The Reference Frame

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.

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.

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.

Hartle, Hawking, Hertog: how our C.C. could be negative

2012-05-22T14:45:00.000+02:00

A reader has pointed out that I missed a paper by Hartle, Hawking, and Hertog last week:

Accelerated Expansion from Negative Λ

They claim – and please sit down so that your stability gets improved – that the accelerated expansion of our Universe could result from a theory that has a fundamentally negative cosmological constant, like in the Anti de Sitter space (AdS).

I enjoyed reading their paper so far. They clearly have brilliant minds. Too bad that the main claim seems to boil down to a sign error so far. ;-)

Of course, it is easier to study stringy AdS vacua than dS vacua and they're related to CFTs by holography, unlike dS vacua (sorry for that comment, Andy Strominger), so I don't have to explain to you how welcome their bizarre conclusion could be from the viewpoint of string cosmology if it were right. One additional advantage of AdS vacua over dS vacua is that they may preserve SUSY but I guess that they don't claim that there is unbroken SUSY in our Universe which is just masked by their tricks, do they?

(The final section of the bulk of their paper is dedicated to string cosmology; they mention holography a few times, too.)

Although I've been promoting various types of analytical continuations and complexifications of types that are similar to theirs, I just can't see so far how it could work when someone else does it. ;-)

They claim that the Wheeler-DeWitt equation (I am sure that under the influence of the authors' names, you're tempted to write "Hweeler-Hewitt equation") may be approximated by a semiclassical one in the large-volume-of-the-cosmos limit and it has solutions where the wave function is approximated by the exponential of a classical action times the imaginary unit.

But their classical action is complex and its nonzero imaginary part is what allows one the real part to resemble a de-Sitter-like expansion even though the underlying theory has a negative cosmological constant. If this is true, it is true regardless of the boundary conditions; so despite the names of the 2/3 of the authors, we don't necessarily talk about the Hartle-Hawking wave function only. We're talking about any wave function that obeys the Wheeler-DeWitt equation.

What I still don't understand is what they actually complexify. Surely if the spacetime coordinates are real and the fields obey their usual Minkowski-signature reality conditions, the evolution of histories that result from an AdS-like fundamental theory can't resemble a dS-like expansion, can they? By their complexified (unreal) action, they seem to be affecting the overall normalization of the wave function in a different way; but the overall normalization of the wave function should be determined by the conservation of the overall probability, shouldn't it? In other words, the relevant Hamiltonian or effective Hamiltonian or even the Wheeler-DeWitt H is real, even a priori, isn't it? This must constrain the unreality of the players, mustn't it? Or do they suggest this normalization is redefined as time goes by? That would surely be interesting but I wouldn't understand how it can be done.

After all, such a rescaling would have to take place differently at different spatial slices (different moments). But there are no preferred slices in a relativistic theory with a dynamical, curved spacetime, are there?

So while I feel these are deep things to be considered, I am still not getting how they can actually fool the fact that in the large-volume, classical limit, the value of the vacuum energy may simply be decoded from the metric tensor in the vacuum, and if the space is accelerating, the cosmological constant has to be positive. If there's some loophole through complexification in these arguments, I am not getting it so far.

Can you help me? Is there one equation or two equations in the paper that really clarify what's going on and where they violate the normal rules, normal rules that – as I believe - imply that in the classical limit, the expansion must reflect the same value of the parameters including the cosmological constant as the values we call fundamental?

So far, the paper by Hawking et al. looks like a contradiction with Einstein's equations to me, classical, quantum, or otherwise. So I have embedded this Hawking-vs-Einstein rap which is hopefully no longer taboo after 45 million YouTube views. ;-)

Paul Frampton: three generations from an extension of SM

2012-05-22T10:02:00.000+02:00

Paul Frampton, an achieved physicist, former TRF guest blogger, a sex symbol among the Argentine supermodels, and an involuntary importer of a substance is impressing everyone with the physics productivity during his confinement in Argentina where he is affiliated with Centro Universitario DeVoto in Buenos Aires.

Five days ago, a North Carolina judge endorsed the decision of University at Chapel Hill not to pay Paul his salary. Most people at UNC believe he is innocent.

Valeria Mazza, a Ms Frampton candidate

They just published the first part of his Notes From the Gallows:

Three Generations in Minimally Extended Standard Models (arXiv)

Paul's co-authors are Chiu Man Ho and Thomas W. Kephart. And I actually think it's a very interesting preprint.

In the Standard Model gauge group, $SU(3)_C\times SU(2)_L\times U(1)_Y$, they replace $SU(2)_L$ by $SU(N)_L$ with a higher value of $N$. So the electroweak doublets are replaced by larger multiplets and there are new particles whose electric charges differ from those of the known leptons and quarks by integer multiples of the electron's charge. Also, the hypercharge $Y$ is replaced by a more general generator $X$ which acquires corrections, $Y=X+\dots$, whenever $N\geq 2$.

That could be boring except that the authors show something interesting about the extended Standard Model. They are actually able to cancel all triangle anomalies. Note that the spectrum is more complicated than it is in the Standard Model and even the cancellation in the Standard Model looks nontrivial. However, the cancellation in the Standard Model is easily proved by an embedding into a grand unified theory, something that isn't quite available here.

So the cancellation in their extended Standard Model is even more nontrivial but they're able to achieve it. They can find infinitely many models that cancel all gauge anomalies but they have one surprising – and nicely surprising – feature: all of these new models require three generations. In their theory, they must make the first two generations analogous when it comes to their quantum numbers but the third generation has to be different. When these building blocks are combined, the anomaly cancellation conditions hold. All of them do.

The value $N=5$, the maximum value compatible with the QCD's asymptotic freedom that Paul keeps on believing in despite his confinement, is given a special treatment.

If you're returning from Argentina through San Francisco, you need some flowers instead of cocaine and some gentle people around you.

Of course, there's probably no simple counterpart of the $SO(10)$ grand unification here: one would need a larger orthogonal group whose spinor would be much bigger than needed. I don't know whether the enhanced Standard Model could fit into some natural $SU(5)$-like grand unification. Needless to say, the models above assume that there is no SUSY: with the superpartners included, the asymptotic freedom would probably disappear for smaller values than $N=5$.

Given the circumstantial data based primarily on the stringy vacua, I don't believe that these strange gauge groups and representations may realistically describe the hypothetical beyond-the-Standard-Model physics but the cancellation they're able to achieve still looks interesting although I would have to play with this model and many others to decide how nontrivial the cancellation actually is. One should appreciate that the more charges and dimensions-of-representations of the new matter fields you may adjust, the less constraining the anomaly conditions (for a pretty much fixed amount of cubic combinations of the generators) should become. So it may have been a priori guaranteed that one may find 3-generation models that cancel the anomalies for an extended Standard Model group if the generations are allowed to be different.

Klaus for Heartland on AGW: Eastern Europe is a bit corrupt, Germany is confused

2012-05-22T08:58:00.001+02:00

Czech president Václav Klaus was the keynote speaker during the Monday dinner at the Seventh Heartland Climate Conference, ICCC-7, in Chicago.

One could have said that all things have been said but one could have been wrong, too. He said some revealing things and addressed some novel questions about politics of AGW.

See

Notes for the Heartland Institute Conference Speech (klaus.cz)

for his full contribution. He mentioned that NATO doesn't care about AGW; ordinary people in Europe think that the hysteria is over; the AGW advocates have changed their tactics and try to suppress the debate as much as they can because the more it is being debated, the more people see how suspicious the doctrine is. So the alarmism has subsided, Klaus thinks, but given the advantage of facts, this new silence isn't in the skeptics' interest.

The rest of the blog entry will discuss some Czech media responses to his speech.

As the Czech Press Agency reports, Prof Klaus said that the post-socialist countries of Europe are "slightly bribed by the European Union" when it comes to their attitudes on the climate change panic. Up to occasional protests and disagreements from Czechia and Poland, these countries don't feel free in their struggle against the dominance of the global warming doctrine, he said in Chicago.

At the same moment, Klaus thinks that Germany is confused due to its decision to retire its nuclear power plants.

Watch live streaming video from heartlandinstitute at livestream.com

Live broadcast from the ICCC-7 conference

Klaus discussed the mild corruption of Eastern Europe after he was asked by other participants whether he sees a visible movement against the climate change panic that would be emerging in Eastern Europe. According to Klaus, we can't speak of a significant movement due to the reasons mentioned above. Also, Klaus predicted that Germany wouldn't change its decision to retire nuclear power plants even though the decision sparked by the post-Fukushima hysteria has scared both industrialists as well as ordinary citizens.

Germany believes in wind energy. They have built thousands and thousands of wind turbines which is, among other things, a problem for our grid. These problems acquire nearly catastrophic proportions whenever the weather is very windy.

Some of these words were new for the mostly American participants of the Heartland conference. Klaus also mentioned that we plan to extend our nuclear power plants, despite the anxiety that the plan causes in neighboring countries of Austria and Germany as well as the EU. However, the Czech government doesn't intend to scrap these plans, anyway. When the participants heard about this attitude, they applauded.

In his speech, Klaus repeated his warnings against the champions of the man-made climate change worries. He believes that it is not the climate that is at stake; instead, what they care about is how to influence the society to match their desires. In this respect, Klaus said, the climate alarmists are exactly isomorphic to the communists.

We must accept the fact that they were able to promote the environmentalist religion to the status of the official religion of the West. It is a religion that demands a radical transformation of the whole Western society.

According to Klaus, the opponents of the global warming doctrine can't rely on the scientific insights and the empirical data, even though those support the opponents' opinions. However, the champions of the global warming doctrine are not interested in these facts because they are ideologically biased. That's why the critics of the global warming doctrine have to join an ideological struggle. At the end, what is at stake is human freedom.

Klaus has attended several Heartland conferences in the past. This year, he came there from the NATO summit in Chicago where he led the Czech delegation.

The Heartland Institute was founded in 1984. It focuses on the support of free-market solutions to economic and social problems. The institute belongs among America's loudest critics of the global warming doctrine. The Czech Press Agency opined that an "overwhelming majority" of the scientific community supports the AGW doctrine, anyway. It has also enumerated some sponsors of the institute, including Microsoft, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Koch brothers, and Exxon Mobil – the last one no longer supports the free-market think tank. The journalists also mentioned that Heartland has contributed to a study co-sponsored by Philip Morris in the 1990s that questioned the health impacts of second-hand smoking. So be sure that the usual pro-warmist delusions and propaganda make it to the official Czech mainstream media, too.

A page with conference videos is here...

On Thursday, Bill Clinton will arrive to the Czech Republic for the sixth time. Along with Klaus and others, he will speak about energy policies in the Spanish Hall of the Prague Castle. I have some doubts whether Clinton and Klaus will be saying the same things. ;-)

Higgs combo viXra java applet

2012-05-21T22:26:00.001+02:00

Cosmological update: Bovy and Tremaine of IAS looked at a recent Chilean claim – wildly hyped in the mainstream media (but only mentioned in one sentence on TRF, in an article on a different topic) – that there was no dark matter around the Solar System. When they corrected some profiles for the velocities, they found out that the dark matter density is nonzero and compatible with the usual estimates. Via Resonaances

Phil Gibbs has written a cute and user-friendly java applet (download Java 7v4 instead of your dated Java 6v32 if you don't have the new one yet) that allows you to create thousands of charts relevant for the Higgs boson discovery:

viXra combo applet (click)

A screenshot of the applet is below.

Once the page above shows up, try to change the "Plot Type" to Exclusion, Signal, Pvalue, Sigma and see how the bump near 125 GeV is immediately affected. If you want to spend more time, you may try to play with the decay channels and individual detectors that are included and other things.

So far, in 2012, each major detector has recorded about 2.5 inverse femtobarns at 8 TeV. For the Higgs purposes, this is equivalent to nearly 3 inverse femtobarns at 7 TeV (and it is like 5/fb for the production of 1 TeV gluinos). So in combination with 5/fb from 2011, each detector has the equivalent of about 8/fb at 7 TeV.

Click to zoom in.

When you add all the channels at a single detector (CMS or ATLAS), the data accumulated so far are "more likely than not" to be enough for 5 sigma of local significance. For a global significance, one detector isn't quite enough but a combination of both ATLAS and CMS is surely enough by now to obtain 5-sigma global significance for the discovery of the 125 GeV Higgs boson, too.

On July 7th, there will be a new announcement on the progress with the Higgs boson. We will have to see whether they will remain separated or not. My guess is that at this time, they will already have the combination from CMS and ATLAS and they will announce a shared discovery of the 125 GeV Higgs boson. (John Ramsden will strictly owe me $500 at that moment, if true.) It's also plausible that they will actually collect much more than 2.5/fb in 2012 by then and evaluate the results quickly enough. If they collect much more than 5/fb for 2012 by the July conference, they could make the discovery announcement separately (or at least the "luckier ones").

Still, I find the inclusive "combo" solution more likely from a sociological viewpoint because it's kind of politically correct. Such an inclusive solution wouldn't occur for the first time. In the mid 1990s, the top quark was discovered once the data from CDF and D0 at the Tevatron were combined. When it comes to ATLAS and CMS, I don't think that one of them deserves to be credited with the Higgs discovery more than the other.

Klaus: Afghans not ready to take security lead

2012-05-21T17:29:00.000+02:00

Czech President Václav Klaus is no military hawk. He had mixed feelings about NATO's interventions in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and probably others if there have been any and many of his attitudes may put him relatively close to folks like Ron Paul.

But before the ongoing NATO meeting began in Chicago, he said something, well, pro-interventionist.

Klaus surrounded by his American and Danish fans. After they shake his hand, they usually don't wash their hands for a week or so.

Before the event began, he adjusted the discourse by his interview for the Czech Press Agency. Note that Cameron plans December 2014 to be the month after which there won't be any military operations by the British in Afghanistan. However, Klaus said:

It would be phoney to fool ourselves into thinking that the Afghan government and the Afghan law enforcement forces are capable of taking the resposibility for Afghanistan from the allies. This is not possible.

Klaus expects the mission to continue after December 2014, too. France plans to leave Afghanistan as soon as in 2012. However, Merkel declared she wouldn't change any plans. Klaus warned that military is the easiest target of attempts to save the money, especially in economic times that aren't easy, and this is a problem for NATO.

Today, Obama said that confident Afghans may take security lead which is, as you can see, exactly the opposite of what Klaus had said previously. Today, however, Klaus said that Czechia is ready to adequately contribute to the Afghan military which suggests that some other folks may have influenced him over there. I personally remain skeptical about the idea that letting Afghans to retake the security lead after a decade of struggles and casualties is a good idea.

After the NATO summit, Klaus will stay in Chicago for a few days because he is a keynote speaker at the Seventh Heartland Climate Conference, ICCC-7.

Incidentally, Peter Gleick may have counterfeited a document claiming that he has been cleared of having counterfeited the documents pretending to be Heartland Institute's documents – and The Guardian may have bought into this new forgery before they realized the mistake and deleted the article endorsing Gleick's new forgery from the Grauniad website. If it is a correct explanation of the deletion, it is amusing, indeed.

Let me also mention that an internal European Commission memo suggests that all green subsidies in the whole EU could be abolished. That would be a good thing – and quite a change.

By the way, this week carries a highly elevated risk of an assault against Iran. Iran seems as defiant as it was in the past, there will be some negotiations about their nuclear exit in a few weeks. They will not agree and America has declared it's technically ready to strike at this moment.

Falcons' webcam

The picture below is coming from the closest webcam to my home that I am aware of; I actually see the very same brown building from my windows but it's from the other side:

Update the webcam here...

Some newspapers just claimed that this nest produces one new falcon every day! Oops, correction: they don't actually mean a new baby every day. They say that there should be a baby and the birth is imminent so you should watch every day...

