.

Two arrays with 61 photomultipliers each. The xenon will be outside them.

A photomultiplier should see every collision of a wimp with the xenon nucleus.

In 2010, engineer Wendy Zawada had to remove some last pile of rock and pocket the last gold – poor guy – to allow LUX to arrive.

Directions: Majorana Demonstrator (looking for neutrinoless double beta decay) in the left cavern, LUX in the right one.

Floor of the Davis cavern will host LUX.

Stainless steel plates on that floor: a lid of the tank.

Construction workers built the tank from the top, starting with the lid.

271,000 liters of purified water is included to protect the smaller detector with xenon from natural radioactive decays.

A diagram of the experiment.

LUX's Simon Fiorucci emigrated from EDELWEISS and XENON in Gran Sasso.

LUX's control room is above the tank, the tunnel goes to the Majorana Demonstrator.

Data taking may begin in October 2012.

Sheldon Cooper's revenge to Stephen Hawking: Hawking made a boo boo

2012-05-23T17:26:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, we discussed an interesting new paper by Hartle, Hawking, and Hertog. It claimed that because of some mysterious maths of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, a theory with a negative cosmological constant may accelerate the cosmic expansion just like as if it were a positive cosmological constant.

Fun update: A reader, yaya jon, has pointed out that in the new version of the Hartle-Hawking-Hertog paper, your humble correspondent and HB are thanked for the innocent sign error whose impact so far looks isolated (but I still believe that there must be some other errors unless the paper shows some really important loophole in the Ehrenfest "theorem" way of thinking about the evolution in quantum gravity).

I said it couldn't be right: there had to be a sign error. But I didn't know where the error was. A reader named "test" or "HB" has quickly filled the gap. I just verified that HB's remark is right. So I will alert Jim Hartle – the only author whom I have talked to for a long enough time – and send him a link to this blog entry. I am sure he will be happy!

My message to Hartle et al. is the following:

Prof Hartle, Hawking, and Herzog, it's an honor and privilege to meet you, Sirs. (We know.) I wanna thank you for taking time to see my blog. (Our pleasure.)

I enjoyed reading your paper very much. You clearly have the brilliant minds. (We know.) Your thesis that the accelerated Universe is an anti de Sitter space exposing its cosmological constant in the backwards way is fascinating. (Thank you. Came to us one morning in the shower.)

That's nice. Too bad it's wrong. (What do you mean "wrong"?) You made an arithmetic mistake on page 7, equation (2.4). It was quite a boner. (No, no, that that that can't be right! We don't make arithmetic mistakes.)

Are you saying I do? (No, no, no, of course not. I was thinking. Oh gosh Golly. We made a boo boo. And we submitted it to the arXiv so it's visible to The Reference Frame readers. Collapse.)

Great. Three more fainters.

A video that inspired my message. TBBT, sitcom, CBS.

Now, let's be a bit more specific. The equation (2.2) on page 7 of their paper defines the action $I$ as follows:\[

I[N(\lambda), a(\lambda)] = \eta\int \dd \lambda \,N \left[
\frac 12 G(a) \zav{\frac{a^\prime}{N}}^2 + {\mathscr V}(a)
\right]

\] In equation (2.3), they also tell us that\[

G(a)\equiv -a,\qquad {\mathscr V}(a) \equiv -\frac 12 (a+ \frac{1}{{\ell}^2} a^3)

\] Finally, the equation (2.4) claims to write down the constraint we may obtain from varying the action $I$ in equation (2.2) with respect to $N$. Let's just do it. First, we ignore (i.e. divide by) the prefactor $\eta$ which is universal. Second, we vary with respect to $N$. There are two things we must vary: the first term is proportional to $G(a)$ while the second term is proportional to ${\mathscr V}(a)$.

Both of these terms are multiplied by $N$ so the variation with respect to $N$ just erases this $N$. That would give us the constraint\[

0 = \frac 12 G(a) \zav{\frac{a^\prime}{N}}^2 + {\mathscr V}(a) + \dots

\] However, we shouldn't forget that the term proportional to $G(a)$ also has an extra $1/N^2$ whose derivative is $-2/N^3$. So it also reduces the power of $N$ by $1$ but with an extra prefactor of $-2$. Adding the prefactors, we get $(1-2)=(-1)$ as the total prefactor for the term proportional to $G(a)$, something we should have known immediately because the total power of $N$ in this term is $N^{-1}$.

