The Reference Frame

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

Focus point supersymmetry

2012-05-15T08:42:00.000+02:00

The mass of the soon-to-be-discovered Higgs boson, $125\,\GeV$ or so, is below the threshold of $135\,\GeV$ which means that it is compatible with the MSSM, the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, where the observed Higgs boson could be the lightest one among five faces of the God particle.

It is definitely the mass region that favors the SUSY particle content in its simple form – and it's this MSSM form that is known to lead to gauge coupling unification which means that there exist other reasons aside from "simplicity" (which is a problematic, aesthetic guide) why a significant fraction of the phenomenological research into supersymmetry should be spent with the MSSM. (Non-minimal models of SUSY allow the Higgs mass to be larger but they usually destroy the gauge coupling unification miracle and have other undesirable effects.)

However, $125\,\GeV$ is still a bit larger than in the most naive attempts to incorporate SUSY via the MSSM.

In the MSSM, one may calculate the Higgs mass. At the tree level – i.e. when we ignore all Feynman diagrams with quantum loops – the Higgs boson must be lighter than the Z-boson which was known to be wrong for a decade. However, the one-loop diagrams usefully correct this tree-level estimate and especially because of the top-quark loops, they allow the Higgs boson to be heavier than the Z-boson.

However, if we want to achieve $125\,\GeV$ in the MSSM, the mass of the stop squarks – the superpartners of the top quark – should be either very heavy or there should be a near-maximal mixing between the two stop squarks (see a Dec 2011 paper on these issues that just appeared in PRD), at least if we ignore other possibilities such as a large R-parity violation (see MFV SUSY, just appeared in PRD). Recall that the top quark is described by a Dirac spinor which may be thought of as a collaboration of two Weyl spinors or two Majorana spinors. The superpartner of each Majorana spinor is a complex boson scalar field so we have two complex Klein-Gordon fields that describe the stop squarks. They may have two different masses – mass eigenvalues – and the mass eigenstates may be rotated relatively to the basis "left-handed stop, right-handed stop". That's what we call the mixing.

If the stop squarks are as heavy as needed for their loop corrections to produce a Higgs boson that is as heavy as $125\,\GeV$, well, they must be about $10\,\TeV$ in mass which is a lot. With these heavy masses, unless we discover a new mechanism, the fine-tuning needed to produce a light enough Higgs is comparable to one part in 10,000 or more which may be a lot of fine-tuning according to some people's taste. It's still better than a quadrillion, the fine-tuning needed in the non-supersymmetric Standard Model, but even 10,000 is a large enough number to make many people feel uncomfortable. The probability that Nature got fine-tuned "naturally" in this way is just 1/10,000: it is very small.

How do we exactly quantify the fine-tuning? To discuss this question, let us already follow a fresh preprint

A Natural $125\,\GeV$ Higgs Boson in the MSSM from Focus Point Supersymmetry with A-Terms

by Jonathan L. Feng and David Sanford. It discusses "focus point" SUSY which was previously ridiculed by Nima Arkani-Hamed but because a lethally low value of the A-term in focus point models was the only criticism in Nima's talk that I could really understand and because this paper explicitly says that it has large A-terms, I at least temporarily forget about all the criticism coming from Nima, regardless of his high caliber and my respect for it and him.

Fine. So let us repeat a question I asked before: How do we quantify the amount of fine-tuning? Fine-tuning is related to problems similar to the hierarchy problem, e.g. the puzzling question why the Z-boson mass is so much lower than some other scales where new physical processes exist, such as the GUT scale near $10^{16}\,\GeV$ which is 14 orders of magnitude higher. Even if we don't know what's exactly going on near the GUT scale, we know almost certainly that something is going on over there. So there must probably exist an effective theory at this scale, assuming that QFT is valid at those high but slightly sub-Planckian scales. Its Lagrangian contains some parameters such as $a$, whatever it is.

Mr Karel Gott: Oh Miss SUSY, one who is moving in a picturesque way, I experienced shock and awe out of you but I was just a smoke for you. ... I will change that and I will break the dams. I already have a plan for that. As soon as I find you, SUSY, I will rent a cottage and I will be there with you alone.

The real problem is that $a$ – a parameter expressed relatively to the GUT scale – must be adjusted very accurately to a very particular nonzero value for the resulting low-energy parameters such as the Higgs boson or Z-boson mass to remain small and close to their values near $100\,\GeV$ at least with a poor accuracy. The real problem is that the Z-boson mass very sensitively depends on changes of the GUT parameter $a$. Because the Z-boson mass depends on almost exact cancellations between many terms, the parameter $a$ has to be fine-tuned with a very high accuracy if we want $m_Z$ to be what it is with a much more modest accuracy.

Feng and Sanford quantify the amount of fine-tuning via the sensitivity coefficient $c$ given by \[

c\equiv \max\{c_a\},\qquad c_a \equiv \abs{\pfrac{\ln m_Z^2}{\ln a^2}}

\] So $c$ is taken to be the maximum among the values of $c_a$ calculated for individual GUT-scale parameters $a$. Each quantity $c_a$ is usually larger than one and when the fine-tuning is really bad, they're much greater than one. For example, if $c_a=10,000$, it means that if we change $a^2$ by 0.0001 percent, the squared Z-boson mass will change by 1 percent. So a very fine adjustment of the fundamental parameters is needed to obtain physics that is at least qualitatively similar to the physics we know.

(The logarithms in the formula above guarantee that we talk about the percentage changes of all the parameters. Some older definitions had $\ln a$ instead of $\ln a^2$ in the denominator.)