How the (2,0) SCFT, little string theory, and others arise from string theory

2012-05-21T10:07:00.000+02:00

We often say that the primary reason why string/M-theory is so essential for modern physics is that it is the only known – and most likely, the only mathematically possible – consistent theory of gravity. Everyone who believes that he or she can do state-of-the-art research of quantum gravity without string theory is an unhinged crank, a barbarian, and a conspiracy theorist of the same kind as those who believe that Elvis Presley lives on the Moon.

But another reason why string/M-theory is indispensable for the 21st century theoretical and particle physics is that many of the "ordinary", important, non-gravitational quantum field theories and some of their non-field-theoretical but still non-gravitational generalizations are tightly embedded as limits in string theory. In this way, a theory whose main strength is to provide us with robust quantum rules governing gravity is important for our knowledge of contexts that avoid gravity, too.

Because of the dense network of relationships within string theory that link ideas, concepts, and equations that used to be considered independent – and I mostly mean dualities but not only dualities – each of the "ordinary" non-gravitational theories may be analyzed from new perspectives. In particular, extreme limits of the old theories in which a quantity is sent to infinity (or zero) could have been very mysterious but many of the mysteries go away as string/M-theory allows us to use new descriptions.

Among the new insights that we're learning from the stringy network of ideas, rules, equations, and maps, we also encounter new quantum field theories – and some other non-gravitational generalizations of these theories which are not quantum field theories – i.e. theories that are not full-fledged string vacua and that we shouldn't have overlooked in the past but we have. What are they?

In March, I discussed the maximally supersymmetric gauge theory in four dimensions. It's arguably the most far-reaching or at least the most widely studied example of the point I made in the second paragraph.

The $\NNN=4$ gauge theory in $d=4$ is a gauge theory with 16 real supercharges. If you write it in terms of components, it's a gauge theory with a gauge group – it can be $SU(N)$, $O(N)$, $OSp(2k)$, $E_6$, or any other compact Lie group – which is coupled to four Weyl neutrinos in the adjoint representation of the same group and six Hermitian scalars in the same representation. When the interactions are appropriately chosen, we discover that the theory has those 16 supersymmetries even at the interacting level.

Nima Arkani-Hamed would call this theory a harmonic oscillator of the 21st century. Andy Strominger reserves this term for black holes but it's true that these two theoretical constructs are perhaps even more important if they work as a team and they often do.

String theory tells us lots of things about the seemingly ordinary gauge theory which wasn't known to have any direct connection to strings. In fact, we have known for almost 15 years that this gauge theory is string theory. The $SU(N)$ maximally supersymmetric gauge theory is totally equivalent to the superselection sector of type IIB string theory respecting the asymptotic conditions of $AdS_5\times S^5$. This relationship is, of course, the most famous example of Juan Maldacena's AdS/CFT correspondence.

However, the remarkable relationship was found – and may be "almost proven" – by less shocking relationships between this gauge theory and string theory. In particular, the simplest representation of the gauge theory is the dynamics of D3-branes in type IIB string theory at very long distances. Some properties of the gauge theory may be deduced out of this realization immediately. In particular, the theory inherits the $SL(2,\ZZ)$ S-duality group – which includes the $g\to 1/g$ exchange of the weak coupling with the strong coupling – from the full type IIB string theory. In the type IIB string theory, the S-duality group may also be motivated by representing type IIB string theory as a 12-dimensional theory, F-theory, compactified on a two-torus. This toroidal proof of the S-duality group may also be realized by another embedding: the gauge theory may also be viewed as a long-distance limit of the $d=6$ $(2,0)$ superconformal field theory compactified on a two-torus; the logic is the same.

You should appreciate that the S-duality is an extremely complicated relationship if you want to construct it or prove it by hand. In fact, it replaces point-like elementary oscillations that are weakly coupled with extended objects such as magnetic monopoles that are strongly coupled. They look like very different physical objects and the proof of the equivalence can't be made in perturbative expansion – because it is not a duality that holds order-by-order in this expansion – but it's still true. But of course, all tests you can fully calculate work: the gauge theory seems to possess the non-trivial S-duality group. In its stringy incarnation, the S-duality may be seen within a second.

Also, Maldacena's holographic duality boils down to the construction of the gauge theory involving D3-branes, too. The low-energy limit of the D3-branes' internal interactions has to be an interacting theory with 16 supercharges – because they aren't being broken by anything – and that has a field content that may be obtained from the counting of open string excitations attached to the D3-branes. You will find out that the theory has to be a gauge theory with the degrees of freedom I enumerated above; the supersymmetries and consistency dictate the interactions uniquely. In the long-distance limit, only the massless open strings i.e. gauge fields and their superpartners matter; closed strings (especially gravity) is decoupled because the energy density per Planck volume is very low in this limit. So we really do have a non-gravitational theory.

On the other hand, the D3-branes in string theory are real objects, lively animals that manifest themselves in many other physical ways. In particular, they have a gravitational field that extends to the transverse dimensions. Much like D0-branes would be particles that would behave as black holes, D3-branes are extended versions of the same objects, extended black holes. We call them black branes or black $p$-branes. They are black 3-branes, in this case. Just to be sure, in the previous paragraph, I stated that the gravitational force between the open string interactions may be neglected; but the gravitational field from their substrate – the static D3-branes in which the open strings live – still curves the 10-dimensional spacetime of type IIB string theory.

A funny thing is that if you adopt the full 10-dimensional perspective, the low-energy excitations have another interpretation: they are physical states that are located near the event horizon of the black branes. The relationship between the adjectives "low-energy" and "near-horizon" holds because near the horizon, it's where the excitations that look "very red" from the global viewpoint (of an observer at infinity) may be created in generic processes. That's because of the gravitational red shift, of course.

If you ask which degrees of freedom are kept if you simply consider all low-energy excitations of those 3-branes, you have two methods to answer: you either realize that the 3-branes may be described as D3-branes whose dynamics is governed by interactions of open strings and the low-energy limit of the open strings' interactions is nothing else than the gauge theory; or you may imagine that the D3-branes are actual solutions of a gravitational theory – an extension of general relativity – and low-energy states are the states of all objects that move near the event horizon.

Each of these operations is a valid method to isolate the low-energy states; so the two theories obtained by these methods must be exactly equivalent. That's an elegant proof of the AdS/CFT correspondence, a non-technical, non-constructive proof that avoids almost all mathematics (although one should still add some mathematics in order to show that it really deserves to be called the "proof"). The near-horizon geometry of the black 3-branes is nothing else than $AdS_5\times S^5$ and gravitational – well, type IIB stringy – phenomena within this spacetime must therefore be exactly described by a four-dimensional gauge theory.

Of course, this successful union of string theory and gauge theory may be extended to other gauge groups, less supersymmetric gauge theories corresponding to less symmetric compactifications of the gravitational side, and even to other dimensions. Lots of objects on both sides of the equivalence may be given new interpretations using the other description, and so on. But the main goal of this text is to describe new field theories and new non-gravitational non-field theories that arise from similar constructions. The most supersymmetric example of the first category is the so-called $(2,0)$ superconformal field theory in 6 dimensions.

M5-branes and their dynamics

In the case of the D3-branes above, we considered objects in string theory in ten dimensions. In the usual weakly coupled approach, these theories are parameterized by the string coupling constant $g_s$ which is the exponential of the (stringy) dilaton; greetings. The coupling constant is adjustable in the simplest vacua; all values are equally good but the choice isn't a parameter representing inequivalent possibilities. Instead, because the coupling is an exponential of the dilaton and the dilaton is a dynamical field, different values of the coupling constant correspond to different environments that may be achieved in a single theory.

In realistic compactifications, a potential for the dilaton is generated (much like the potential for all other moduli) and string theory picks a preferred value of the string coupling which is at least in principle but – to a large extent – also in practice calculable (much like the detailed shape of the extra dimensions etc.).

However, there exists a vacuum of string/M-theory that has no dilaton-like scalar field that would label inequivalent environments. Of course, it's the 11-dimensional M-theory. The field content of the eleven-dimensional supergravity only includes the graviton, some spin-3/2 gravitino, and spin-1 three-form generalizing electromagnetism. No spin-0 scalar fields here.

That's kind of nice because the theories we may obtain from M-theory in similar ways as the theories obtained from type II or type I or heterotic string theory have an unusual property: they have no adjustable dimensionless coupling constants. This is something we're not used to from the quantum field theory courses taught at schools. In those courses, we first start with a free theory and interactions are added as a voluntary deformation. All these interactions may be chosen to be weak because the coupling constants are adjustable and the free, non-interacting limit is assumed to be OK.

However, for theories obtained from M-theory, we can't turn off the interactions at all! These theories inevitably force their degrees of freedom to interact with a particular vigor that cannot be reduced at all. Because the coupling constants may be measured as the strength of the "quantum processes" – how much the one-loop diagrams where virtual pairs exist for a while are important relatively to the tree-level "classical" processes – we may also say that the theories extracted from M-theory are intrinsically quantum and they have no classical limit.

Are there any?

You bet. As I mentioned in my discussion of 11D SUGRA, the theory has to contain a three-form potential $C_3$. One may add terms in the Lagrangian where $C_3$ is integrated over a 3-dimensional world volume in the spacetime. This term generalizes the $\int \dd x^\mu A_\mu $ coupling of the electromagnetic fields with world lines of charged particles (in the limit in which they're treated as particles with clear world lines, not as fields). And indeed, M-theory does allow such terms; the 3-dimensional world volumes are those of M2-branes, or membranes, objects with 2 spatial and 1 temporal dimensions.

Also, the exterior derivative of the $C_3$ potential is a four-form $F_4$ field strength. By using the epsilon symbol in eleven dimensions, this may get mapped to a Hodge-dual seven-form $F_7$ potential which is locally, in the vacuum, the exterior derivative of a six-form "dual potential" $C_6$. So M-theory also admits couplings of this $C_6$ and indeed, the 6-dimensional world volume we integrate over is the world volume of M5-branes, the electromagnetic dual partners of M2-branes.

Just like string theories contain fundamental strings, F1-branes, and lots of heavy D-branes of various dimensions, M-theory contains no strings or 1-branes but it has M2-branes and M5-branes which have different dimensions but are "comparably heavy" as long as their typical mass scale goes.

A nice thing is that just like you may study the long-distance dynamics of D3-branes which led to the very important maximally supersymmetric gauge theory, you may also study the long-distance limit of the dynamics inside M2-branes and M5-branes. Both of them give you some new interesting theories. The theories related to the M2-branes were the subject of the recent "membrane minirevolution"; this was my name for the intense research of some supersymmetric 3-dimensional gauge theories extending the Chern-Simons theory. Some new ways to see the hidden symmetries of these theories were found; the most obvious "clearly new" development of the minirevolution were the ABJM theories extending the long-distance of the membranes to more complicated compactifications. The membrane minirevolution has surprised many people who had thought that such M(ysterious) field theories would never be written in terms of ordinary Lagrangians. They could have been written. People could only discover these very interesting and special Lagrangians once they were forced by string/M-theory to look for them.

When you consider the low-energy limit of the M5-branes, you get a six-dimensional theory: 5 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time. It is useful to mention how spinors work in 6 dimensions. In 4 dimensions, the minimal spinor is a Weyl spinor (or, equivalently – when it comes to the counting of fields – the Majorana spinor). But there's only one kind: if you include a left-handed Weyl spinor, the theory immediately possesses the Hermitian conjugate right-handed one, too. So you only need to know how many spinors your theory has. For example, the $\NNN=4$ theory has supercharges that may be organized into 4 Weyl or Majorana spinors.

However, things are a bit different in $d=6$. Because it is an even number, one still distinguishes left-handed and right-handed Weyl spinors. But in spacetime dimensions of the form $4k+2$, the left-handed and right-handed spinors are actually not complex conjugates to each other. You may incorporate them independently of each other. The same comment holds for supersymmetries; if you want to accurately describe how the spinors of supersymmetric transform, you must specify how many left-moving and how many right-moving Weyl spinors there are in the list of supercharges.

In ten dimensions, we use the "shortened" terms type I, type IIA, type IIB for $(1,0)=(0,1)$ supersymmetric theories, $(1,1)$ supersymmetric theories, and $(2,0)=(0,2)$ supersymmetric theories, respectively. The permutation of the two labels is immaterial. The type I and type IIB theories are inevitably left-hand-asymmetric i.e. chiral; type IIA is left-right-symmetric i.e. non-chiral, as expected from the fact that it may be produced as a compactification of an 11-dimensional theory.

In six dimensions, there's a similar classification. The $(1,1)$ theories are non-chiral and typically include some gauge fields. On the other hand, the $(2,0)$ theories are chiral. The $(2,0)$ theory we find in the long-distance limit of the M5-branes is non-chiral not only when it comes to the fermions in the field content. Because the labels $(2,0)$ are "very asymmetric" between the first and second digit, the left-right asymmetry actually inevitably gets imprinted to the bosonic spectrum, too. If we're explicit, it's because the theory contains "self-dual field strength fields" i.e. 3-form(s) $H_3$ generalizing $F_2$ in Maxwell's theory that however obey $*H_3=H_3$. Note that this is possible in 6 dimensions but not in 4 dimensions because $(*)^2=+1$ in 6 dimensions but $(*)^2=-1$ in 4 dimensions.

Because the $(2,0)$ theory must allow a generalization of the gauge field whose field strength is however constrained by the self-duality condition, it's hard to write an explicit Lagrangian definition of the theory, at least if we want it to be manifestly Lorentz-symmetric one. It's a part of the unproven lore that this can't be done. However, you must be careful about such widely held beliefs. In particular, the membrane minirevolution has shown that various Lagrangians that would be thought of as impossible are actually totally possible and you never know whether someone will find a clever trick by which this explicit construction may be extended to 6 dimensions.

So the six-dimensional theory can't be constructed as a "quantization" of a classical theory. It's a point that I discussed in less specific contexts in several recent articles about the foundations of quantum mechanics. We see many independent reasons why it's natural that no such "master classical theory" may exist in this case. First, the quantum theory requires the coupling constant to be "one" in some normalization: it can't be adjusted to be close to zero so studying the theory as the deformation of a free theory would be similar to studying $\pi$ using the $\pi\to 0$ limit. Second, we have mentioned that the theory contains self-dual fields and it's hard to write a Lagrangian for a potential if you also want its field strength to be self-dual. Third, and it is related, you would have a problem to write renormalizable interactions in a theory in 6 or more dimensions, anyway. A $\phi^3$ cubic coupling for a scalar would be the "maximum" that would still be renormalizable but it would create instabilities. By denying that there exists a way to represent the full quantum field theory as a quantization of a classical theory (with a polynomial Lagrangian), string/M-theory finds the loophole in all these arguments that a sloppy person could offer as an excuse that such a non-trivial 6-dimensional theory shouldn't exist.

However, this theory still exists as an interacting, non-gravitational theory with all the things you expect from a local quantum field theory. One may define local fields $\Phi_k(x^\mu)$ and these fields have various correlation functions and may be evolved according to some well-defined Heisenberg equations, and so on. It may be hard or impossible to use the perturbative (and other) techniques we know from the gauge theory but the resulting product – Green's functions etc. – is conceptually identical to the product in the gauge theory. You may be ignorant about methods how to compute these physical answers in the $(2,0)$ theory; but one may actually prove – using the consistency of string theory as a main tool or assumption – that these answers exist and have the same useful properties as similar answers in gauge theory. However, in gauge theory, we may calculate a whole 1-parameter or 2-parameter family of the "collection of Green's functions"; the families are parameterized by the coupling constant (and the axion). In the $(2,0)$ case, there are no such parameters. It's just an isolated theory – one isolated set of Green's functions encoding all the evolution and interactions – without continuously adjustable dimensionless parameters.