So the right variation is\[

0 = -\frac 12 G(a) \zav{\frac{a^\prime}{N}}^2 + {\mathscr V}(a) + \dots

\] But this subtlety switching the signs wasn't the actual point where the mistake was generated. The real mistake fully boils down to the term proportional to ${\mathscr V}(a)$. Let's use the equation (2.3) to rewrite the last displayed equation above. After we divide the equation by the omnipresent $(a/2)$, we obtain\[

\zav{\frac{a'}{N}}^2 - 1 - \frac{a^2}{{\ell}^2} = 0

\] Now, compare this result with their equation (2.4). Their term ${a^2}/{{\ell}^2}$ has the opposite, plus sign! This sign is wrong because the relative sign between the second term $-1$ and the last term has to be $+1$ because the signs of both terms in ${\mathscr V}(a)$ are the same. But they got the opposite sign!

Needless to say, this last term is exactly the cosmological constant term because, as they write below equation (2.3), \[

\frac{1}{{\ell}^2} = -\frac{\Lambda}{3}.

\] So by a sign error, they reverted the sign of the cosmological constant and unless (2.4) is just an isolated equation with a typo that isn't used later (which could be the case because e.g. (2.5) and (2.6) seem to be fixed again), all the other remarkable claims in the paper probably boil down to this single sign error.

They may also boil down to another sign error or another error. It seems to me now that they're doing something similar to my March 2012 blog entry, Reality of complexified fields, and with the kind help by some readers (who pointed out that one must insist on the positivity of the kinetic terms etc. to avoid ghosts, a rule I may have violated), I think that I convinced myself that the signs can't be switched this easily.

Euro, geuro, and Greece before grexit

2012-05-23T11:05:00.000+02:00

The outcome of the recent elections in Greece was an unbelievable proof that Greece is a dying democracy, something I've been predicting for years.

The single largest party turned out to be New Democracy which, despite its attempts to right-wing image, one could recognize as a remote counterpart of some center-left parties in the rest of Europe. I actually consider New Democracy – which received about 19 percent – to be an extreme left-wing party, too. But the other parties are worse, much worse.

A one-geuro coin.

A collection of would-be far-right nuts is called Golden Dawn. They use a modified swastika (with some Greek explanations) as their symbol and their leader, an immature 55-year-old teenager, acts as if he were an Adolf Hitler and surrounds himself with skinhead bodyguards at all times. They're against immigration – and living in a virtual reality in which some modest immigration to Greece is Greece's most pressing problem.

But of course, the actual worst problem is the rise of the super insane bug-nutty batshit crazy infinitely far left-wing parties such as Syriza; the Papandreou dynasty that was "just" batshit crazy apparently wasn't crazy enough. Their young boss is a superstupid insane ultracommunist who wants to introduce a society in which everyone has everything he needs and only does what he wants to do. I have watched a few YouTube videos with Alexis Tsipras and I must say that in comparison with him, our insane social democratic jerk politicians are sensible moderate deep thinkers. This Marx who lost the last traces of realism got about 16 percent and it will be even worse. Check e.g. his address to the GDR communist "comrades".

Of course, they were unable to form a government. But there will be new elections on June 17th and the support for similar Tsipras-like feces is likely to get even bigger. Such a Greece will refuse to respect any commitments, agreements, and treaties, as the idiotic comrade has proudly announced many times. I think – or at least I hope – that the consensus has shifted enough so that Greece will be expelled from the eurozone and then from the EU once their new government will officially declare that they want to steal all the money they have been stealing for decades and they don't want to make any pro-free-market and pro-fiscal-balance reforms whatsoever.

Deutsche Bank has promoted the idea of their top economist, Thomas Mayer, to introduce a parallel currency in Greece, one geuro, that could be used alongside with the euro. This geuro has the declared advantage over a drachma that it sounds more European and the parallel status of the currencies could mean that Greece will abolish geuro in the future once again and it will return to the euro as the only currency.