This fine-tuning makes particle physicists feel uncomfortable because it seems unlikely, by an ordinary Bayesian calculation of the odds, that Nature adjusted those things properly by chance, naturally. And because we don't want to introduce the anthropic excuses, we just think that a theory that requires the fundamental parameters to be adjusted very accurately (the percentage error has to be tiny) is contrived and therefore unlikely. This is just a different application of the same principle that leads many of us disfavor the literal interpretation of the Bible which implies that Jesus Christ should have accidentally violated many laws of hydrodynamics when he was walking on the water. It's plausible but it seems very unlikely, much like the flying saucers. The claim that the Universe was brutally fine-tuned at the beginning is analogous to the flying saucers, many of us think.

The Standard Model which assumes that the Higgs boson is an elementary particle at least up to the GUT scale has $c$ comparable to roughly $10^{30}$. It's hopelessly fine-tuned. The squared Higgs mass has lot of contributions comparable to the squared GUT mass but they must mostly cancel and only a leftover that is $10^{30}$ times smaller is left. The GUT-scale parameters can't possibly be chosen this accurately "by chance". The only way out is to look at the values of the GUT-scale parameters that are compatible with the intelligent life. In this anthropic view, the required huge fine-tuning ceases to be a problem but we may feel that we have thrown the baby out with the bath water by allowing the anthropic selection as an argument.

Alternatively, people thought that the Higgs boson was composite. So it was connected with no parameters at the GUT scale. Instead, there was a compositeness scale, which is higher than $10\,\GeV$ as we know today, and this compositeness scale was low because of some log renormalization group running similar to that in QCD. This running didn't depend on any parameters $a$ at the GUT scale, at least not much, so no fine-tuning of such parameters were needed. However, because this compositeness scale is higher than $10\,\TeV$ or so, as we know from various LHC searches and from other methods, the required sensitivity coefficient $c$ is of order tens of thousands. It's bad.

SUSY in some form clearly remains the most promising mechanism allowing us to reduce the fine-tuning. Feng and Sanford claim to be able to find big regions of the MSSM parameter space whose fine-tuning is as low i.e. as tolerable as $c=100$. They achieve so with the focus point (FP) supersymmetry. In general, it claims to reduce the sensitivity coefficient $c$ about 30 times or so. What is the FP SUSY?

It's a choice of the parameters at the GUT scale which are correlated in such a way that they have an interesting property: if you extrapolate them by the renormalization group to low energies, you will discover the Z-boson and other particles' masses near the electroweak scale regardless of the detailed adjustment of the GUT-scale parameters. The RG equations "focus" the curves ("beams") to the right place regardless of the initial directions. We could say that the log-enhanced corrections to the Higgs mass automatically disappear in the result, an interesting coincidence that may have other interpretations and additional justifications. The result is summarized in their equation (15). If you pick universal values of the up-type Higgs mass, up-type quark singlet mass, quark doublet mass, and the trilinear coupling $A$ – a parameter that has the unit of mass and that used to be chosen tiny in FP but is large in the new paper – at the GUT scale, you will find simple solutions of the renormalization group equations (4)-(8) in which the sensitivity is eliminated.

The detailed values of most (or all?) GUT-scale SUSY breaking parameters become irrelevant. But this mechanism still makes a prediction for the top-quark sector of the MSSM. It's because the four parameters whose dimension is that of mass are expressed in terms of two independent dimensionless parameters $x,y$ and one $m_0$, i.e. three parameters in total.

In particular, some FP regions of the MSSM parameter space allow relatively light stop squarks with a large mixing. Those can reduce the amount of fine-tuning to the 1-percent sensitivity which is acceptable to me and probably many others. Such a required "accident" is equivalent just to a 2-sigma "not so big miracle", roughly speaking. Such things may happen naturally.

The author also mention papers [59] and [60] which may contain the material needed to derive the required correlations of the GUT-scale parameters from string theory. They also propose their regions of the MSSM parameter space to be a new replacement or "simple update" of the mSUGRA/CMSSM parameter spaces – a few-dimensional somewhat ad hoc subspaces of the MSSM moduli spaces that have been rather strongly disfavored relatively to some other regions of the 105-dimensional MSSM moduli space by the 2011 LHC data and that many SUSY phenomenologists have already abandoned at least silently if not loudly ;-) even though even the exclusion of mSUGRA/CMSSM isn't quite complete and rock-solid yet. So they really want the future LHC searches to impose limits on their FP models rather than the mSUGRA/CMSSM.

At any rate, I want to emphasize a general point that the MSSM – the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model – remains compatible with all the observations and there are regions in it which are not only consistent with all the data but require small fine-tuning that seems tolerable to me. This is partly linked to the fact that among limits on models of new physics, the lower limit on superpartner masses are among the lighest ones – in particular, the stop squark may still be pretty close to the top quark and many other superpartners may be below $1\,\TeV$. So supersymmetry is still the "least constrained" model of new physics which roughly speaking implies that it is capable of producing the least fine-tuned explanations of the unbearable lightness of the God particle's being.

And that's the memo.

LQG calculates the correct black hole entropy

2012-05-15T08:33:00.000+02:00

Not really but the stupidity of the LQG proponents has reached levels that are utterly comical

Just a week ago, I discussed the incompatibility between the black hole thermodynamics and loop quantum gravity. In a new paper, Ashoke Sen updated the list of black holes whose logarithmic corrections to their entropy are calculable.