Much like the $\NNN=4$ gauge theory is equivalent to type IIB string theory in $AdS_5\times S^5$ which we could have derived as the near-horizon geometry of a stack of the D3-branes, the $(2,0)$ theory in six dimensions may be shown to be equivalent to M-theory on $AdS_7\times S^4$, the near-horizon geometry of a stack of the M5-branes in M-theory. Just to be sure, there is a similar case involving a 3-dimensional Chern-Simons-like theory andd M-theory on $AdS_4\times S^7$ – note that the labels four and seven got exchanged – which is the near-horizon geometry of a stack of M2-branes in M-theory.

So while the perturbative, weakly coupled methods don't exist for this six-dimensional theory, the holographic AdS/CFT methods work as well as they do for the gauge theory. Also, this six-dimensional theory is as important for Matrix theory, a non-gravitational way to describe some simple enough compactifications of string/M-theory on flat backgrounds, as the gauge theory is. In particular, if you compactify the $(2,0)$ theory on a five-torus (times the real line for time), you get a matrix description for M-theory on a four-torus.

Perturbatively, the $\NNN=4$ gauge theory with the $SU(N)$ gauge group seems to have the number of degrees of freedom – independent elementary fields – that scales like $N^2$. That's because the adjoint representation may be viewed as a square matrix, of course. There are actually different, independent methods to derive this power law, too, in particular a holographic one that is based on the entropy of a dual bulk black hole.

The holographic methods may also be used for the M2-based 3-dimensional theory and the M5-based 6-dimensional theory. They tell you that the number of degrees of freedom in these two theories should scale like $N^{3/2}$ and $N^3$ in $d=3$ and $d=6$, respectively. The first case, a fractional power, doesn't even produce an integer but it has still been motivated in various ways.

The 6-dimensional case is even more intriguing because the integral exponent does suggest that there could exist a "constructive explanation" – some formulation that uses fields with three "fundamental gauge indices", if you wish. Many authors have tried to shed light on this strange power law. A month ago, Sav Sethi and Travis Maxfield offered a brand new calculation of the "conformal anomaly" (what was interpreted as the number of degrees of freedom) which also produces the right $N^3$ scaling.

There's still a significant activity addressing this 6-dimensional theory and its less supersymmetric cousins. A few days ago, Elvang, Freedman, Myers, and 3 more colleagues wrote an interesting paper about the a-theorem in six dimensions. You should realize that despite the absence of an old-fashioned, "textbook" Lagrangian classical-based construction of the theory, the amount of knowledge has been growing for more than 15 years. Let me pick my 1998 paper with Ori Ganor as some "relatively early" research of physical effects that occur in this theory.

So the $(2,0)$ theory is conformal and therefore scale-invariant (it is a "fixed point" of the renormalization group) which is why it may occur as the low-energy limit of other physical theories in 6 dimensions; I will mention one momentarily. It has a qualitatively well-understood holographic dual and it appears in a matrix description of M-theory on a four-torus. Some fields, especially the "supersymmetry preserving ones", may be isolated and some of their correlation functions may be calculated purely from SUSY, and so on. The theory has various topological solutions that may be interpreted by various "perspectives" to look at this theory that string/M-theory offers. This six-dimensional theory is also an "ancestor" of the maximally supersymmetric gauge theory; the $\NNN=4$ gauge theory may be obtained from a compactification of the six-dimensional theory on a two-torus.

There are interesting modifications and projections of this theory, too. For example, there are $(1,0)$ theories in six dimensions which respect an $E_8$ global symmetry. This global symmetry is inherited from the $E_8$ gauge symmetry that lives on the domain walls (ends-of-the-world) in M-theory whenever the M5-branes are places on such a boundary. I can't say everything that is interesting about this theory but be sure that there would be lots of other things just to enumerate – and lots of interesting details if I were to fully "teach you" about those things.

One of the broader points is that physics is making progress and finding "conceptually new ways" how to think about old theories, how to calculate their predictions, and how to related previous unrelated physical mechanisms and insights. Quantum field theory is essential in all this research; however, we know that quantum field theory isn't just some mechanical exercise starting from a classical theory and adding interactions to a free limit by perturbative interactions. There are lots of nonperturbative processes and insights that may be obtained without explicit perturbative calculations, too.

Little string theory

I have mentioned that the $(2,0)$ superconformal field theory discussed above was a quantum field theory whose Green's functions are as real as those coming from a gauge theory; they satisfy the same consistency, unitarity, and locality conditions, too. But it's a "fixed point", a scale-invariant theory that may be identified as the "ultimate long-distance limit" of some other theories. Are there any other theories of this kind?

Yes, you bet. But the most interesting ones aren't gauge theories. They're "little string theories".

A little string theory is a type of a theory in spacetime that is something in between a quantum field theory in the spacetime; and the full gravitating string theory in the same spacetime. They're not local because we may say that their elementary degrees of freedom or elementary building blocks arise from strings much like in the full string theory; however, an appropriate limit is taken so that the gravitational force between the strings decouples.

This seemingly contradicts the lore that every theory constructed from interacting strings inevitably includes gravity; however, there's actually no congtradiction because while the little string theories contain strings and they are interacting theories, they actually cannot be constructed out of these "elementary strings" by following the usual constructive methods of the full string theory.

Fine, so what is the little string theory? The simplest little string theories carry the same $(2,0)$ supersymmetry in $d=6$ as the superconformal quantum field theory I was discussing at the beginning. In fact, the long-distance limit of these little string theories (they are parameterized by discrete labels such as the number of 5-branes) produce the superconformal field theory we have already discussed.

But these little string theories are not superconformal or scale-invariant. In fact, they are not local quantum field theories at all. In this sense, they are just a generalization of a quantum field theory in a similar sense as the full string theory is a generalization of a quantum field theory. How can we obtain them?

The most straightforward way to obtain the $(2,0)$ superconformal field theories above were a stack of M5-branes in M-theory. Are there some other objects in string theory that are not M5-branes but that look as M5-branes in the low-energy limit? The answer is Yes. M-theory may be obtained as the strong coupling limit of type IIA string theory. Type IIA string theory also contains 5-branes. But they are not D5-branes which may be found in type IIB string theory; type IIB D5-branes produce $(1,1)$ supersymmetric theories in six dimensions, not $(2,0)$: their world volume is exactly as left-right-symmetric as the type IIB spacetime fails to be. There are also NS5-branes in type IIB string theory which have the same SUSY as the D5-branes, because of S-duality that relates them.

Type IIA string theory only contains D-even-branes, not D5-branes, but it still allows NS5-branes, the electromagnetic duals of fundamental strings. And while type IIA is left-right-symmetric in the spacetime, its NS5-branes are left-right asymmetric; not that there is an anticorrelation between the chirality of the spacetime and the chirality of the NS5-brane world volume.

The dilaton of type IIA string theory has a value that depends on the distance from the NS5-branes; this contrasts with the behavior of D3-branes in type IIB string theory that preserve the constant dilaton (and string coupling) in the whole spacetime. This depends of the dilaton – it goes to infinity near the NS5-branes' core – means that the ultimate low-energy limit of the dynamics of NS5-branes is the same one as it is for M5-branes in M-theory: the new 11th dimension really emerges if you're close enough to the NS5-branes.

On the other hand, one may define a different scaling limit of dynamics inside the type IIA NS5-branes in which the gravity in between the excitations of the NS5-branes is sent to zero; but which is not the ultimate long-distance, scale-invariant limit yet. Such a theory inherits a privileged length scale, the string scale, from the "parent" type IIA string theory. But it doesn't preserve the dilaton or the coupling constant because it's scaled to infinity.

The resulting theory of this limit, the little string theory, has no gravitational force but it has string-like excitations. It is not a local quantum field theory but its low energy limit is a quantum field theory. The theory – which has a "qualitatively higher level of conceptual complexity than the $(2,0)$ superconformal field theory" – also enters Matrix theory; its compactification on a five-torus is the matrix description of M-theory compactified on a five-torus. All the usual limits and dualities between the toroidally compactified string/M-theoretical backgrounds may be deduced from the matrix description, too: these dualities may be reduced to relationships between their non-gravitational matrix descriptions.

The little string theories have various other relationships to quantum field theories and vacua of the full string theory, too. Again, I can't say everything that is known about them and everything that makes them important.

Let me emphasize that none of these theories – neither the new superconformal field theories nor the little string theories – has any adjustable continuous dimensionless parameters. They still have discrete parameters – counting the number of 5-branes in the stack and/or whether or not these 5-branes were positioned at some end-of-the-world boundaries or other singular loci in the parent spacetime. But the absence of the continuously adjustable parameters allows us to say that all these quantum theories are "islands" of a sort.

They're obviously important islands. If you want to study consistent non-gravitational interacting theories in 6 dimensions, these islands may be as important as Hawaii or the Greenland or Polynesia or Africa – it's hard to quantify their importance accurately in this analogy. However, the importance is clearly "finite" and can't go to zero. Hawaii, the Greenland, Polynesia, or Africa inevitably enters many people's lives.

Finally, I want to end up with a more general comment. New exceptional theories that were previously overlooked but that obey all the "quality criteria" that were satisfied by the more well-known theories; and all the new perspectives and "pictures" that allow us to say something or calculate something about these as well as the more ordinary theories are important parts of the genuine progress in theoretical physics and everyone who actually likes theoretical physics must be thrilled by this kind of progress and by the new "concise ways" how some previously impenetrable technical insights may be explained or proved.

There exists a class of people with a very low intelligence, no creativity, no imagination, and no ability to see the "big picture" who are only capable of learning some very limited rules and who are devastated by every new powerful technique or technology that physics learns. These human feces often concentrate around Shmoit-and-Shmolin kind of aggressive sourball crackpot forums. I hope that all readers with IQ above 100 have managed to understand why the text above is enough as a proof of the simple assertion that all these Shmoits-and-Shwolins are just intellecutally worthless dishonest scum.

And that's the memo.

Cap and trade for U.S. water

2012-05-19T20:52:00.000+02:00

Hank Campbell of Science 2.0 discusses an unusual new proposal, namely to regulate the amount of water in America's largest water reservoir, Lake Mead, on the Colorado River (whose flow is blocked by the Hoover Dam near the border between Nevada and Arizona) by a cap-and-trade system inspired by the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system.

Hank reminds us of the utter failure of the CO2 cap-and-trade system – which is admitted even by most of the champions of the climate panic – and extrapolates the insight by saying that it must be a bad idea for water, too.

Lake Mead from the Hoover dam. The structures look just like Stanford's Hoover Tower, don't they?

The proposal was discussed by Phys Org, Live Science, and Water Online. While I agree with Hank that the CO2 cap-and-trade has been an embarrassing failure, I am not so sure I agree with him about H2O.

There are big differences between the CO2 and H2O situations. First of all, in the case of H2O, everyone actually knows and agrees about the right sign. Enough water is a good thing. Water costs something and the cost is positive. And we even know what a pretty good and natural "cap" could be.

For CO2, the proponents of the cap-and-trade schemes can't calculate the right level of CO2 emissions. In fact, they were not even able to determine the right sign of the price. While CO2 is at least as beneficial and important as water, the apparatchiks behind the CO2 cap-and-trade schemes have actually assigned a negative price to this gas that we call life. Moreover, this negative price is completely arbitrary and isn't dictated by the markets at the end; it may be changed by the politicians and their new laws about the arbitrary "caps" at any time.

The Aral Not-So-Sea-Anymore

If I return to the case of water, I do agree that there could exist a reasonable level of water in the lake which could be achieved by making people pay the appropriate amount of money which get higher if there's shortage of water and which gets lower or zero if there's enough water. In some sense, I think it makes sense. In fact, I believe that this market system should have been adopted for the Aral Sea and it wouldn't have died if this system had existed. Unfortunately, there was no market and water was for free for the Soviet officials and their economically – and therefore environmentally – unsustainable projects designed to rob Nature in order to compensate for the defects of the socialist agriculture.

Well, I would say that it's common sense that water has to cost something if there's shortage of water. People pay lots of money for bottled water – which is, by the way, largely overpriced and superstitious bulšit as Penn and Teller discuss in their program that happens to be called "Bulšit", too. When they were selling the super fancy French water in the restaurant around 22:22 but go to 21:30 - water called L'eau Du Robinet – and the consumers were so excited, I was rolling on the floor. The translation of the water to English is "tap water" but they used a garden hose and a sprinkler. So yummy for $4.75 a bottle. :-)

Global temperature maps

2012-05-19T11:28:00.000+02:00

You may want to bookmark this page if you are often tempted to look at the regional temperatures "right now". Click (or shift-click or CTRL-click) any graph below to zoom in.

First, NOAA's El Niño unit has introduced a new, visually attractive map of the current surface sea temperatures.

It's fun to see how the Gulf Stream makes Europe warmer. Look at the dark blue (cold) color near the East Coast Canadian beaches. Even Northern Norway which is more than 25 degrees of latitude more to the North seems warmer! The temperatures go from less than 32 °F, the freezing point, to 90 °F, a good reason to think that a change by a degree or two can't make a difference.

Now, the temperature anomaly – the difference of the temperatures above minus the average/normal temperature for this season combined with the same place – is mapped below:

We're living in ENSO-neutral conditions as the recent La Niña episode ended a month ago or so, at least the conditions ended. I think that the warm neighborhood of the Western beaches of South America indicate a coming El Niño; the red, warm anomaly is likely to spread to the West in coming months.

Finally, you may want to follow the temperature anomalies on the whole globe, including the land, here:

This map at the Policlimate.com server predicts the average temperature anomaly in the coming 8 days and the predictions of these quantities by meteorological models at this timescale have become so good that you will actually not be able to distinguish it from the truth 8 days from now. Note that the land is always much more colorful than the oceans: it is easier to change the temperature of the land, in either direction, while the ocean tends to keep more constant temperatures.

Right now, you see some very cold conditions in the Western continental United States and central Canada, very cold conditions in much of the Antarctica. There is a hot spot in New England, in Russia near the Euro-Asian border, a smaller region in the Antarctica, and a few others. I think you wouldn't be able to say whether the global mean temperature is above the normal or below the normal by looking at a similar graph. The El Niño or La Niña waves seem pretty invisible on this map, too. I think it's always the case but I haven't watched this map for too long so far.

For polar caps, see The Cryosphere today. The global sea ice anomaly is approximately zero right now – the average conditions relatively to recent 30+ years.

Many of these comments will become obsolete in weeks.

Chanel Nº 5/fb: sweet fragrance of SUSY

2012-05-18T13:06:00.001+02:00

I have discussed ${\mathcal F}-SU(5)$ superstringy models previously. They're based on local F-theory models, flipped $SU(5)$ grand unification, and no-scale supergravity; each of the concepts brings some attractive or likely features to the model. In November 2011, we talked about profumo di SUSY; in March 2012, it was all about the aroma of squarks and gluinos.

The aromatic authors have added another product to their collection, Chanel Nº 5.

I guess that much like your humble correspondent, you didn't know that it was the world's most famous perfume (for me, the most impressive perfume would be Marrakesh, because of a love story) and the number 5 in the name of the perfume was preemptively chosen according to the number of inverse femtobarns collected by each detector by the end of 2011. You see that the female physicist on the picture above needs a lot of it. The paper by Li, Maxin, Nanopoulos, Walker is called

Chanel Nº 5 (${\rm fb}^{-1}$): sweet fragrance of SUSY

What do they claim?

They claim that the quadrupled amount of collisions has kept their picture consistent and the signals got appropriately stronger, as expected by their model!

In the previous paper, I was mostly unimpressed by the statistical arguments. The $\chi^2$ deviation of the measured data from the Standard Model was exactly near the median value so as far as I could say, there was no real justification to look for a better fit. Such a search amounts to overfitting. There's no good reason why the fit of a correct model should be "much better" than the average fit, as given by the noise expected in the experimental data. If you're deliberately trying to make your model closer to the observer data, then you are working hard to describe something that is demonstrably noise.