It's of course a proposal that may be done and that can solve something. But if it does solve anything, it just proves how utterly irrational all the people in Greece – and some people advising Greece – are. Imagine that there are two currencies. Of course, the goal of this arrangement is to make it possible to change all the salaries and pensions and tons of other payments that the government is throwing around the Hellenic country to the same number of geuros which will however be much less real money due to the instant devaluation. In other words, with a unit of money that fakes the euro but isn't a real euro, one may reduce all this waste of money while the people won't notice (much like they were not noticing when the drachma was inflating and devaluing in the past).

But if the geuro and the euro will exist simultaneously, one will be able to see that the geuro is approaching its market value – which is closer (on the linear scale, not on the log scale) to 0 euros per 1 geuro than to parity, as the coin above indicates – and everyone who is receiving geuros must be able to figure out that he's just getting fewer euros. So why don't they just keep the euro and reduce all the salaries and pensions e.g. to 30% of their current values and make sure that the prices drop to 70% of their current values, too? It's the same thing with less bureaucracy, can't you see it?

I have been an opponent of currency unions that are politically and not economically motivated and I think it's been a bad idea that the traditionally inflating nations such as PIGS were squeezed to the hard-currency euro straitjacket. On the other hand, I think that almost everyone – including our president – heavily overstates the actual role of the euro in the mess that is thriving in the peripheral countries and in Greece in particular. At the end, what's wrong is that all the politicians are outside the reality and politics has become a tool for lazy parasitic Greeks to vote themselves money. Benjamin Franklin of the $100 fame is often attributed the following quote:

When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.

See also Founding fathers on redistribution of wealth.

This precious quote exactly describes what has already happened in Greece and that may be gradually happening in other countries, too. The electorate and the politicians in Greece are so insane that they're just not able to create a stable economic environment that could be disconnected from the dripfeed. Yes, their separate currency could solve many troubles by producing a 100% inflation and losing half of its value every 8 months. But high inflation makes many things more complicated. I don't want to describe all the bad implications of high inflation. The effects and living standards are ultimately the same as if you manage to live with a hard and stable currency and just avoid unsubstantiated increases of salaries and pensions (and therefore prices as well) and if you allow these things to decrease whenever necessary.

Why the hell can't the Greeks learn these basic things? Switching to a geuro or a new drachma is just a change of the units and an additional bureaucratic burden. It changes nothing about the actual substance. A constantly devaluing currency just makes your counting and planning more chaotic; the interest rates increase to include the expected devaluation, too. It doesn't make you richer. And the Greeks don't really want to have a worthless currency. If you ask them in a poll what they want, of course that they will answer that they want all the advantages and wealth coming from the euro but they don't want to do anything that requires them to work or fulfill their commitments etc. You don't need to make such polls. The results are easily predictable from the wording. If the wording emphasizes the advantages, they will vote to be kept in the eurozone, if the wording will expose the fact that one has to be fiscally balanced etc., the result will be negative.

Alexis Tsipras himself says that he wants to keep the euro but he wants to do nothing whatsoever to restore the fiscal balance of his country. Instead, he wants to "declare null and void" all the Greek debt from the past – and probably in the future, too. That's the main problem here. And the co-problem is that many people in the EU and elsewhere fail to realize what the main problem is and do nothing whatsoever to fight against this main problem. Or maybe the problem is the shortage of balls needed to tell Tsipras et al. "No, comrade, game over," something that more "moderate" leaders such as Papandreou should have been told many years ago. What we got because of our politicians' castration is ever more shameless blackmailing by various Tsiprases. Fortunately, people are beginning to realize that it's unacceptable and these Tsiprases don't really have any weapons (except for our politicians' irrational receptiveness to their outrageous populist lies) to blackmail us with.

The value of the Greek people's opinions is about a few billion geuros – which is approximately zero euros. We should stop pretending that the opinion of these lazy parasites matters. We must be ready that the political feces similar to Alexis Tsipras will be getting increasingly strong and we must learn how to treat Greece as a country of unreliable liars and thieves, a country with the same political values as North Korea that is however much more costly for us than North Korea, a country harboring lots of Syrizas that are at least as big threats for the modern capitalist civilization as Al Qaeda (Tsipras is known as the European Che Guevara for a reason), a country of enemies.

And that's the memo.