For the Schwarzschild black hole in $d=4$, the right formula contains terms such as $(212/45-3)\ln(a)$ while the LQG folks have confidently claimed that their theory predicts the coefficient equal to $-2$ or $-3$. Sorry, guys, that didn't work well. ;-)

But a "slightly less intelligent" paper was pointed out by Backreaction and Physics Forums:

Entropy of non-extremal black holes from loop gravity

The stupidity of this paper by a young Gentleman called Eugenio Bianchi – no, he is not Luigi Bianchi (1856-1928) of the Bianchi identities fame – has reached such celestial levels so that even Sabine Hossenfelder was able to notice. Let me extrapolate some of these lessons (including her justified yet not really novel arguments against Lee Smolin that the nonlocality implied by "doubly special relativity" means an inconsistency) in a more respectful way: I think that her IQ could be some 10-20 points above the IQ of an average LQG researcher such as Lee Smolin.

The paper goes approximately like this.

We want to calculate the right entropy of black holes from loop quantum gravity, with the ultimate goal to show that loop quantum gravity is a competitor of string theory as a theory of quantum gravity. How do we do that?

Take a few tons of spin foam and construct a little model of Stephen Hawking, Jacob Bekenstein, and Bill Unruh. The pieces look like this:

The 6,000-views video above is the most valuable contribution to the humanity that was at least inspired by loop quantum gravity. The structure has nothing to do with physics but it is cool.

Now, make the spin foam model of Bill Unruh accelerate with a constant acceleration. Because loop quantum gravity has "quantum gravity" in its name, his observations will match those in the real world which contains quantum mechanics as well as gravity. In particular, this spin foam model of Bill Unruh must be able to calculate the temperature he experiences. In the same way, the spin foam models of Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein will do the same calculations as their real-world counterpart and they will obtain the result\[

S = \frac{A}{4G}

\] for the black hole entropy. It's great because we have just proved that loop quantum gravity obtains the right result for the black hole entropy, regardless of the value of the Barbero-Immirzi parameter that was promoted to fix factors in previous calculations of the entropy – calculations whose results were proportional to this parameter.

Or have we? ;-)

I often find it frustrating to read similar papers because there's just so much stupidity everywhere in the world that it no longer makes me laugh in most cases; I usually feel physically threatened by the combined brute power of all the idiots in the world. But this paper was different; it made me roll on the floor because its stupidity was transparent enough even for Sabine Hossenfelder.

Obviously, the paper has nothing to do with a microscopic calculation of the black hole entropy which requires that you count microstates. Instead, it is just a rewriting of the usual macroscopic or thermodynamic derivation – equivalent to the semiclassical derivations that emerged from the work by Bekenstein and Hawking – into a language that tries to sound as much loopy as possible. But the actual microscopic theory, the loop quantum gravity, isn't used anywhere. So the paper obviously doesn't do anything beyond the work done in the 1970s.

As Sabine has equally noticed, the situation is actually much worse than that. By rephrasing the semiclassical arguments – which are not quite correct but they're close enough to be called a spin foam caricature of the right calculation – in the loopy language, one is forced to say many things about the spin foams and their number of states that clearly and brutally contradict statements about the same things that exist in the loop quantum gravity literature.

In particular, the entropy of the black hole should depend on the Barbero-Immirzi parameter but Bianchi derives that it doesn't. So one gets two different values predicted "by the same theory" for the same object. That's clearly a contradiction. Obviously, the contradiction doesn't imply that mathematics is inconsistent. Instead, what it implies is that some of the assumptions had to be incorrect. The assumption that was incorrect was that the structures that are constructed from the spin foam toys ever resemble physics in a nearly flat space. They never do. That's why you can never construct an accelerated loopy Bill Unruh in a Rindler space and that's why you can't use this impossible Bill Unruh to prove a contradiction in mathematics.

Even though the author himself works hard to keep his head in the sand and not to see the flagrantly obvious fact, Bianchi's paper is a proof that loop quantum gravity is inconsistent with physics in a nearly flat space. We don't even have to discuss any curvature – the Rindler space doesn't have and doesn't require any. Even in the flat space, we may derive a contradiction. That's because the flat space, as an approximation, isn't among the environments that are allowed by loop quantum gravity.

The crackpot paper got endorsed by a large portion of the "loop quantum gravity community" that hasn't prevented Bianchi from submitting this embarrassing preprint. The stupidity that these people indirectly endorsed is so breathtaking that you may want to remember the names of some of these – if you allow me an euphemism – staggering idiots:

Thanks to A. Perez, C. Rovelli, H. Haggard, J. Russo, L. Freidel, L. Smolin, L. Modesto, N. Afshordi, R. Sorkin, T. Jacobson, W. Donnelly, and W. Wieland for many conversations on the problem of black hole entropy. I am especially grateful to C. Rovelli for precious comments and suggestions during the last stage of this work.

A nice gang, indeed. ;-)

The discussion at the Physics Forums is hilarious, too. There may be hundreds of rather detailed comments including formulae in which the participants try to make sense out of the loop quantum gravity literature on black hole thermodynamics. Obviously, certain technical yet elementary questions arise such as:

Does the leading LQG result of the entropy of a large black hole depend on the Barbero-Immirzi parameter?
May the degenerated faces with the spin foamy spin $j\gt 1/2$ be neglected?
Can the correlations between groups of faces be neglected when one computes the entropy at the leading order?
Do the leading and subleading terms depend on physics beyond the semiclassical approximation?
Is the paper XY in the LQG literature – where XY is pretty much any element of a large set – correct?
Does the Barbero-Immirzi parameter run?
If it runs, is this fact consistent with the discreteness of the level of the Chern-Simons theory?
Should the Barbero-Immirzi parameter which was inserted as a fudge factor to mask a wrong result be correct by another fudge factor?

and many others. You may see that the answer to absolutely every elementary question of this type becomes totally open by the end of the Physics Forums discussion. The situation is totally fuzzy when it comes to absolutely everything and absolutely anything in LQG. It's clear what the right answers to these questions (except for those that depend on the nonsensical LQG magic toolkit) are in the correct theory – most of them follow from approximations to quantum gravity and every consistent full theory of quantum gravity must respect these answers.