Give me four parameters and I may interpolate an elephant, von Neumann famously said. With five parameters, the elephant may wiggle his or her trunk.

This complaint of mine got a little bit weaker – e.g. their case got a bit stronger. As Figure 1 in the Chanel paper shows, the deviation of the Standard Model from the data is something like 1.2 standard deviations which is not much but at least, one may start to talk about an excess of events, especially multijet events of certain kinds. Their best supersymmetric fit can achieve a much smaller deviation which is about 2 standard deviations smaller (i.e. closer) than the average – I would still say an unnecessarily overfitted agreement.

The best fit supersymmetric model of their kind that is currently favored has the lightest neutralino mass at $143\,\GeV$ which could spectacularly agree – if Nature is very kind to us already in 2012 – with the $130\,\GeV$ gamma-ray line observed by Weniger in the Fermi data. The lighter stop squark mass is at $786\,\GeV$ and the gluino mass is at $952\,\GeV$. If this particular point were right, SUSY could be discovered before the 2012 run ends.

Note that the increase of the total collision energy from $7\,\TeV$ to $8\,\TeV$ only improves the efficiency for light objects such as the Higgs boson by 10 percent. However, the signal from gluinos around a $\TeV$ is actually increased two-fold or so!

Where and why people's reasoning starts to diverge from the physical one

2012-05-18T10:01:00.000+02:00

Introduction to all conceptual mistakes that people do when they think about science and Nature

When you look at the whole set of scientific misconceptions that I have been trying to correct and clarify on this blog for years, whether they are all about the climate panic, rejection of quantum mechanics, denial of the arrow of time, hopeless research projects in quantum gravity, or anything else, you could think that this set depends on a large number of isolated technical details that one should simply learn and many people haven't.

But I don't actually think it is the case; I think that most of the wrong attitudes, wrong conclusions, and delusions are due to some more general mistakes in people's thinking, due to their revolt against some very universal principles of science. If one learns these principles and starts to think scientifically, he or she may exploit them many times. In other words, I believe that most of the people's mistakes are about the rejection of principles that people should probably internalize well before they're in puberty – otherwise it may be too late. And maybe it's not too late.

Let me try to map this tree of the scientific approaches (well, there is only one scientific branch at the end although it may be accessed from several directions) and their "competitors".

Science vs non-science

Near the very root of the tree, let us decouple the people who reject the scientific method as a matter of principle. When they face a new or old claim that someone wants to prove or check or dispute, these people just don't believe that the right answers may be looked for by the evaluation of the empirical evidence that may be done now, in the lab and repeatedly, in combination with the logical and mathematical reasoning.

Of course, now I am talking about folks like my sister, some relatives of yours (I hope), and a large group of people whose number of elements is – I believe – greater than 5 billion. It seems to me that a vast majority of the world population refuses the idea that the truth about most general enough questions that refer to the real world may or should be studied by the scientific method. Why do they do so? One way to answer is that most people just haven't tried so they just don't know that it works.

They haven't ever successfully managed to complete one important enough exercise which led to a true yet impressive result about a previously uncertain or mysterious question, one calculation of this sort, and if they have done it, one wasn't enough. They haven't crossed the critical mass of such arguments to convince themselves that observations and doable experiments are, together with a mathematically oriented analysis, the superior way to decide which answers are true and which answers are untrue.

One could perhaps argue that the number of people who can actually usefully use science in "new contexts" – i.e. contexts away from some highly specialized situations in which they were trained to behave according to some mechanical ad hoc rules – isn't much larger than those 2 billions which means that the 5 billions people are doing a sensible thing when they refuse science. They couldn't do it well, anyway.

I am not sure whether this counting is right. It seems conceivable to me that the influence of the scientific method could be much higher than it is if the intelligence and skills of the people were the only limiting factor.

In other words, I believe that the deliberate priority of various superstitions, obsolete religious dogmas or, on the contrary, newly created religious superstitions such as a frying Earth and so on are seriously lowering the efficiency with which most people on Earth use their brains. For all of them, the world is full of witches, homeopathic solutions, prophets, dowsing sticks, lucky numbers, geopathogenic zones, miracles, divine truths revealed to shamans, tipping points leading to the Armageddon, and so on. Scientists – people who actually try to use brains, logic, and mathematics applied to the observations – are just some exotic freaks who deserve humiliation and who can't ever reach the glory of the true leaders such as the witches and prophets. Many of these 5+ billion people would be capable of disproving this opinion of theirs if they tried (and if they decided not to fool themselves) but they just don't want to try. They have already made their mind – either individually or they were forced to adopt it – and doubting it would mean for them to undermine their own spiritual existence which is what they don't want to do.

Fine. If someone rejects the scientific approach to the truth in the most general sense, you can't do much against it and there isn't too much to explain. Most people on Earth are just either too silly or too uneducated or too brainwashed or too emotional or unexposed to the ideas underlying the modern science and technology. But this blog entry would be very cheap if they were the primary target. I want to talk about the folks who superficially claim that they want to pursue the scientific method but they don't or they make errors that look rather elementary, at least from some viewpoint. There are still many levels at which one may deviate from the scientific reasoning.

By the scientific reasoning, I mean an appropriately accurate, rigorous, and reliable analysis of the past data and, whenever possible, data that can be repeatedly obtained by experiments. This analysis depends on mathematical logic and mathematics in general. In other words, by the scientific reasoning, I mean the physicist's approach to questions.

It doesn't mean that I am only talking about questions that are traditionally studied by the physicists. I mean any sensible questions about the observable world. Sciences different from physics will be considered approximations of the legitimate approach, i.e. physics. As long as these approximations are OK for some purposes, these sciences will be viewed as OK; once they deviate, of course that widespread attitudes in the other sciences that differ from the physicist's approach will be identified as errors as well.

Rejection of mathematical logic

The first branch diverging from the scientific one right after the superstitious branch discussed above is a branch that denies the mathematical logic. I am talking about the people who don't think or who don't "agree" that our knowledge or their knowledge about the world may be organized into propositions that are either right or wrong or something in between but whose validity may be, in principle, studied, whose validity matters, which can a priori be right or wrong, and which may be correlated with other propositions by the rules of mathematical logic.

For example, if we know that "A implies B", we also know that "not B implies not A". Also, if we know "A" and "A implies B", we also know "B". And so on. You hopefully know what I mean by mathematical logic.

If we're looking at a scientific problem, we must first transform its open questions and mysteries into some operationally meaningful propositions whose validity may be studied. When we find lots of evidence that some proposition is true, we have also found evidence that the propositions that contradict it (e.g. its negation) are false. There are important aspects of such propositions: they must have some consequences that aren't "totally obvious" i.e. that depend on further research; and – this is really the same thing as the previous point although it sounds different – we have to be open to both possible answers, Yes/No, at the beginning. If you can logically prove that a proposition is true, then it is a tautology and you shouldn't study it anymore. On the contrary, if you can't prove or disprove a proposition, you must always be open to both possibilities until you collect enough evidence for one of the answers. And if a proposition doesn't make any impact on the things you may observe, not even in principle, then it means that you will never learn anything about it and you shouldn't try to study it because such research is futile. Questions that "don't belong to physics" because they are too philosophical are examples of this category.

You might think that no one who believes in the scientific method can question this basic logical framework. But of course, you may actually find lots of people who do – including those who consider themselves highly "philosophically" sophisticated when it comes to science and its methodology. In fact, I would say that the whole movement attempting to reject the proper quantum mechanics in its Copenhagen form (or its modern, equivalent presentations) is an example of the refusal to follow the mathematical logic as a vital skeleton of science. Why?

It's because these people want to declare certain statements as true and important ones – e.g. that the world has objective accurate properties before the observations – but even though these statements are important in their approach and can't be proved by pure logic, they don't want to discuss whether the evidence supporting these claims is actually stronger than the evidence supporting the negation of these claims.

You may see that I am interpreting these folks as cherishing dogmas that can be proved neither by pure logic or mathematics; nor by the observable evidence; nor by their combination. In this case and many others, these dogmas may actually be proved false. From a perspective, you may say that their desire to believe certain dogmas by disallowing their negations to be even considered makes this branch a subset of the previous one, the purely religious or superstitious one.

Similar comments apply to many other erring "scientists". The global warming fearmongers want to make other "key" statements, e.g. the climate is changing dangerously, but they never want to be sufficiently specific so that the validity of the statement may be compared with the validity of its negation. More generally, they want to do everything possible so that the negation can't even be considered. But according to the logical approach, if the negation can't even be considered, then even the original statement doesn't carry any information, anything that could influence a rational person. Only statements whose validity (or probability) is shown to be different from the expectations may influence a rational person's opinions.

Needless to say, many people who are denying the basic rules of logic actually know that they're doing something wrong but they're addressing their demagogic arguments to consumers who honestly can't find the problem. I am confident that a vast majority of people hired as climate alarmists by the universities and other places would be able to figure out that when you do all the steps honestly and correctly to determine whether it is a beneficial idea to dramatically reduce the CO2 emissions within a few years, they would be able to find out that the answer is No. But the mixture of scientific propositions with the pop science propositions (i.e. not-so-scientific ones) and with various mutually inconsistent conventions to gauge the validity of these propositions is explosive and may be abused to find lots of space to change the final conclusions.

Refusal to consider the context and adjacent propositions whose validity is clearly relevant for yours; refusal to isolate questions from completely decoupled ones

Fine, so the first issues that science may want to clarify before its mathematical apparatus gets sufficiently sophisticated for detailed calculations are Yes/No questions. Scientific statements that deserve further research are never tautologies; we don't know whether a proposition or its negation is true; evidence must be collected to decide – or try to decide because we're never guaranteed that a problem may be fully solved within a period of time.

I decided to insert this short section that covers two errors that are opposite to one another. The climate alarmists will be my examples once again but the errors are much more widespread.

The first error is that many people try to answer a question but they ignore other questions that are demonstrably relevant; the second error is that they fail to stop talking about questions that are demonstrably irrelevant. Let us mention examples.

When we talk about the evolution of the Earth's temperature, we are talking about the increase or decrease. The simple question "is the temperature rising?" is too ill-defined because there isn't just one temperature (consider many places on the globe and above the globe) and there isn't just one time scale (and one particular position in time) in which the question may be addressed. All these details have to be added to the question.

Once they're added, it's important to notice that the answer may be both "increasing" or "decreasing" (or, and it is a measure-zero possibility that is however very important in the presence of nonzero error margins which includes many real-world situations, "not changing at all"). And indeed, the probability is 50% vs 50% for increasing vs decreasing temperatures for most well-defined implementations of the question. One has to do lots of operations – averaging temperatures over 20-year or longer periods (to get rid of the short-term "noise" from various sources) and over the whole globe (to get rid of the "regional weather" and "regional climate" which is also a "noise" for this question) – if he wants to see a clear excess of "increasing temperatures" over "decreasing temperatures". And one will only find such an excess in a few recent centuries, since the little ice age or so. For longer periods of time, the signs start to be mixed once again.

I want to say that all the known sources of temperature variations are clearly important for the question "whether the temperatures are rising". Especially in a strongly interacting system, various phenomena influence others. We clearly can't predict anything important about the evolution of temperatures if we don't evaluate the contributions from changes in the cloud cover, volcanoes, and many many other things that obviously have a sufficient magnitude to matter. And on the contrary, we can't ask a question "just about some change attributed to something" because it's not directly measurable. Thermometers don't show us which fraction of the temperature came from clouds or power plants. They just show a single temperature.

And when the atmosphere is changing, many things may be changing with it. One can't neglect changes in the cloud cover, ocean currents, and many other things. Clouds influence the surface temperatures and vice versa. Here I want to say that it is a fundamentally flawed idea to try to isolate a subdiscipline that clearly can't be isolated. If you have a "chunk" of questions and mechanisms that strongly influence many others in the "chunk", the "chunk" is the minimal entity that may deserve its own scientific discipline or specialization.

Many people violate this obvious derived rule. They try to overlook the forests for the trees. In many cases, it's flagrantly obvious that there is a forest around your question (your tree) and this forest makes an impact on your tree. These questions "adjacent to the object of your obsession" are relevant for the "object of your obsession" and you simply shouldn't ignore them. Your tree usually can't be modeled as a tree in the vacuum if it is a tree in the dense forest. Also, you shouldn't pretend that the "object of your obsession" is very important unless you actually have some evidence for that statement. And you usually won't find such evidence if the object is demonstrably just a single small wheel or gear in a larger internally interacting conglomerate.

If I use a positive language, an important sequence of steps in the development of a scientific discipline is to find out what actually belongs to the discipline and what doesn't. Many people have said that the true art in physics is about the ability to find out what can be neglected. The things that are interacting with your favorite objects all the time – in both directions – clearly can't be excluded. On the other hand, the entities whose interactions are negligible may be and probably should be neglected. Again, actual evidence (and not unjustified dogmas defended by loud screaming or "authorities") is needed to find out whether something may be neglected or not.

People err on both sides. It's easy to invent an example of the opposite mistake. When some people start to speak about Richard Lindzen's being a smoker who pays a few dollars to tobacco companies by smoking XY cigarettes every day in the context of the analysis of the H2O circulation patterns in the atmosphere, you may be pretty sure that you have included too detached issues to the analysis of H2O in the atmosphere and the people who think of tobacco when they try to analyze the energy flows between the clouds probably won't get too far in the accuracy of their research; they're too distracted by irrelevant things (like the artist who says "it's just like f*cking" when Richard Feynman tries to teach him about solenoids), if I have to avoid the term imbecile.

This example was meant to be a bit comical; the people who try to link the atmospheric physics to conspiracy theories about tobacco industry or the Big Oil are real nuts. But even among people who are not obvious nuts, you will find lots of people who isolate their questions from others although they can't be separated; or people who mix topics – classes of propositions – that have no (or almost no) impact on each other.

Rejection of quantification of claims; failure to appreciate continuity of quantities

Mathematics is a key subject behind the natural science. But it has many subdisciplines and mathematical logic discussed above, while it's paramount, is "more discrete" a discipline than the disciplines of mathematics that are really critical for the actual hard work in physics. The important disciplines deal with continuous numbers – real numbers or other number systems that may be built out of real numbers (although I surely don't like this "constructive" definition of the complex numbers which are ultimately more fundamental than the real ones).

While there are important Yes/No questions everywhere in science that can be sharply answered – for example, "Are the postulates of QM exactly right?" or "Is the information exactly conserved in principle when a black hole evaporates?" (both answers are "Yes", we've learned) – most questions in science are about more continuous things. It means that when we try to make them more meaningful from a scientific viewpoint, we should convert them to the form starting with "How much...". The empirical evidence that is relevant for such questions is about the measurement of a priori continuous, real values of various quantities. It doesn't mean that there are no examples in which we may measure binary things but it's clear that if we're measuring something continuous, we're getting more complete and more accurate information.

Physics – and science – is all about the continuous numbers. The a priori values of pretty much any quantity we encounter in physics are real. That's true for distances, times, voltages, and so on, and so on. It doesn't mean that we can't ever find quantities that are shown to take values in a discrete set – e.g. the angular momentum in quantum mechanics – but such a restriction may only be assumed if there's actually some evidence or proof for that. It's absolutely nonsensical to try to assume discreteness of a quantity without the evidence – or contrary to the evidence. This approach amounts to an additional assumption, an extraordinarily unlikely one, that the quantity can never take values in infinitely many a priori sensible intervals.

Of course, various discrete physics revolutionaries err in this elementary aspect of physics. In fact, their would-be revolution is all about the attempt to deny the continuous character of almost all propositions (and measurements) in physics. They either deny that measuring devices show continuous values; or they deny that there's an a priori nonzero probability for the devices to show any number in an interval; or they do a similar mistake.