It's clear that the analogous qualitative questions in a functional theory of quantum gravity would be instantly answered – otherwise a sensible physicist wouldn't dare to suggest that he has any theory of these phenomena at all. The term $S=A/4G$ is universal and derivable from semiclassical gravity, the logarithmic corrections also depend on the low-energy spectrum only, some higher-order corrections may need you to know more, and so on. String theory has calculated the entropy for lots of diverse multi-parameter classes of black holes – with different dimensions, different topologies, different charges, different dual descriptions, different levels of deviations from the extremality, and so on – and whatever had to agree with the macroscopic calculations has always exactly agreed although the agreement has always looked miraculous. Despite these initial feelings of a miracle, no one is surprised anymore. Those things have to hold in a consistent theory of quantum gravity and string/M-theory is one (and quite certainly, the only one).

But none of them get answered over there, in loop quantum gravity. There aren't any answers because there isn't any fixed theory here.

Instead, what they have are just some vague ideas about mathematical tools that could be used in the desired theory – and there is a lot of wishful thinking that such a theory could be found. But every, arbitrarily basic question about the "right way" to combine the proposed "building blocks" and how to choose the right assumptions remains unresolved. Whatever combination of building blocks and assumptions is chosen always leads to some immediate contradictions. In fact, it is trivial to show that any and every combination of the assumptions and building blocks used by the LQG folks is inconsistent with physics of gravity.

So whenever these people find enough contradictions in some way of thinking, they make it fashionable to say completely different things, adopt completely different additional assumptions, and totally change all the mathematical formulae for basic things.

If you want to know the current answers to some questions in LQG, you're not studying science. Instead, this research is a part of humanities because it is all about random fads in a community of some totally irrational and mostly dishonest folks.

The amount of useless details that the people at the Physics Forums are willing to write before they become able to figure out that the theory doesn't work – and maybe they will never be able to make this trivial statement – reminds me of the following situation. They find a new, fantastic, fundamental aircraft – namely the aircraft at 8:35 constructed by a civilization that was amazingly sophisticated relatively to the LQG criteria. It's surely more advanced, faster, and more carbon-neutral than any Boeing or Airbus you can think of, these folks tell us. Now, the goal is to figure out how this bamboo aircraft was used to fly and stay in the air.

So just like the constructors of the aircraft were attempting to exploit various types of wooden airphones, their LQG descendants are trying tons of possible explanations that try to determine which part of the bamboo aircraft was lifting the mass, moving it, keeping it, and sending signals to the folks at the airport. Every combination of assumptions they try implies that the bamboo aircraft couldn't work. Every single consistency check fails. But they don't give up because it's a dogma for them that something like that has to work and no finite amount of evidence – even proofs that they're exactly at the state zero where they don't know anything at all, not even answers to the most elementary questions about the structure of their very theory so at least all the research in the last 30 years was a waste of time – can ever help them to understand that the "theory" doesn't make any sense, that it doesn't exist in any useful sense.

The zeal of these "LQG researchers" makes Osama bin Laden look like a moderate and sensible agnostic in comparison. Their inability to draw lessons out of totally elementary contradictions knows no limits. I find it unbelievable but I think that many of them actually know that LQG is just an inconsistent pile of worthless feces. They have just spent enough time and connected themselves with this stuff so tightly that their courage is simply not enough for them to admit that they have wasted years with feces – something that an honest scientist must always have the courage to admit (primarily to himself, but then also to others which is the easier part) if he wants to save his integrity and research potential for the future.

Meanwhile, the arrogance of some of these stunningly hopeless crackpots is so breathtaking that they will come to a journalist and tell him once again that they have surely discovered something that could be compared to string theory – if it's not even better! That's the case despite the fact that they demonstrably don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about even if we talk about complete basics of their "theory". They always find some journalists and some laymen who are eager to devour these feces and loudly smack their lips – because unlike the Universe, the human stupidity has been demonstrated to have no limits.

And that's the memo.

Quantum gravity: replies to "top ten"

2012-05-13T21:05:00.000+02:00

Backreaction highlights what Sabine Hossenfelder considers ten "most interesting and pressing open problems" in theoretical physics related to quantum gravity. The amount of ignorance – a type of ignorance that is unfortunately widespread – and the depth of the misunderstandings that are visibly contained in the very questions seems very high to me.

Let me try to clarify some of these basic misconceptions that are often apparent in the very way how she phrases the questions.

The original problems are blockquoted in the blue blocks.

1. How can the apparent disagreement between general relativity and quantum gravity be resolved? Does it require to quantize gravity?
(Still 1. Haven't changed my mind about that.)

The reconciliation of general relativity and quantum gravity is unique and is known as string/M-theory.

The people who claim that they professionally work on quantum gravity but they're not really doing any string theory – or they haven't even learned the first chapters of the "textbooks" on the subject – are pure fraudsters, charlatans, and crackpots in the same sense as professionals who study even prime integers greater than 56. There aren't any.

It's kind of amazing that there exists a whole industry that tries to hide this simple fact. There are so many crooks doing these things that many people are literally afraid to loudly say that those people are crooks even though everyone in the field knows that.

But even if I ignore the fact that Ms Hossenfelder is completely ignorant about the basic knowledge about the field that she pretends to be her own, namely string theory, the remaining misunderstanding is still profound. In particular, the question "does it require to quantize gravity?" makes no sense.