Let me emphasize that the importance of the real numbers in physics doesn't "supersede" the importance of mathematical logic. Even when you use real numbers in mathematics, you may still construct propositions involving such numbers that are either true or false (think about the identities such as sin(2x) = 2 sin(x) cos(x)). This is true in physics, too. The only new aspect of physics relatively to mathematics is that some quantities appearing in these propositions represent values that were, are, or will be measured in the real world (think about s = gt^2/2 for an accelerated motion).

I have mentioned "discrete physicists" to be the typical villains violating the demonstrably continuous essence of physics. But many others are doing the same mistakes. Climate alarmists love to talk about Yes/No questions related to the climate change – probably because they sound more impressive – even though questions starting with "How much" are the only similar ones that have a decent chance to be well-defined and answerable by the scientific method. Many people try to hide this obvious fact. When someone screams (or raps) something like "the climate change is real", it is totally obvious that the very purpose of such a screaming is obfuscation and an attempt to prevent one from making quantitative research. Science can't answer as vague and general questions such as "Is climate change real?". Or if it can answer them, the answer is almost certainly "Yes" but this answer has no surprising consequences.

A whole category of suberrors would deal with error margins and statistics. When we talk about the values of quantities in Nature, they're continuous and involve errors coming from many sources. The measuring device doesn't measure "exactly" the quantity we're interested in, either because of its imperfect inner workings or imperfect calibration, or imperfect way how it covers a region, or because of human errors, or because it measures a random quantity similar to the "number of events" which is statistical and inevitably suffers from a statistical error (which becomes less important if we repeat the experiment many times). A scientist must be aware of the existence of error margins which makes all propositions about real numbers from the real world – typical inequalities involving some functions of the measured quantities – to be true or false in the statistical sense only. Many incorrect conclusions occur when people overlook that there are error margins and they deduce, for example, far-reaching conclusions out of very accurate agreements between pairs of quantities that are clearly coincidental because the compared quantities have a larger error margins; many other errors are caused by setting the error margin to zero or making more subtle errors in the way the error margin is treated.

Once again, the quantum deniers may be included into this category of mistakes, too. When they assume that the world has some "objective precise properties" before the measurement, they are doing nothing else than the denial of the logically tautologous fact that "properties that an object has before the measurement can't be measured" (failure to eliminate unphysical questions from physics) or the fact that "the results of a measurement are either uncertain or inaccurate or both". If the evidence shows that the electron lands at a rather random place of the photographic plate, and only statistical properties of the results display predictable patterns, you're just not allowed to assume the opposite, especially not if you don't have any theory that would be compatible with this assumption as well as the observations.

Rejection of order-of-magnitude estimates

An important technique used by all good practically oriented physicists – but even many other good physicists (and other scientists) – all the time are order-of-magnitude estimates or dimensional analysis. These are the terms for simplified calculations that obtain the resulting value of a quantity of interest as the product of powers of the input parameters. This resulting value isn't exact but is a reasonable multiple of the right value; the dimensionless coefficient is neither much larger than one nor much smaller than one. When the exponents in the powers are uniquely dictated by the units of the result and the units of the input parameters, we call this approximate calculation "dimensional analysis".

This method works because you may view it as a "shortened, rough version" of the full calculation and the difference between the full calculation and its shortened version only influences the numerical coefficient in front of the result. The multiplicative discrepancy is very unlikely to be a number much larger than one or much smaller than one because the calculation of the dimensionless coefficient is equivalent to a purely mathematical problem in which numbers of order one are manipulated to get another number and in a majority of situations, perhaps with some additional assumptions that may be seen to be obeyed in many contexts, one may see that the resulting dimensionless number will be of order one, too (a statement that is a bit vague but you see a number very different from one if you see one).

I don't want to explain the dimensional analysis or order-of-magnitude estimates in detail here. Instead, my goal is to say that they're important techniques whose importance can't be denied by someone who claims to approach questions about Nature in the scientific way. This technique is important not only in the situations in which we don't have enough time and we want to calculate an approximate answer to a question. In fact, this method is providing us with the first step to "get an idea" about a physical system whose details we don't understand yet.

Arguments based on the dimensionless analysis are inaccurate but they're important and legitimate if there are no errors in them. The people who try to ignore them are not acting rationally; in many cases, people are denying such arguments because they're totally unfamiliar with this mode of reasoning. Pure ignorance. But ignorance doesn't mean that the evidence doesn't exist. In other cases, people deny these order-of-magnitude calculations because they find their conclusions inconvenient.

Such estimates are also important to find out whether some effect may be relevant for a particular observation. If we can calculate that the effect is many orders of magnitude smaller than what it is needed for the effect to influence the quantity we have measured, it is a strong argument indicating that the effect – and/or everything that is connected to it – may be ignored or separated when we want to understand the bulk of a question. On the contrary, if the order-of-magnitude estimate says that the effect of something is large enough, comparable to other factors, it is evidence that we shouldn't forget about the effect unless we have some good reason (e.g. evidence that a theory ignoring this effect works much more accurately than what we could expect from a generic sloppy theory that neglects important things).

Refusal to improve the accuracy

Sensible estimates of the order-of-magnitude of some quantities are the first steps in our efforts to understand a conglomerate of questions. However, it is often useful or important to keep on improving the accuracy. We want to learn something about the dimensionless coefficients that we failed to distinguish from one in the step above.

Arguments based on approximate estimates are often vague and have a chance of being qualitatively wrong; more accurate statements allow us to derive more accurate or more reliable statements about other things, too. I will postpone examples for a while but many people are trying to abandon science at this point. They want to hide in the "fog" of the errors and avoid improvements in the precision. Sometimes it's because more accurate measurements or calculations lead to conclusions that exclude their "pet hypotheses". Well, we could mention an example: numerologists. Sometimes they write down a contrived and clearly unmotivated formula to "explain" a constant which works because the formula is awkward enough and some formulae simply have to succeed within the error margins. But in some cases, the numerological formulae don't even work within the known error margins and their proponents want to ignore these facts. They want to preserve a less accurate understanding of a situation because its conclusions seem more convenient for them than the conclusions of a superior, more accurate treatment.

One could also mention the errors in the climate sensitivity. The IPCC still claims it to be between 2.0 and 4.5 °C or so per CO2 doubling. The error margin is of order 100 percent; it's huge. And it's not getting better. If these vague results were the only ones one may find in the literature, this failure would indicate that this particular subdiscipline hasn't gotten beyond the order-of-magnitude estimates. Even if the sensitivity were 3 ± 1 °C, there would probably be a substantial, at least 5 percent, probability that the right number is below 1 °C (assuming a normal distribution – and much of the evidence that the distribution is highly non-Gaussian are really bogus).

However, tiny biases are enough to shift these wide distributions in one way or another. There has arguably been a huge bias in the positive direction. More importantly, the cutting-edge science about the climate sensitivity has gone beyond the order-of-magnitude estimates. For example, Lindzen and Choi calculate the sensitivity to be something like 0.9 ± 0.2 °C or something like that; the standard deviation is 10 times smaller than in the huge IPCC range. Of course that research concluding with figures that seem much more precise should be paid much more attention to. One of the "details" that follow from this result, if true, is that any climate fear contradicts science and any investment attempting to reduce the CO2 emissions or concentrations is a waste of money from the scientific vantage point.

The alarmists' error margin hasn't been decreasing because they're working with the constraint that it is a blasphemy to get the right result around 1 °C which would prove that global warming fears are just stupid. So they must get numbers at least above 2 °C but among these wrong values of the climate sensitivity, there is no "canonical wrong value" that everyone could naturally agree with. Try to solve the mathematical problem: "Find a very large number greater than 2 that is a good approximation of 1." The IPCC researchers wouldn't face an easy problem if they had some scientific integrity. The lower values closer to 1 °C are more consistent with observations; the higher values that are sometimes claimed to be as high as 5 °C are increasingly incompatible with observations but they're very interesting for the granting agencies and politically or financially motivated sponsors because they allow the nonsensical hysteria to continue. Depending on the relative composition of science and "higher interests", the alarmist hired guns may get any number between 2 and 5 °C or so. They haven't converged to a smaller error margin or "consensus" because there can't be any natural consensus about a number if you impose the extra condition that the number must be much higher than the right one.

On the contrary, the people who have actually studied this question scientifically did converge to an answer whose error margin is vastly smaller than 2 °C. Their methods are superior for obvious reasons. If you can measure something with a 5 times or 10 times smaller an error margin, think about your height plus minus 1 cm or 10 cm, the more precise measurement is clearly more relevant and valuable and you should focus on such methods that are capable of telling you something precise.

Of course, the main reason why the skeptics have been converging to more accurate answers – incidentally compatible with the no-feedback value of 1.2 °C which may be more than just a coincidence – is that they were not constrained by the (wrong) assumption that their value should be high. The refusal of the IPCC's climate sensitivity's error margin is another argument why they're not doing research in the ballpark of the truth. And in this case, much like others, the improved accuracy has impacts. The value around 1 °C is compatible with the IPCC range if interpreted as a normal distribution – within two standard deviations or so – but by getting more certain that the right value is really around 1 °C, competent scientists are also getting increasingly more certain that the climate alarm is irrational.

Anything goes
Openness to discontinuities and paradigm shifts with no reason
Wrong opinion that sufficiently general claims are immune to falsification

In the last portion of this blog entry which was given three titles – originally meant to be independent sections – I want to discuss one more class of mistakes: excessive extrapolations of insights and the opposite tendency, an insufficient extrapolation of insights and the desire to forget them as soon as possible.

I think that most people understand why the first mistake is a mistake but they often err in the second direction. But it's still true that the errors appear in both directions.

Imagine it's Spring 1998, a warm year, and the trend of the global mean temperature in the recent two decades was nearly 0.2 °C per decade. Can you conclude that the globe is warming and the trend calculated from the following 15 years could have been 0.2 °C per decade as well? Well, many people have certainly made similar predictions. The actual trend in the following 15 years turned out to be zero, within the error margins (including the differences between the individual methodologies).

The idea that the trend in the next 15 years had to be very close to the trend in the previous 15 years was a hypothesis, a proposition, and it may be wrong. It's obviously nonsense that the same temperature trend continues forever. But one may discuss this question more quantitatively. One may analyze the hypothesis that the temperature is composed out of an increasing "signal" and "noise" and estimate the relative importance of both for the 15-year trends. He will find out that the noise is still huge. However, the hypothesis that we're living in this simple "linearly increasing signal" plus "noise around zero" can be totally wrong and indeed, there is a lot of evidence that it is a totally inadequate description of the global mean temperature as a function of time.

Many sensible people know that the trends in the past can't always be extrapolated to trends in the future. They're not obliged to continue. In many cases, they don't continue. And in many cases in which they do continue, they only continued because of chance and the relationship may break in the future. So a correlation isn't a proof of causation, especially not if the correlation contains too little information and too inaccurate information.

The Standard Model of particle physics works up to hundreds of GeV or a few TeVs, depending on how you parameterize the candidate deviations. The LHC has already increased the domain of validity of the Standard Model by a factor of 3-10 or so, depending on the proposed models of new physics. But can this success of the Standard Model continue for several more orders of magnitude? The answer is simply not known. If you see no new physics once you have tripled your energy reach, it doesn't mean that you won't see any new physics if you multiply it by 20. Sensible people know that this implication would be sloppy and unjustified. Some people are still trying to pretend that this wrong "mathematical induction" i.e. unsubstantiated extrapolation is a legitimate argument. It's not.

I could tell you lots of examples of unjustified extrapolation (to the future or to more extreme values of various physical quantities) from many contexts.

However, my original claim is that people usually fail to apply known insights in situations which are actually included in the well-understood science. They fail to interpolate or extrapolate millimeters away from the known situations. They fail to see that the speed of 20 GeV neutrinos has to be remarkably close to the speed of light because similar neutrinos' speed was measured after the 1987 supernova and a sharp discontinuity of the speed as a function of energy is much less likely than a badly connected cable. Also, many people are ready to expect quantum mechanics to totally break down in rather elementary experiments even though it's been working perfectly in lots of diverse situations, including some very extreme ones. They're ready to take scissors and cut quantum mechanics and replace it, at least locally, with some physical laws that have been excluded for a century – such as classical physics. They don't pay attention to the logical inconsistencies of such unions and they don't pay attention to the direct observations that show that those things can't work.

Many people are excited about hypothetical scientific paradigm shifts that could come in the near future and they often fail to distinguish their wishful thinking from the evidence. When paradigm shifts come, they can't really change the claims about processes where the older theories have been verified, at least not by much. Also, when a new theoretical structure such as relativity or quantum mechanics arrives, it doesn't just "lift" or "relax" the previous constraints such as the Galilean symmetry. Instead, it typically replaces every single constraint and structure by a new one which is qualitatively different but plays the same role and is equally constraining.

It's similar to the replacement of relays by the first transistors in old computers. The newer computers just "don't completely break away" from the obsolete architecture based on relays. They must replace the relays by something else. Analogously, relativity replaces the Galilean symmetry of Newtonian physics by the Lorentz symmetry. Quantum mechanics replaces Newton's equations by the Heisenberg equations. Many previous assumptions such as the conservation of the electric charge remain exactly true in quantum field theory as well as string theory (the probability of violations of the law is zero). Some others, such as the conservation of the baryon charge, cease to be exactly true in physics beyond the Standard Model but the exact conservation law is replaced by an approximate one which comes with some new structure – the explanation of accidental symmetries – and it is a new justification why the law has apparently worked in all the experiments we have made. One simply can't build a renormalizable interaction violating the baryon charge but preserving the other, exact, established symmetries, the explanation says. Such baryon-violating interactions have to be non-renormalizable which explains why they're weak and produce infrequent processes.

Many people are imagining future paradigm shifts as the statements that "some important principle from the past is wrong", without saying anything positive. But this is not how a paradigm shift in science can realistically look like. Things that have apparently worked may only be replaced by things that work even better and that have a more modern structure which is more compatible with the new concepts and experiments. But previously successful principles simply can't be annihilated without a word of explanation why they were successful. And the paradigm shifts are almost never "going back". If you don't like a revolution that has changed the overall character of the scientific description of something about 100 years ago, you may be more or less sure that the future revolutions will move science even further from your preconceptions, not closer. Science isn't really moving "backwards" because the true reason why the old theories were superseded is that they were falsified and falsification is irreversible (and incomplete or a bit fuzzy falsification is almost irreversible but still unlikely, depending on the fuzziness).

Some breakthroughs in science are more important than others but it's always possible to look at them as if they were incremental steps. Most of the true revolutionaries – including Einstein (and Newton himself) – were interpreting their contributions in this modest way, anyway. The people who are imagining themselves as revolutionaries who really "kill" all the previous science are not being sensible; they misinterpret how the actual progress in science works and they don't really resemble the heroes from the history of science. The ideas that previous insights simply "disappear" or that "anything goes" are symptoms of people who can't focus their attention, who have problems with the memory (so they quickly change their mind without a reason), or who haven't successfully tried to understand the previous science.

I have included one more title in this section: the wrong opinion that sufficiently general or unspecified claims are immune to falsification. This is a theme I encounter often and that affects many people, including those I consider very good physicists.

At the beginning, I mentioned that one shouldn't talk about propositions that can't a priori have both answers at all. They're tautologies or anti-tautologies, whatever is the right term for a proposition that can be proved identically false just by using the rules of logic. But surprisingly many people seem to believe that if they leave "enough wiggle room" in their general statements, these statements must be true or, to say the least, they can't be shown to be false.

However, this is a complete misconception. Whether something may be disproved depends on the actual available evidence, not on your vague feelings whether your statement is sufficiently vague or whether your collection of candidate explanations looks like a large army.