The only two known conceptual frameworks that may describe physical phenomena are classical physics and quantum mechanics. There is no third way, at least not a major one.

In particular, one can't consistently couple a classical system to a quantum one. A uranium nucleus may influence Schrödinger's cat as well as its gravitational field; it follows that the gravitational field has to evolve into the same kind of superpositions of states that are observed for the nuclei. The observables linked to gravity may only be predicted probabilistically, much like everything in quantum mechanics, and they have to be represented by Hermitian linear operators.

The answers to all questions of the type "does Nature require observables to obey the postulates of quantum mechanics" are obviously Yes. But the ignorance concentrated in Hossenfelder's questions doesn't end with that.

Another problem is that she asks about the need to "quantize gravity" rather than the need for "gravity to obey the postulates of quantum mechanics". But this phrase of hers hides another incorrect preconception. Hossenfelder talks about "quantization of gravity" which is a procedure to obtain a quantum theory out of its classical limit. We may obtain some theories – especially those in the "textbooks" of quantum mechanics – in this way. But it is in no way guaranteed that all quantum theories are "quantizations of something".

This point is especially important in quantum gravity. We know that the correct theory of quantum gravity is not a quantization of any classical limit. It's wrong to assume that one may always start from a classical theory. More generally, it's wrong to imagine that classical theories are central or primary players. The arrow of the relationship goes exactly in the opposite direction. The full quantum theory is the exact set of rules that makes sense and that is connected with the Universe, either the real one or a conceptually similar but thought one. The classical theory is just a limit of the quantum theory if it exists. In some cases, it doesn't exist. For example, the six-dimensional (2,0) superconformal field theory doesn't have any classical limit in the superconformal phase.

Similarly, quantum gravity in 11 dimensions, M-theory, isn't just a quantization of a classical theory (e.g. classical supergravity).

So Ms Hossenfelder shows that she has vaguely yet mindlessly learned some mechanical procedures to construct quantum theories out of the classical ones – and she still seems to have a problem with this "addition of hats" – but she has never thought about the question whether this is the universal way how to find or define a quantum theory. It is not. And of course, we know that especially in quantum gravity, the reliance on a classical starting point is a brutal error.

2. Can we understand quantization?
(Up from 9. The more I think about it, the more I believe our problem with quantizing gravity is in the quantum part, not in the gravity part.)

Every pair of words in this question shows that the author of the question is confused about elementary things. The first sentence, the question, talks about "quantization" once again. But quantization is a simple procedure to construct operators and determine commutators out of their classical counterparts. An undergraduate student who is learning quantum mechanics should be able to understand and master quantization.

In the case of quantum field theories, the quantization leads to some additional complications – related to actual short-distance physical phenomena in the full quantum theory – that are addressed by regularization, renormalization, and the renormalization group. If we interpret an Einsteinian theory of gravity as a quantum field theory, these problems become fatal because the general theory of relativity isn't renormalizable at the quantum level.

However, this fact doesn't mean that there isn't any consistent theory of quantum gravity. This conclusion would be wrong because, as I have already said, it's not true that a correct quantum theory describing a physical situation must be obtained by a straightforward procedure from a classical starting point. Classical theories just aren't fundamental in any sense and you shouldn't assume that you will find one in every quantum research you will pursue. In the case of gravity, it's not true that one may get the right theory by a quantization. We only know that in a certain limit, the quantum theory should reduce to a classical theory. But this requirement isn't equivalent to the statement that the quantum theory should be constructed from the classical limit by a straightforward procedure, by "quantization". Instead, we must look at the set of plausible theories with desired properties and study them. Nature doesn't guarantee that our preconceived method how to find or construct these theories should work. It actually doesn't work.

Ms Hossenfelder's opinion in the parentheses proves that she is deluded about elementary points, too. The postulates of quantum mechanics are completely universal and can't be deformed in any way. Linearity, unitarity, and the quadratic formulae for the probabilities team up to create the unique viable framework different from classical physics that may produce predictions resembling the classical ones. There isn't any way to modify the quantum rules without destroying the entire theoretical structure.

On the other hand, the spacetime geometry is just one particular collection of observables in an effective theory; there may be and there are many other observables beyond the metric tensor. And the metric tensor isn't really a good degree of freedom at very short distances, away from the long-distance effective description. Also, the Einstein-Hilbert action (the Ricci scalar) is just one term in an effective Lagrangian. Once again, we know that there are many other terms, including interactions of the gravitational field with other fields as well as higher-derivative terms indicating more complicated self-interactions of the gravitational field with itself. It is totally obvious that at least a priori, the equations of general relativity may and do receive all kinds of corrections and deformations.

Ms Hossenfelder's opinion about all these things is upside down. She can't possibly understand the concept of the effective action – and I think she can't really understand the universal postulates of quantum mechanics – if she thinks that quantum mechanics should be modified while gravity should not be. It's certainly the other way around. Only incompetent would-be scientists and cranks can have a doubt about this basic point in 2012.

3. ~~Do black holes destroy information?~~
What happens to the matter that collapses to a black hole?
(I think we spent enough time on the black hole information loss problem. It would be fruitful to instead think about what happens to matter at Planckian densities. Down from 2.)

The question about the black hole information loss was stricken by her; the justification is that "we spent enough time" on that problem. That's a very bizarre explanation why it was stricken. If we spend "enough time" on something, it doesn't mean that we have solved it or it has ceased to be a very important question. In many cases, having spent a long time with a problem may only highlight the depth of the problem.

At any rate, the black holes preserve the information even during the process of the Hawking radiation. We've known that since the late 1990s when explicitly unitary descriptions of these processes were constructed – in Matrix theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence. Stephen Hawking isn't a "canonical string theorist" but the evidence was so waterproof and overwhelming that he surrendered his bets and accepted that the information is preserved. Still, many questions that are more detailed and that are concerned with the way how the information gets out remain at least partially open. It's not quite easy to formulate them; Ms Hossenfelder hasn't even tried.

Her question about the Planckian densities could be refined and transformed into a meaningful question without misconceptions but it's not fine as stated. In the form it was stated, Ms Hossenfelder's question obviously assumes that there is some local description of "what is happening inside" in the very small regions where the densities are Planckian. But that's not how it works.

One can't construct a fully local description of such extreme situations. Instead, meaningful physics reflects what can actually be measured about such systems, e.g. via scattering. So it doesn't really make sense to ask "what happens at the Planckian densities". Instead, we may ask what probes and observers will observe in situations that would be naively assigned Planckian densities.

Moreover, Ms Hossenfelder's formulation of the question shows that she denies the holographic principle. In fact, you may see that in her whole "top ten list" of quantum gravity, there's not even a hint of holography although most genuine experts consider it the most important discovery of the last 20 years in theoretical physics. She's just detached from all these things.

Trans-Planckian densities can't really exist. If you try to find the densest object of a given size, you inevitably end up with a black hole. The smallest black holes have the highest density. But there can't be any black hole – an object admitting a general relativistic description as a black hole with small corrections – that would be smaller than the Planck length. So the maximum density one can achieve is the density of these tiniest black holes. It happens to be close to the Planck density.

Such a tiny black hole quickly evaporates – within a Planck time. It follows that one can't make any detailed measurements what was happening inside; there's not enough time e.g. for an accurate measurement of the energies. In the Planck time that is available, the error in the measured energy is inevitably greater than the Planck energy, too. There is simply no "large body of knowledge" about the internal behavior of materials that have similar densities simply because these materials don't exist as (meta)stable states.

Her focus on "volume densities" also contradicts the holographic principle. In the text above, I showed that only the tiniest black holes may reach close to the Planckian densities. But these objects are small and heavy. You can't fill a larger volume – a volume much larger than the Planck volume – by this "material". If you try to place too many (a million of) similar black holes next to each other, they will coalesce into a larger black holes whose radius is much (a million times) larger than the original one. Its density will be inevitably much lower.

The very idea that one should imagine that matter may be arranged into Planckian (volume) densities has been shown invalid by the holographic principle. It's a completely wrong way to think about the extreme conditions in quantum gravity. The modern legitimate replacement is to think about the maximum concentration of entropy per area – and that's nothing else than the event horizons. And one may also try to study the black hole interior or even the vicinity of the black hole singularities. But one must also realize that these questions are incompatible with "fully precise measurements" because only a limited amount of time is available for such measurements. And what happens in the very vicinity of the Schwarzschild singularity is arguably unphysical because no measurement can be done over there – and if it could, its results can't be broadcast to long-lived scientists.

Quantum gravity just doesn't work in the way that Ms Hossenfelder suggests in between the lines. Her questions could have looked OK thirty years ago but for decades, we have known that they're not good questions. One must be very careful when he discusses the black hole interior because it's unavailable to the scattering methods etc. It's likely that everything that may be said about the observations inside the black hole is equivalent to "matter on a curved background" which is an approximate description whose errors are matched by the unavoidable errors of the measurements, anyway.

It would be much more interesting to ask about the ways how the horizons store the information and how the viewpoints of the external and internal observers may be translated in between but of course, Ms Hossenfelder is nowhere close to these actually open questions in quantum gravity.

4. Are the electroweak and strong interaction unified at high energies? If so, are they also unified with gravity?
(That is, is there a theory of everything? Up from 8. I'm undecided whether or not unification is helpful to the problem of quantizing gravity.)

We don't know for sure whether the electroweak and strong interactions unify in the strict sense of grand unified theories – whether the GUT field theories are good effective descriptions of Nature at some scale. It may be a good assumption (and the gauge coupling unification in the MSSM is positive circumstantial evidence) but it could be wrong. However, we do know that at high enough energies, the seemingly differences between individual interactions (between the individual non-gravitational ones; as well as between the non-gravitational and gravitational ones) have to go away.

They surely go away in string theory but even if you pretended that we don't know string theory, one may also offer general arguments based on quantum gravity in the general sense that imply that the strict separation between different kinds of elementary particles has to go away.

5. Are the currently known particles of the standard model (SM) elementary? Are there more so far unobserved particles? Why are the parameters of the SM what they are and are they in yet unknown ways related to each other? Why are the gauge groups of the SM what they are? Is it even possible to uniquely answer this question?
(Formerly 8, minus the question for unification plus the question whether there's a unique answer.)

This question is obviously a purely stringy question; no other framework has even tried to dream about finding tools to address such conglomerates of questions.

Whether the particles of the Standard Model are point-like is a particle physics question – within string theory or outside string theory – that is probably unrelated to the characteristic problems of quantum gravity. One could say that this question shouldn't have appeared in a quantum gravity list. It would be OK in a string theory list but quantum gravity is a term that only describes those aspects of string theory that depend on the validity of the postulates of quantum mechanics as well as on the existence of the gravitational field. Questions about the inner structure of very light particles are unlikely to belong to this subset.

The same comment applies to the question whether additional particles exist. It's what particle physics model building is all about and its existence is mostly independent from quantum gravity; this separation is legitimate and justifiable, at least according to the current level of understanding of these topics.