In the climate debate, one may say vague things about a class of conceivable mechanisms that may drive the Earth's climate out of control. They believe that if the comments are sufficiently fuzzy, the fog must inevitably contain a detailed hypothesis that is plausible. However, it's not true. The strength of mathematics – and science based on mathematics – is that it may often prove statements that would look amazingly strong or general or unexpected at the beginning. After all, we are discovering the laws of Nature (often previously unknown laws) that are valid in every event that has ever took place and will take place in the Universe. Even narrower theories with a less universal domain of validity may accurately describe millions of observations that often look very diverse. It is often possible to exclude huge classes of candidate hypotheses. In fact, the disproof of a stronger statement is often mathematically easier than the disproof of a weaker, more specialized assertion.

It's easy to look for fundamental unscientific errors in the climate alarmists' reasoning and in their arguments because those folks are extremely far from proper science and its methodologies, as we have seen at many points in this text. However, even people who are trained if not achieved theoretical physicists often fail to appreciate that science has tools to quickly rule out whole classes of hypotheses even if these classes may look "large" if not "formidable". It doesn't matter that a class of hypotheses looks large or is large. All of the elements may still share some lethal characteristics that allow us to instantly kill all of these elements.

It's obvious what the examples are. Some people believe that the world is a discrete machine or a cellular automaton. Or quantum mechanics has to be just a manifestation of some hidden variables. Or gravity is an entropic force in which the entropy may be encoded in many ways. And so on. These people probably impress themselves by a large number of cellular automata they may simulate on their computers; large number of shapes of the basic simplices in their spin foams or spin networks; large ensemble of quaternions, octonions, pilot waves or other things that may play the role of hidden variables hypothetically underlying quantum mechanics; or a large number of codes that may store the entropy differences that hypothetically drive the Earth's orbiting around the Sun.

A special but important example are the anthropic people who believe that the anthropic explanation of the Universe has to be right because the number of the flux vacua they may construct is overwhelming and they "beat" all other possible explanations – just a few modest Cinderellas who are easily killed by the numerous army of the flux vacua anthropic warriors.

In all these cases and many others, those people think that they're creating a resilient theory that can't be disproved because it has many elements or because it has many unspecified details that may still be adjusted. But it doesn't matter! In mathematics and science, the truth simply isn't measured by the number of elements of a set of detailed implementations of your theory. It is not true that the probability of a statement is proportional – in any legitimately usable sense – to the number of "specific specialized versions" of the statement. The validity of uncorrelated statements are uncorrelated and even if you talk about probabilities of propositions that have a statistical character, the probabilistic distribution over diverse sets isn't uniform and can't be uniform in any sense. Uniform distributions are extremely special and therefore unlikely and any claim that a distribution is uniform is extremely strong and must be justified by some evidence (e.g. by a description of thermalization in the case of microstates that may evolve into each other).

This also means that it's completely wrong to clump a statement of interest with some other statements and assume that they are analogous even though no evidence for the analogy exists, to clump a right theory with many wrong theories, and claim that they're analogous and they should "share" the probability. In communism (or whatever term the far-left "progressive" people would choose for it today), people may share resources. But inequivalent propositions and classes of propositions in science don't share the probability in mathematics and science. Each of them has its own "banking account" and as long as two such possibilities are distinguishable, one of them may be totally right and one of them may be totally wrong.

Logic and mathematics offer us sharp and powerful swords that may – and often do – cut the throats of every single element of a class of hypotheses that share certain properties, properties that turn out to be incompatible with life. That's why we know that hidden-variable "explanations" of quantum mechanics are wrong; discrete models of the Universe are wrong; all forms of the "entropic gravity" theories are wrong; and so on. All these classes are wrong despite their having many elements because the reasons why all of their elements are wrong are independent on the detailed differences between the elements of each class! On the other hand, right theories may be interpreted as elements of larger sets of candidate theories but all other elements in the sets are still wrong and the right theory doesn't really share the credit with others! You can't argue against a (potentially?) valid theory by pointing out that there exists a similar theory that is demonstrably wrong.

I discussed this category of "flagrantly unscientific ways to think" at the end of the blog entry because I know several if not many people who could be called "the world's top physicists" who often like to impress themselves by the shear size of the sets of detailed possibilities, by the huge wiggle room in which their seemingly flexible theories may be adjusted, and so on. But the large number of microscopic possibilities, detailed theories, or the large wiggle room may often be – and often is – insufficient to protect hypotheses and claims that are simply wrong.

Summary, limitation of such a general essay

It is obvious that the general observations above can't save us from every wrong claim we do about science or the real world – especially because many errors people are making or we are making do depend on some technical details in a discipline. But if people were kind enough to think about the general "logical" issues underlying science and errors in science that I described in this text, I guess that we could avoid many if not most of the persistent, constantly repeated errors that keep many people on the wrong track for years or decades or whole lives.

And that's the memo.

Will Happer: CO2: friend or foe?

2012-05-17T08:36:00.001+02:00

A comprehensive physicist's introduction to CO2 and climate

I would say that most of the competent physicists at good universities who have spent enough time to study the climate change issue are climate skeptics. A good example is Will Happer, an atomic physicist of Princeton.

Today, I checked the list of Berkeley physics coloquia and picked the following November 2010 talk:

CO2: a friend or a foe (MOV video, 90 minutes)

Lots of achievements by Prof Happer are enumerated at the beginning; you may want to listen to it carefully and compare with some of the scientific niemands who promote the climate alarm. As soon as the talk begins, it's fun.

Happer begins with the concentration of CO2 outside the building and inside the room which he actually measures by a gadget. It was about 390 ppm outside and 650 ppm in the lecture hall. Within seconds, the gadget was gradually growing to 654 etc.

He says that he's against real pollution – lots of examples are mentioned – but is CO2 a pollutant as the EPA would love to suggest? Properties of CO2 are mentioned. He asked the folks what was the CO2 concentration in your breath. No one knew, except for a guess, 10,000 ppm. Too bad physicists don't know such things. Of course, if I were there, I would instantly scream 40,000 ppm. ;-)

Two theses he wants to demonstrate are that the climate change will keep on going even if CO2 stays constant; and he wants to discuss the optimum CO2 level – assuming we can choose. Well, 150 ppm is too little: plants die and Kelvin already knew that. Geological epochs with thousands of ppm are reviewed. It's nonsense that we're doing an unprecedented experiment with a high CO2; the CO2 has done much greater experiments of this type and high CO2 is good. Seasonal variations of CO2, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, are shown. Most land is over there.

Now, there's time for the greenhouse effect. Absorption and emission spectra of the atmosphere and the Rayleigh scattering are explained in a very sensible, no-nonsense, physics-oriented manner. Cute classical animated visualizations of excitations of the water molecule, the main greenhouse effect molecule, are presented. Rotational modes have low enough frequencies to influence the Earth's thermal radiation. Three spectral lines of CO2 are mentioned.

Temperatures as a function of the altitude are shown, the lapse rate, and so on. Most of the infrared radiation comes from H2O and CO2. Radiation to outer space is the only way for the Earth to cool itself. We're shown some absorption as measured by the satellites and comparisons with the black body curve. The greenhouse gases don't stop the radiation from escaping; it's just emitted from the top of the troposphere at a colder temperature.

The spectra at 280 ppm and 380 ppm of CO2 show almost no noticable difference. Even another doubling has a tiny effect.

The logarithmic dependence on the concentration is shown; it only breaks down for very low concentration because the temperature change doesn't go to minus infinity as the logarithm suggests. To compare, the clouds have huge and obviously visible impact on the spectra. Happer considers clouds to be the main players that influence these flows of radiation.

When he talks about the Vostok ice core data, he reviews the usual things and also discusses the dust. There was much more dust when the Earth was cold. This means that a colder Earth had many more deserts – exactly the opposite than what the climate warriors love to say, contrary to the evidence.

Temperatures in the last millennium – the developments of non-hockey sticks and hockey sticks – are discussed using IPCC graphs and historical knowledge – including details of the organization of the thriving agricultural society in Southern Greenland during the Viking period. The hockey stick, especially the shaft, is one of the most discredited charts of science, Happer states. The satellite-era graphs of the temperature are said to have lots of instabilities: ENSO, volcanoes contribute something.

Yields from the crops went up by dozens of percent while CO2 went from 280 ppm to just 390 ppm. The plants are also able to resist dryness etc. Gadgets are actually sold to burn carbon and to triple or quadruple CO2 in the greenhouses and people have good reasons to buy them. That's how these questions are addressed if the political pressures are avoided and people are allowed to search for profit.

Stomata are discussed, redwoods etc. At a lower CO2, plants need more stomata to import the gas which makes them less resilient.

Sea level rise: 140 meters in the last 20,000 years, mostly between 16,000 and 8,000 years ago. It's fluctuating in both directions these days. In the recent century, it was going up about 2-3 mm per year; the rate seems smaller if not negative in the 5 years before his talk. No way to flood NYC or L.A. or Berkeley in a few hundred years. No acceleration is seen. No trend seen in sea ice in a decade, either. Ice-free regions in the Arctic were shown on 1959 photographs. Ocean acidification isn't a problem: detailed measurements of pH, in a trip to colder places or higher depths, the ocean gets less alkaline (not acidic yet!). The doubling of CO2 changes pH by 0.1 which is much smaller than the natural fluctuations of the ocean. Sea life has adapted; ability to regulate internal pH (pH pumps) were the most ancient gadgets that life had to invent very early during evolution to prosper.

Now, the feedbacks. The bare climate sensitivity is about 1 degree Celsius, the IPCC wants to inflate it to more than 3 degrees, mostly by water-vapor-related feedbacks. IPCC calculations of the sensitivity are highly incompatible with each other – and with observations. And they aren't getting better. Only one oldest model could be OK; models seem to be getting worse (less compatible with observations) with time.

Some cost-and-benefits analysis (William Nordhaus) is reviewed. Doing nothing at least for 50 years is the most sensible option, or at least nearly statistically indistinguishable from the optimum policy.

Happer is wrapping up. Why do people get emotional? It's a secular religion; resistance against any change (Happer is conservative but not conservative enough to resist any change which may be good); inadequate time to study science; governments' desire to increase the revenue (he knows quite something about these matters from his activities in D.C.: Enron could have established cap-and-trade in the U.S.); and finally: we're shown pigs with a quote by Pushkin in Russian (from Dubrovsky, 1832). All you need are feeding troughs and pigs will always come. Lots of money.

The CO2 concentration in the lecture hall went from 650 to 730 ppm during the talk so far (about one hour), almost the same absolute increase as the outdoor increase from the beginning of the industrial revolution (about 250 years).

Questions and answers.

In the first answer, he says that much of the data is still very shaky but the measurements of the oceans' parameters (temperature, pH etc.) look promising. The second guy says that CO2 is just a proxy for other bad things. Happer agrees that coal mining does bad things in general but it shouldn't be extrapolated to the CO2 itself. Methane burning is OK for Happer and there shouldn't be policies that ban it.

Richard Muller is questioning the figure about 1 degree Celsius for the no-feedback doubling CO2 climate sensitivity. He wants to know where it comes from; Muller obviously didn't know much about the greenhouse effect in 2010. Happer's answer seems confusing to me, too. The "experimental" measurement of this figure is linked to Spencer-Lindzen-like analyses of the energy flows. Yes, 1 degree is closer but it's not the no-feedback value. The no-feedback value is theoretical! Muller asks how Happer dares to reach a conclusion that doesn't agree with the IPCC but once Happer says that the IPCC isn't a scientific organization, Muller approvingly nods.

What will happen with the cloud cover if temperature changes? Happer thinks that clouds regulate the climate, i.e. negative feedbacks. He explains that high (Cirrus) clouds are warming the system, unlike the low-lying clouds. The composition of the clouds is subtle. Clausius-Clapeyron equation matters etc.

Another older physicist says that the hysteria exists because the government needs a crisis to justify its right to exist. The same man asks what's the probability of tripping into an ice age. Happer thinks that no one understands how the ice ages really start. Books, such as Rich's book (looking at Muller haha), don't make much sense if you look closely. ;-) On the other hand, people underestimate the importance of the irregular Earth's orbit. Happer seems to be a Milankovitch skeptic, a position I don't find sensible at all and I will try to convince Will that the Milankovitch explanation is indisputably right immediately, unless he has already changed his mind. Update: Prof Happer responded that he became more convinced that the cycles are an important contributor in the months after the talk...

A visitor makes everyone laugh by saying that he wants to disagree with a lot of things Happer had to say. He asks why CO2 was changing in the distant past. Bob Burner is sold as the world expert on it; mountain building plus plants and lignite etc., semiplausible. The idea of the man is to link CO2 to temperature via coal deposits by an argument I didn't understand, and neither did Happer. He at least disproved some naive theories how to calculate temperatures of the ancient Earth etc. Lindzen's cloud thermostat-like explanation of the faint Sun paradox is mentioned.

Another question asks about the hockey stick graph – someone else agreed it was bogus – and asked something about the hiding of the decline. Happer also talked about tree rings, moisture, etc. Another man says that a slow CO2 rise is OK but can't the fast CO2 rise be dramatic? Happer talks about some geological episodes that could have been fast for various reasons, lots of water etc. There's no evidence that the biosphere couldn't deal with similar changes. 20,000 years ago, CO2 may have been too low to allow systematic agriculture which could be the right explanation why it didn't exist at that time. For Happer and his instincts, Nature is extremely tough and it's his enemy, especially the weeds in his garden that grow much more quickly than his stuff. ;-) He doesn't understand why the visitor (and others, including the speakers of Czech) use a feminime word for Nature. :-)

Lots of people are raising their hands. A guy says that H2O in the atmosphere is very complex. Happer sees convincing evidence neither for amplification nor for reduction of the greenhouse effect by water vapor and clouds in the literature. Neither do I. Even the basic observational data about the evolution of water vapor in the atmosphere is shaky.

A female attendant is finally asking whether she should conclude that we shouldn't fight against the CO2 rise – yes, Happer says, we should do nothing (except that it may be a proxy for mercury in coal etc. but if we can measure the bad things, we should decouple them). Happer says how coal may worsen lives but it's not CO2. She also asked another question. I didn't understand it well but she was apparently looking for another quantity to panic about assuming that the evil CO2 toy is taken from her. ;-) Happer mentioned some random population killers, famines etc., in the past which are vaguely correlated with a cool weather so if there's an optimum temperature, it's higher than the present one.

It's too bad that all the arrogant yet uninformed folks who want to talk about the climate – all these Gores, Hansens, Manns, and similar jerks – can't be forced to learn the basic physics of these physical systems, at least at the level of Prof Happer's talk.

Seventh Heartland Climate Conference: schedule

2012-05-16T19:25:00.000+02:00

Between next Monday and next Wednesday, the Heartland Institute organizes the ICCC-7, its seventh climate conference. The schedule is available here:

Schedule of ICCC-7

The composition of speakers looks interesting enough. Czech President Václav Klaus – who has had some complaints about the Heartland billboards – will be responsible for the dinner keynote speech on Monday. The logistic good luck seems almost incredible: on May 20th and 21st, Klaus attends the NATO summit in the very same city of Chicago! Was some intelligent design involved?

Many other well-known names attend ICCC-7, too.

They include Shaviv, Carter, Soon, Singer, Morano, Michaels, Eschenbach, Avery, Watts, Schmitt, and many others. It is fine that these conferences are organized as long as the climate change is considered an important topic with a potential to change the world in one way or another. However, I am not quite sure whether the amount of progress in the discipline – and the debate – fully justifies this high frequency of the conferences. Aren't the talks guaranteed to become pretty repetitive? Has the law of diminishing marginal returns been properly incorporated in the calculation of the right frequency of the events?