Whether the field content and the values of parameters are calculable is nothing else than the usual vacuum selection problem. Some people would promote the anthropic reasoning as an answer in recent years; there is a large (but finite) number of possibilities and our Universe is a pretty random one. It may be very hard to isolate the right one. Alternatively, there may be a vacuum selection rule we don't know yet but it will be found in the future (or it won't be found but it may still exist).

At any rate, I find it bizarre that Ms Hossenfelder tries to "squeeze" the whole field of particle physics phenomenology and model building as the question number 5 in her quantum gravity top ten list. One either studies these things seriously, as good phenomenologists do, or she doesn't. Suggestions that questions about the short-distance architecture of the Standard Model particles is just a tiny subset of Ms Hossenfelder's "field" is yet another dishonest proposition because Ms Hossenfelder knows almost nothing about particle physics.

6. Did the universe start with a big bang, a big bounce or something else entirely?
(This is a reformulation of the earlier question number 4 which focused on singularities specifically. Down from 3.)

Because of the second law of thermodynamics – a law dictating that the entropy can't decrease – the visible part of the Universe had to have a beginning. Bounces can't be quite eliminated but they're neither natural nor motivated. Cyclical cosmologies have to have a beginning, too.

None of these questions are quite settled at this point but I think it's a wrong intuition to expect some new great insights about the prehistory of the visible Universe around us. It started 13.73 billion years ago and it's almost certain that there exists nothing that wouldn't fit on the semi-infinite axis from the Big Bang to the present.

If there are interesting insights to be found in related contexts, they're about the incorporation of our visible Universe into a grander scheme of things, e.g. an eternally inflating multiverse. It seems obvious that the eternal inflation is the more convincing proposed theory for a "broader context" in which our Universe lives; on the other hand, it's equally obvious that the existence of such a prehistory is likely to have no genuine yet calculable physical implications.

Again, what I don't like about the formulation of the sixth question is that it feverishly tries to overlook the actual progress that's been done in the relevant field – in cosmology, in this case. Ms Hossenfelder is asking the question in the same way as people would ask it 40 years ago or so. I don't think questions like that have any value if nontrivial insights collected over a 40-year period don't affect the wording of the questions at all.

7. Why do we experience 3+1 dimensions? Are there extra dimensions? Does the effective dimension of space-time decrease at short distances?
(This is an extension of the earlier question 7, taking into account that dimensional reduction to 2 dimensions has received some attention recently.)

Inside the parenthesis, this question tries to hype a random unimportant fad in the fringe literature.

At any rate, there are 6 or 7 extra dimensions but one should be much more careful when she talks about them. Before we count them, we should know what they are and how we define them. In quantum field theory, fields are functions of a certain number of spacetime coordinates and strict locality allows us to identify the spacetime manifold and measure its dimension. But quantum gravity is not a quantum field theory in the strict sense (and in the same spacetime); it is not strictly local and the usual definitions of the dimension don't apply to the short-distance space according to quantum gravity which is "fuzzy".

This fact makes the definition of the number of dimensions subtle. The counting of the dimensions is only "unambiguous" if we decide to count the dimensions whose size as well as the curvature radius is much longer than all fundamental length scales. However, the number of tiny compactified or strongly warped dimensions depends on the description. We know that because of dualities, the number of compactified dimensions (e.g. in the heterotic/K3 duality) isn't well-defined. In the AdS/CFT correspondence, the number of dimensions is ambiguous, too: depending on the description, the holographic radial dimension in the warped geometry may be seen or invisible. These are the actual important discoveries that are relevant for the seventh question; however, Ms Hossenfelder pays absolutely no attention to them. She has no clue.

Ms Hossenfelder is asking questions but she seems totally uninterested in the answers. That's why particle physics doesn't appear in her questions about particle physics, holography doesn't appear in her questions about holography, cosmology doesn't appear in her questions about cosmology, and so on. As far as I can say, she just wants to look smart by asking similar questions even though she doesn't have the slightest clue what the contemporary science knows about these matters.

8. Why is gravity so much weaker than the other interactions?
(Up from 10.)

The fact that gravity must be weaker – when the strength is properly defined – than all the other interactions seems to follow from consistency conditions in quantum gravity; it is implied by constructions in string theory, too.

The fact that it's much weaker is the core observation of the hierarchy problem.

Let me start more slowly: we know why gravity is weaker than the strong nuclear force. Or to say the least, we may transform this proposition into a more fundamental one. This fact boils down to the value of the strong coupling constant at the fundamental (Planck) scale which is smaller than one but not insanely smaller than one. By the logarithmic running and dimensional transmutation, we may calculate the scale at which the strong coupling constant grows larger than one – the QCD scale – and it inevitably ends up exponentially smaller than the Planck scale.

For the electroweak force, the calculation can't be done in this way assuming that the Higgs boson is a point-like particle. The reason why the electroweak force is much weaker at low energies than gravity is the hierarchy problem and much of the activity in particle physics phenomenology of recent decades has been dedicated to this problem. While no detailed complete answer is known, it seems obvious that attempts such as technicolor and compositeness have been eliminated after the 125 GeV Higgs was observed and supersymmetry is by far the most motivated solution to the hierarchy problem.

Of course, it's also plausible that there's no "mechanism" that explains the gap and one needs to refer to some anthropic explanations etc. in order to explain it.

9. Does dark energy exist? If so, what is it? Is the coincidence problem more than a coincidence?
(Down from 4. I think that the dark energy puzzle is possibly a relevant hint for quantum gravity. But then, maybe not.)

The case for the dark energy in the form of the cosmological constant has been getting stronger since the initial discovery in 1998. It has led to largely unsuccessful attempts to explain the small but nonzero value of the cosmological constant; the anthropic multiverse is the only at least plausible explanation that may agree with everything else we know and it's been briefly discussed above.