Via San Francisco Chronicle

By the way, after a year or so, tomorrow, Benjamin Netanyahu and a few other Israeli leaders will visit Prague. Various types of peaceful, civilian collaboration will be the main topic of discussions. The guests will talk to the president and the prime minister and visit the Jewish Quarter of Prague.

Does hard work guarantee discoveries and answers?

2012-05-15T13:58:00.002+02:00

The short answer is No.

In his newest article,

SUSY: A Matter Of Prior Beliefs,

Tommaso Dorigo of CMS argues that many people at CERN have worked hard so they deserve to cause a paradigm shift in physics – in his case, he believes that phenomenologists should stop the research of supersymmetry in order to appreciate the contributions of the experimenters. Tommaso's opinions are a combination of utter irrationality, dishonesty, self-brainwashing, and victimism.

Why?

The first year at the LHC has significantly increased lower limits on masses of all kinds of hypothesized new particles. We suddenly know that if a certain new particle exists, it must be heavier than a threshold that is significantly higher than it was a year ago. For exotic particles such as new gauge bosons, massive gravitons moving in extra dimensions, tiny black holes, and many other things, the new limits are as high as several TeVs.

The search of supersymmetry has been the single most important class of searches at the LHC because SUSY seeems to be the most motivated and the most likely new physics that experiments may find. However, the limits on SUSY are the least constraining ones. Among candidates for new physical phenomena, SUSY is still the most viable one, having the greatest chance to be discovered soon, e.g. in 2012. For example, the stop quark may still be as light as 300 GeV. As the experimenters will try to raise the limit to 900 GeV or so in 2012, they will probe an interval that corresponds to tripling of the lower limit on the mass. That's quite a change and there's a significant chance that the squark will be found in this interval. No other type of new physics will make a comparable shift on the log scale for the energy. If some limits on new black holes are raised from 4 TeV to 4.5 TeV, it's not hard to see that the chance that the objects will be discovered in this relatively narrow interval, measured by the ratio of the end points, is rather low. Not much will be changing about the particles whose lower limits on their masses are already high today.

What I want to say is that it is a sign of complete dishonesty if someone picks SUSY as the scapegoat and suggests that SUSY should be particularly punished by the "empty" results from the LHC (except for the Higgs boson that had to be found). In fact, the LHC has refused to discover all forms of new physics so far and light superpartners are elements of a very small set of light particles that the LHC may still discover. SUSY should be the least punished candidate theory, not the most punished one. If you admit that there should still be phenomenologists who try to work on models of new physics, it's actually obvious that the percentage of those who work on SUSY should increase because the LHC has excluded other possibilities up to much higher energies.

On Thursday, I reviewed and extended Phil Gibbs' calculation of the change of the probability that SUSY or low-energy SUSY exists in Nature, the change that is induced by the exclusion plots from the LHC papers. In an example, we assumed that the LHC has eliminated 2/3 of the parameter space. This percentage is calculated according to the prior distribution (or "measure") and takes all previously believed arguments that prefer lighter masses etc. into account. The figure 2/3 is probably an overestimate and I think that it is a huge one.

But even if the figure were 2/3, the impact on the big question "low-energy SUSY Yes/No" is tiny, pretty much negligible. You know, if one wants to believe that low-energy SUSY is hiding in the remaining third of the parameter space, she just needs to believe that an event whose probability was 33% has occurred at CERN. Now, events whose probabilities are "just" one third are occurring all the time. Claiming that such events are extraordinary signals that should change our mind is mathematically equivalent to believing that one-sigma bumps in graphs are very important. In fact, the probability 66% corresponds to less-than-one-sigma "certainty" that the answer should be No: you need 68% for a one-sigma argument!

The decrease of the probability that low-energy SUSY is right is by a factor of three if your prior probability was extremely low. But if it were higher, close to 60%, the relative decrease is much smaller, just by a dozen of percent or two. I have reviewed these calculations. If your prior probability that SUSY is right is much closer to 100%, the probability is almost unaffected by the exclusion of 2/3 of the space. But even if you start with the odds as believed by a SUSY skeptic, all the LHC exclusion papers have only added a one-sigma bump, imagine a deficit, that may be used as a very weak evidence against SUSY. At the same time, we have new insights whose confidence level is often above 4 sigma and that strengthen the case for SUSY – for example, the recent identification of the 130 GeV gamma-ray line in the Fermi data that would nicely agree with the explanation that it came from the pair annihilation of the lightest superpartner, from the SUSY-inspired dark matter. This modest paper pretty clearly overcompensates the anti-new-physics arguments from all the LHC papers that have been published so far.

Now, Dorigo is pretty explicit in expressing his desperate feelings that his work at the LHC was useless because it hasn't radically changed people's minds. I understand that it must be pretty depressive to share your credit with 3,000 other people plus 3,000 additional people in your friendly competing team, especially if even the combined excellent, nearly flawless hard work of these 6,000 people isn't making any qualitative impact on the thinking of the phenomenologists and theorists. It isn't making a big impact on the way how particle physicists do research and how they use their brains. Of course, the 125 GeV Higgs boson is an exception. It's being incorporated into a growing collection of papers.

If the LHC discovered another new particle or force, the impact would be huge. But the impact of negative evidence is much weaker. The exclusions are already affecting the kind of models that phenomenologists are studying; some of the models or points in their parameter spaces are either safely excluded or highly disfavored and of course, physicists are abandoning them, either resolutely or gradually. But when it comes to bigger questions, such as low-energy SUSY Yes/No, the LHC simply hasn't brought us enough evidence to change our mind about this question. This doesn't mean that the running of the collider hasn't been amazing or that the people have done anything less than a spectacular amount of quality work. They should be praised and I am praising them now, too. But that's something else than the question how big an impact the experiment has made on a big open question in physics, e.g. the question whether Nature uses low-energy supersymmetry to solve or improve the hierarchy problem. A simple calculation is enough to show that the LHC has made almost no impact on this question.

I think it's a matter of common sense: the LHC has only excluded what it has excluded. If it hasn't found new particles such as superpartners in the first 5 inverse femtobarns of the 7 TeV data, it doesn't imply that the LHC won't find a new particle in the first 15/fb of the 8 TeV data. The 2012 dataset will be independent and much larger than the 2011 dataset. It can easily find 3-sigma if not 5-sigma excesses even in plots that didn't even show 2-sigma excesses after the 2011 run. It clearly can happen: the LHC will go totally beyond the questions it was able to probe in 2011 so it may bring new answers.

If we could use the 2011 data to become sure that the LHC won't discover supersymmetry (or, less likely, other types of new physics) in 2012 or 2014 or 2015 (there is a break in 2013), we could just stop the LHC right now. But such a conclusion would be hasty or irrational so no sensible person is making it. Only Tommaso Dorigo tries to make it. It's surprising why he continues to work for CERN if he's so sure that they won't discover anything.

Concerning hard work that hasn't answered some big questions that the hardly working people wanted to be answered, we have lots of similar examples. Hundreds of string phenomenologists have tried to find the right vacuum of string theory describing our Universe for something like 30 years so far. We still don't know which one it is. Should we use some sort of compassion and affirmative action and pick a vacuum that will be the right one, in order to reward these string phenomenologists for the excellent hard work they have done? You know it sounds as a ludicrous joke, don't you? One may work hard and one may have IQ above 145, as almost all string theorists do, but it still doesn't guarantee that a big question will be answered in 30 years. String theorists have found many amazing things in the recent decades – arguably much more lasting and valuable insights, many of which they couldn't even predict, than almost all other scientists in the world – but they simply haven't answered some questions that they wanted to be answered from the beginning.

Of course, I could offer you some "old", no longer emotional examples from the history of science.

The case of the LHC experimenters is totally analogous. They're doing excellent work but whether this work actually brings us an answer to a big question – e.g. whether SUSY exists at low energies in our Universe – depends on the actual quantification of the evidence, a calculation involving the information contained in the results. The strength of evidence isn't measured by man-hours of work of string theorists, LHC experimenters, or anyone else. Would you believe that someone who considers himself a scientist could find such an obvious point controversial? Tommaso Dorigo unfortunately does find it controversial. I will discuss it at the end of this blog entry.

But let me start with some fun.

Tommaso Dorigo offers us three everyday life examples that are meant to be analogous to the exclusion of 2/3 of the parameter space (or much less). He recommends everyone to prematurely give up in all similar everyday situations. The first one is about cakes:

In some cultures a popular game played in special events is to hide a small coin or jewel in a big cake; everybody then gets a slice, and the person who finds the precious treasure can keep it. Now imagine you play such a game, and you start eating your slice bit by bit, to be sure you are not gulping down the treat with the cake. You keep finding nothing, and your dish is soon close to empty; only the tip of your slice remains to be checked. You therefore now grow extremely excited: surely you're going to find it in the next bit!

In the cake called the SUSY parameter space, we have eliminated (much less than) 2/3 of it. After I eat 2/3 of my cake and find no coin in it, it's still plausible that the coin is in the remaining third. If my prior belief that the coin is in my piece of cake was very low, the chances have dropped by a factor of three. If my prior belief was closer to 100%, the chances haven't changed significantly and I remain almost certain that the coin has to be in the remaining third. The situations are totally analogous, indeed. I think that no serious participant of the cake game would stop looking for the coin after he has eaten 2/3 of his piece. This would simply be a totally sloppy, wasteful attitude to the game. The question whether the coin is in the rest remains almost as open as it was to start with.

Another example, trains.

You arrive at a deserted train station in the evening. You know that there's one train exactly every hour to your destination; however, you do not know the minutes at which trains pass. You also seem to remember that at some time late in the evening trains stop circulating. You sit and wait, and after 58 minutes have passed your train has not come yet. You then rise from the bench and pick up your suitcase, certain that the train is about to arrive.

First of all, the right number should have been 40 minutes or less, not 58 minutes, because it's not true that the LHC has eliminated 58/60 of the parameter space. How rational people react? If I haven't seen the train for 40 minutes and there's only a one-hour window, I may become more nervous but I will surely not give up. Never, never, never give up. I would actually wait at least for 75 minutes, to include the Academic 15 minutes and allow the driver to be a scholar who may be 15 minutes late.

The evidence that the train won't come at all is extremely shaky if not negligible if we have only failed to see it for 40 minutes. It is, once again, equivalent to less-than-one-sigma evidence (excess or deficit) signalling that the train could refuse to come. Of course that I won't be quite decided after 40 minutes. I won't be decided even after Tommaso's 58 minutes. In fact, in my life, I have jumped to a train that was already starting within the next 30 seconds several times. In fact, I managed to do the same with an airplane, too. If the question is as important as a possibly wasted air ticket or the discovery or exclusion of SUSY, be sure that I won't make premature conclusions. I will fight to the last minute.

When 99.7% of the window when the train may arrive is wasted or excluded, we still have just 3-sigma evidence that the train will probably not come. Even this percentage makes it legitimate to remain calm: many physicists dismiss evidence that is as weak as 3 sigma so they may consistently ignore the exclusion of 99.7% of a parameter space, too. So of course that phenomenologists won't stop all the research of SUSY if 2/3 – and not even when it is 58/60 – of the parameter space is excluded. In the same way, most of us won't give up a train if we still have 20 minutes or 2 minutes to get there.

In a science-fiction story (I believe it is Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles", but I could be mistaken) a man decides to seek the help of a private detective. The detective explains that his client can be confident the case will be solved: he failed to solve the previous 150 ones, so it's extremely improbable that he'll fail on this one, too.

Again, the right number is that he failed in the two previous 2 cases. But to make the analogy with SUSY accurate, we must say that this is the best detective in the world. No one else can find it with a greater chance to succeed. Once again, of course that we will pick the detective to have a chance to find the truth. We may also try another, less promising detective to increase the chance. The detective may fail again but we are sure we won't find the truth if we don't hire this detective or any similarly good one. The argument that we can't find the culprit just because the best detective has had an imperfect record is simply wrong. 33% isn't an impressively low probability in any sense.

In the three above examples, there is an obvious flaw in the reasoning of the protagonist: a wrong a priori assumption. The failure to account for the unknown probability that reality is according to one's wish is a childish mistake that we sometimes fall in even as adults.

There is no mistake in my reasoning. If 2/3 of an "opportunity window" disappears, we may gradually become more anxious, whether we think about cakes, trains, detectives, or supersymmetric models. But the decrease of the likelihood estimated by us that is caused by the elimination of 2/3 of the "opportunity window" is so tiny that it doesn't even classify as "evidence" in the physical terminology. "Evidence" is reserved for arguments that have at least 95% or 99.7% confidence level; 66% confidence level is just too low to be even called "evidence". There are lots of evidence in physics that may be caused in this way and shift our opinion in either direction but the elimination of 2/3 of an "opportunity window" simply can't belong among them.

Let me skip some boring and utterly stupid anti-SUSY rants that Tommaso offers in the following paragraphs and continue with the last three paragraphs that expose Tommaso's irrational, emotional, affirmative-action-like beliefs in their nakedness.

I believe Science progresses more rapidly if scientists keep their minds open to the widest range of possibilities. Well, let me restate that: I believe Science does not progress at all if scientists fail to do so!

Scientists work on many possibilities. The most boring one is that the Standard Model continues up to some huge energy scales. It's plausible but it makes the light Higgs mass mysterious, as in the hierarchy problem. Maybe it's not a problem because the Higgs mass is low for anthropic or other reasons. It's plausible. But even if it's right, this scenario is boring enough – everything has been calculated about it. We can't discover too many new things about this scenario which is why people don't write hundreds of papers how the Standard Model works up to huge scales. There's almost nothing new to write about here.

The Standard Model up to huge scales actually has many bugs: fine-tuning, instability of the Higgs potential, problems to account for dark matter, baryogenesis, and many other things. That's why people investigate other possibilities. There are many of them but the supersymmetric possibilities represent a huge fraction of the models because they're the most well-motivated ones (or at least among them). The LHC hasn't changed anything at all about the claim that SUSY is the most likely single kind of new physics beyond the Standard Model. In fact, as I pointed out at the beginning, it has made this proposition stronger. It has increased the relative importance of SUSY in the beyond-the-Standard-Model model building.

Dorigo continues:

I am therefore inclined to believe that choosing a point mass PDF for one's beliefs on the correctness of a unconfirmed theory is a wrong, anti-scientific attitude. I certainly acknowledge that SUSY is a beautiful idea, and I indeed would be happy if it were found some day (even better, if I myself found it! I am indeed searching for SUSY particles in my research time with the CMS experiment!); yet the failure to observe SUSY as we raise the energy of proton-proton collisions and the accumulated size of our datasets in ATLAS and CMS cannot be dismissed as "no information". It is important information!

It is important information but only for the detailed questions which corners of the SUSY parameter spaces are favored or disfavored. When it comes to the big Yes/No question about low-energy SUSY, the LHC's information is equivalent to a less-than-one-sigma bump. It is not important information for this question: it is almost no information at all. If we learn that the right point is in a third of the original space, we have learned less than two bits of information but this information only tells us about the "where" question and almost nothing about the "whether" question. Any other argument we have in these discussions is incomparably stronger.

By the way, I don't understand how one could deny that the ultimate right distribution is a delta-function. When we look for something, it may be at many places now so the distribution reflecting our ignorance is fuzzy but if the right answer is somewhere and the search continues, of course that the distribution will converge to a delta-function. That's what the Higgs mass has been doing, too. What exactly does Tommaso want to question about this tautology? He apparently wants to clump the right model with some wrong models (like if a collection of wrong climate models is proposed to describe the climate) and say: look, many friends of the right model are wrong so he must be wrong, too! ;-) The right model has to respect the will of the majority and admit that he is wrong. ;-) That's how I understand Tommaso and that's why I think he is a childish nutcase.

But the main paragraph I wanted to react to is this one:

Keeping oneselves anchored to a point-mass PDF that "SUSY is correct" equates to dismissing as garbage all the negative results of the LHC searches. I will say more: it equates to saying that it is useless to do experimental research, because SUSY might be hiding where we have no access with particle collisions or other experiments. Given that, and given that we must already be sure that SUSY is correct, why searching for it?

Converting this discussion into this emotional "you are hating us and consider us garbage" exchange is completely irrational. I am not dismissing anyone's work or expertise or whatever. I am just saying that a particular body of research has almost no relevance for a particular big question. I am not just saying that: I have rigorously proved that it is the case. If you consider any research that hasn't been able to determine whether low-energy SUSY exists in Nature to be garbage, well, then I must say that according to the terminology you have chosen, not me, the 2011 LHC run is garbage.

Before the LHC began the collisions, I have stated very explicitly that even if the LHC wouldn't see any SUSY, I will believe that it exists in Nature and it exists up to energies that are much lower – by orders of magnitude – than the Planck scale. One could have asked the question "how would we react in this situation" before the LHC began its journey and I have actually asked and answered this question many times. Of course that I will be convinced that SUSY up to energies much lower than the Planck scale is realized in Nature even if the LHC won't find any SUSY up to 2020. To change my mind, one would actually have to find significant evidence that could change our mind. In the absence of any experimental discoveries, it's much more likely that such game-changing evidence would come from some hypothetical progress or paradigm shift in the theory.

But if the theory remains what it is and the LHC will discover neither SUSY nor any other new physics, of course that it will continue to be the case that some SUSY, with some higher degree of fine-tuning than what we believed to be OK just years earlier, is the likeliest explanation. Unless some completely different ways to think will emerge in the theoretical research, I will also continue to believe in the naturalness arguments which imply that the Standard Model up to a huge energy scale is much less likely than SUSY with 50 TeV superpartners that is somewhat fine-tuned but still much less fine-tuned than the Standard Model valid up to arbitrarily high scales.

Let's repeat a sentence from the quote above:

I will say more: it equates to saying that it is useless to do experimental research, because SUSY might be hiding where we have no access with particle collisions or other experiments. Given that, and given that we must already be sure that SUSY is correct, why searching for it?

As I have said previously, in the absence of new game-changing evidence, I will indeed keep on thinking that SUSY is relevant at some point of the parameter space regardless of the LHC run up to 2020.

Why is the LHC searching things at all then? It is doing so because we don't just want some qualitative Yes/No questions – whose answers we kind of know because of deeper arguments anyway – to be answered. We want to know much more detailed things about physics at the LHC scale. It's obvious that the Standard Model valid up to 2020 is a possibility, the simplest one to describe in words and one that many people consider the nightmare scenario; I am personally not horrified at all.

But it is not the only possibility. The SUSY possibilities represent another large subclass. But individual elements of the subclass may be very different from each other, too. It is somewhat demagogic to pretend that the separation of the beyond-the-Standard-Model to supersymmetric or non-supersymmetric models is the most fundamental separation to be made. Some pairs of supersymmetric models or some pairs of non-supersymmetric models are conceptually much further from each other than some mixed pairs.

The LHC will move our experimental reach well beyond the reach in the past. But the shift will still be negligible relatively to the gap between the electroweak scale and the Planck scale. Even though the LHC is very expensive, is working extremely well, and the people working on it are hard-working, very competent folks in most cases, it simply doesn't have the power to decide about some of the most far-reaching questions about the Universe.

I am confident, though, that the attitude of those SUSY enthusiasts who choose the point-mass PDF is going to change if we continue excluding parameter space points at the LHC. Phenomenologists are pragmatic and smart people (someone funnily used the word "street-smart" in connection to one of them in the comments thread I mentioned above), so even the stubborn among them will soon choose some other point mass to anchor themselves and their careers to.

But such an alternative point mass to "anchor ourselves to" would first have to be discovered.

As far as we can say today, it doesn't exist and all such point masses that would predict new physics for the 2011 LHC run have been ruled out. If the discovery of the new point mass won't occur, and the non-discovery by the LHC isn't a discovery either, of course that nothing will change about the broad structure of the phenomenological research and of course that SUSY will remain the single largest subgroup of this research. Only the details will be adjusted to agree with all the newest data and exclusions. That's exactly how science should proceed, that's exactly what the actual evidence tells us. Attempts to selectively "interpret" or "abuse" the LHC as a supersymmetry killer are absolutely unjustifiable by rational arguments and by the evidence.

I am sure that Tommaso Dorigo would prefer to see a paradigm shift (many of us would), especially one in which he participated, but non-discoveries usually don't imply paradigm shifts. So the detailed hard work at the LHC, if it continues to be as "empty" as it has been so far, will only have an impact on the details of the phenomenological research, not the big picture. Some game-changing discoveries – whether they're of theoretical or experimental character – are needed to change the game, of course. Hard work doesn't guarantee such paradigm shifts whether someone finds this obvious fact cruel or not.

And that's the memo.

Czech socialist politician: $350,000 in a shoe box

2012-05-15T10:20:00.000+02:00

On Wednesday, they found extra $1.5 million (CZK 30 million) in a special hideout in the floor of his house (and probably submachine gun model 58)

It's been a stereotype that Mr David Rath, the current governor of Central Bohemia (a disk around Prague without Prague), a former socialist healthcare minister, and one of the most aggressive social democratic politicians in the Czech Republic is one of the most immoral and corruptible politicians in Czechia.

It turned out that it hasn't been a stereotype. It's been a fact since the very beginning. I've heard many stories about his previous methods to get lots of money (he was very poor right after the fall of communism) but what we got yesterday and publicly today sounds much more specific. Details will be investigated but the conclusion that he is a criminal without any moral restrictions to speak of seems pretty much unassailable at this point once he was taken into custody by police. The police president who informed the interior minister last night claims that they have worked hard – 100 investigators were involved – and they feel very certain about the case.

Someone who has seen into Dr Rath's cards has spoken (Mr Paroubek speculates it was Mr Filip Bušina, an entrepreneur who had similar legal problems in the past) and for about six months, police have investigated accusations of bribery, negotiating advantages in public procurement (i.e. manipulating public tenders), and misappropriation of EU funds that is related to Dr Rath, a female director of a Central Bohemian hospital, and about 6 other people (5 men, 3 women). Contracts linked to the hospital in Kladno and/or the reconstruction of the Buštěhrad chateau may be involved. Today, the cops finally decided to catch the rat on the street, near a sewer in front of his house in Hostivice, Greater Prague, a mile from the Prague Havel Airport (calm video from the event, rap). What did they find?

By a "complete coincidence", they found a David Rath with a shoe box and what was in the shoe box? Yes, exactly what you expect in a shoe box that someone is carrying on the street: the answer is either $350,000 or $600,000, depending on the sources (USD $1 is at CZK 20 Czech crowns again, due to the anxiety caused by the ongoing putrefaction of Greece as a nation). The actual damages to the country are higher by more than an order of magnitude.

That's a pretty good observation. I guess that Mr Rath was just going to buy some ice cream. More seriously, the planning by the police was probably so perfectionist and used so much overwhelming information that they were probably sure in advance that he would have the money with him, too. The cops actually needed to catch him red-handed; see the explanation at the end. It seems that the money was brought to the place by Rath's important friend, Ms Kateřina Pancová, the director of the Kladno hospital (another social democrat and Rath's #3 in the list of sexual partners after his wife and his mistress: he only has kids with #1 and #2). The money transfer could have taken place in her house in Rudná near Prague. Pancová and Rath are among the 8 arrested people, much like Mr Petr Kott, an ex-center-right lawmaker who left conservative politics because he was drunk all the time (the social democrats hungrily devoured him, a super-drunk ex-right-wing lawmaker was destined to become a top social democrat), and Mr Pavel Drážďanský, the director of developer Konstruktiva Branko who won the tender to reconstruct the chateau for $10 million from EU funds.

Dr Rath's P.R. department was asked to offer an explanation. They said: "It is not in interest of Dr Rath to humiliate himself by an explanation [which could be interpreted as excuses by the media]." LOL! :-) These last words of his political career may become another quote that will be often repeated. (Later, he humiliated himself in this way, anyway. He said that the shoe box was supposed to contain bottled wine: he was "surprised" to see any banknotes in it. I guess that he postponed this explanation in order to invent the most credible one and the wine was his winner. If he learned some kindergarten physics, he would be able to distinguish bottles from banknotes.)

It's a good luck that they managed to find him. When it comes to corruption, I am a realist. I have no doubts that some people in the public sector – in Czechia as well as almost all countries in the world – enjoy some advantages because of their power. Potential for corruption is one of the largely unavoidable taxes that we pay for the intrinsically sick part of our lives that we call the public sector. But punishment is only meaningful and morally justified if one has a sufficient amount of evidence that a given person has done something worse than an average politician is doing or that he or she has received more money than an average politician or official is receiving.

Mr Pavel Bém, the former mayor of Prague who is also a physician and who has been to the peak of Mt Everest, has been harassed due to some telephone calls with his friend, an entrepreneur, and these conversations could have been interpreted as a suggestion that the entrepreneur may have helped to buy shoes for Dr Bém or something like that, and maybe these shoes were really bought, and if they were bought, it could have been corruption, and so on and so on.

I would always think: are you joking? You don't have evidence for any wrongdoing, certainly not something that would be really dangerous and non-negligible, and what we should really worry about here is that the ex-mayor was eavesdropped and someone controls P.R. machineries that may use these conversations against the ex-mayor – or anyone else. I don't give a damn whether he received shoes because of a billion-of-crowns decision.

This was how a center-right politician, a former candidate or "prince" to lead the conservative Civic Democratic Party, was treated. Today, however, a left-wing politician and a former candidate or "prince" who could have led the left-wing Social Democratic Party, wasn't vaguely accused of receiving shoes as a bribe. He was found with a shoe box containing about half a million dollars that seem pretty clearly linked to a specific case of corruption and/or misappropriation of the EU money.

A new product of IKEA that will flood the shelves soon

Now, don't you really see a material difference between the shoes and the shoe box? I can't believe that some people would be able to suggest that these two cases are similar. But in reality, some people would love to spread the meme that the shoe case is worse than the shoe box case! At some level, it becomes clear that the accusation of corruption may become a cure that is worse than the disease. It seems pretty clear that politicians from the political parties who were most loudly screaming that they would fight against corruption belong among the most corrupt politicians in a country. Accusations of corruption became a cheap tool to win cheap votes and these things may be more harmful to our country – and others – than the corruption itself.

I think that the voters who still believe someone who verbally wants to fight corruption (Dr Rath has been an elite in this discipline of accusations!) is just being naive. The recent corruption stories surrounding the "Public Affairs", a party that was the loudest one concerning corruption, should be another revelation for everyone who is willing to learn from the experience. The right attitude is to accept that this is happening to some extent and calmly introduce mechanisms and punishments that will reduce corruption. These mechanisms will surely cost something as well and when the costs exceed the benefits, it becomes counterproductive to increase the fight against corruption! At the same moment, it's important to respect the presumption of innocent for generic officials. The government simply cannot work if everyone is automatically assumed to be a criminal.

It's interesting that most of the politicians, especially the regional ones, who are involved in these debates are physicians. Dr David Rath, the guy with the shoe box, is a physician. Dr Pavel Bém, the ex-mayor of Prague from Mt Everest with the eavesdropped telephone conversation, is a physician, too. Some TRF readers may remember Dr David Rath from the following nice exchange with Dr Miroslav Macek at a stomalogical conference:

Dr Rath had publicly described Dr Macek's marriage as one that was motivated by the thirst for money (suggesting that Mr Macek's wife had no other virtues) – the same kind of slanderous talk that you expect from Shmoits and Shmolins and similar human crap.

In the video above, the host, Dr Macek – who was already decided to defend the dignity of his wife and himself – calmly says: Before I start to moderate our conference, please let me deal with one issue that is of purely personal nature: [SLAP, applause.] Mr minister [at that time] Rath was preemptively warned. I have warned him in the press. It is purely my personal matter. He deserves it. [Applause, Dr Rath is leaving.] Dr Rath: Mr Doctor, we won't be solving it over here. You have attacked me cowardly from the back side. Why didn't you face me like a man, face to face? [...] You are a coward! [SLAP, COUNTER-SLAP]

Of course, this exchange has become legendary and has been included in the Guardian's TOP TEN of similar events. Dr Macek had to pay $5,000 to Dr Rath as a compensation but the happiness that the smack brought to the nation clearly had a much higher value if it weren't priceless.

Ms Lenka Bradáčová, the Czech Corrado Cattani, a boss of the anti-corruption police unit that has shown much more skills than many others, and not only in this scandal. Let's hope that she will end up differently than her fictitious Italian counterpart.

I sincerely hope that they will be able to find out and prove the wrongdoings that has allowed Mr Rath to carry half a million in a shoe box exactly when he was caught by the police so that he will be allowed to spend many, many years in a prison (estimates talk about 12 years, let's see). My hope for a thorough derathization is connected not only with the fact that Mr Rath is not only a socialist (who has worked hard on his power under many other colors in the past, however, but this kind of immoral folks is what Mr Paroubek wanted to attract intohis party) and a guy who sometimes lives with his wife and sometimes with his official mistress (one child with each) but more generally, he is an unquestionable, egotist, immoral rat.

Another reason behind my hope is that I want the ordinary people's obsession with the corruption and the conspiracy theory that being bribed poses no risks to gradually go away. In particular, the lawmakers' immunity hasn't helped Dr Rath at all: the receipt that police may pick Dr Rath was a pure formality for the chairwoman of the Parliament (who was the only right-wing politician who knew about the arrest in advance). ;-) According to our laws, only the Parliamentary Spokesperson's agreement is needed when the police catches a criminal-lawmaker during a crime i.e. red-handed (in order to make immunity disappear): so the cops really needed to make this tour de force but they succeeded.

Of course, I would love to hope that the incident will also reduce the scary, high amount of votes that the social democrats may receive in the next elections but I am not so sure whether my hope is also a realistic scenario.

The leaders of the Social Democracy have already apologized and indicated that due to the presumption of guilt in their party rules, it's a matter of days when Dr Rath will be stripped of his membership.

The Czechs are already making fun of a classic Czech movie, Jáchym, throw him to the machine. A psychiatrist in the asylum says: At this place, I've been telling all of them: don't accept bribes, don't accept bribes, don't accept bribes, they will make you insane. But these warnings are futile, futile, futile. Dr Macek who had slapped Dr Rath in the past has already explained that Dr Rath – like some other politicians who rise too quickly – lose their mind and start to consider themselves to be omnipotent demigods. Indeed, one has to be intrinsically stupid or insane – despite the rumors about Dr Rath's immense intelligence – to be a governor and to accept half a million dollars of bribes in cash.

Republic Rath, previously known as Central Bohemia (before all the towns were renamed as well)

Fortuna, a bookmaker, allows you to make a bet how much more money (and where) will be found in Rath's house beyond the current CZK 30 million.

The amount of parodies and jokes about Rath that were created within a day or two has been enormous; see e.g. an unmodified song from a TV fairy tale, We have caught a little thief. Among many other things, I liked this Czech poem (all "rath" below has been improved from "rat", of course):

Náš kamaráth demokrath
udělal si doktoráth.
Kolikráth si musel přáth
o národ se postarath,
až byrokrath na kvadráth
začal lidi nasírath.

V hlavě měl zkrath, státu krath,
i EU chtěl odírath,
ovčany by mileráth
poslal na dlažbu žebrath.

Když šel prachy provětrath,
troufli si ho vyšťourath.
Zbývá už jen zapírath,
nevědomost předstírath,
kňourath, kárath, vydírath,
šance vidět umírath,
a dřív, než přijde slunovrath,
mříže budou zavírath.

Hlavně to však tentokráth
zase celý neposrath." :D