On the other hand, there exist various reasons to think that the dark *matter* exists. The 130 GeV gamma-ray line recently isolated in the Fermi data could become the most explicit evidence in favor of the existence of dark matter.

The coincidence problem isn't a problem. There are two reasons. First, we may compare many pairs of time-dependent quantities in a cosmology so it's not shocking that some of them are close to each other, within half an order of magnitude. Second, Weinberg's calculation of the optimum cosmological constant for life indeed does indicate that life tends to arise when the cosmological constant is comparable to the upper bound compatible with life – which is comparable to the density of dark matter when the life is actually thriving.

It shouldn't be shocking that I refer to Weinberg's arguments which are "anthropic" and depend on our existence because the very question "why now" depends on our existence, too. There is nothing objective about the moment we call "now". To describe it objectively, we need to link it to some properties of the Universe that exists today – such as the existence of stars or life on Earth.

10. How do we correctly assign an entropy to gravitational degrees of freedom? Is this testable at all?
(Newcomer.)

Yes, the gas of gravitons carries a calculable entropy much like any other gas; moreover, the event horizons carry the extra huge Bekenstein-Hawking entropy $S=A/4G$ that's been known from the mid 1970s and verified by totally independent methods in string theory. The appearance of this question does indicate that Ms Hossenfelder has no idea about quantum gravity, indeed.

If one isn't satisfied with independent calculations of the thermodynamic properties of black holes etc., she has to observe them. However, only very small black holes have high enough temperature for its radiation to be detectable experimentally. There are not too many objects around. And of course, one always needs some indirect reasoning to talk about entropy because the entropy isn't ever "directly observable". We may determine the changes of the entropy of macroscopic objects from the first law of thermodynamics in an appropriate form but there's no "entropy-meter"; this disclaimer is true both in black hole thermodynamics as well as any other thermodynamics.

Moreover, the whole language she uses is sloppy and naive. One of the lessons that we have learned in recent decades in theoretical physics is that we can't sharply separate gravitational degrees of freedom from others. This is related to the unification discussed above. In fact, AdS/CFT-like holography is another manifestation of this unification. Degrees of freedom that look completely gravitational in the AdS description are physically identical to degrees of freedom that look completely non-gravitational in the exactly equivalent CFT description. Ms Hossenfelder's wording implicitly denies all these facts because it pretends that a "gravitational degree of freedom" is a uniquely well-defined concept. It's not.

The impressive amount of deep insights that theoretical physics has learned in recent decades – but Ms Hossenfelder has not learned them – has shown that not only some naively guessed answers of people like her were wrong; even most of the questions are wrong, as you have seen above.

Dark matter has dropped off the list. I think we're well on the way to finding some direct evidence for dark matter. It will be difficult to pin down, but at this point it seems unlikely to me that it will be relevant for quantum gravity.

There may be surprises but I agree with these particular comments. Too bad they're not a part of the top ten list.

David Suzuki: humans are 2D maggots

2012-05-12T15:09:00.001+02:00

The leader of the Canadian global warming movement has studied fruit flies (much like Alexander Ač whose PhD thesis is about the carbon-enhanced copulation of fruit flies on blue-flowered meadows).

But during his research, he had discovered something that has had huge implications for the human race, too.

He has discovered that humans are fruit flies and maggots because they eat stuff around.

After they break from a comfortable egg, the human maggots move in two dimensions and become second-level maggots who crash other maggots in proportionality with their own weight, who defecate all over the environment, and who eat the defecation from the other, usually larger maggots.

Some of these humans become tenth-level maggots who are big wheels. That's what the consensus environmentalist and global warming science knew about the humans and their co-existence with the environment at least since 1972. You may see their deep respect for the humanity as well as the impressive precision and rigor that have been hallmarks of this scientific discipline for quite some time.

Human beings according to David Suzuki's climate model

I wonder whether today, in the New Age in which the old New Age dreams have already become a reality, David Suzuki and Al Gore are still the tenth-level maggots or they have already become the eleventh-level maggots who keep on growing by exponentially devouring their own defecations together with a positive feedback that has entered a runaway behavior.

Via The Haunting Library and Marc Morano

A universal theory of climate denial

While Prof Suzuki explained the human race as maggots back in 1972, a breathtaking progress in May 2012 has just managed to explain one of the most mysterious movements in the history of Gaia, the climate denial.

University of Central Florida Professor Peter Jacques made a staggeringly original discovery that is composed of several parts. First, he invented a totally novel and original name for the movement, "climate denial". Second, he noticed that one should study the literature on the Holocaust denial in order to understand the climate denial. Third, he identified the climate denial as a reactionary movement driven by special interests and privileges.

The groundbreaking discoveries are being published in MIT's Global Environmental Politics. You must agree that his ideas are so fresh and ingenious that we have to ask: Why haven't other geniuses thought about it before Prof Jacques? ;-)

Tommaso Dorigo, cMSSM, and demagogy

2012-05-11T21:38:00.001+02:00

Tommaso Dorigo has driven me up the wall by a demagogic article about SUSY, MSSM, and cMSSM, and so have his stupid readers. That has occurred despite the fact that he has already written about a hundred of such dishonest rants.

Because it seems that the Italians weren't sufficiently beaten by us today yet, let me copy my reactions over here.

By the way, tomorrow, Pilsen's soccer team is playing the Czech Gambrinus soccer league's final match against Liberec and it just happened that whoever wins will be the winner of the league! Sparta Prague has been gone for one round. A tie means that Pilsen loses; a victory means that "we" defend the title (with the same score but better mutual matches).

OK, back to the PIGS' propaganda:

Dorigo: The cMSSM is a very attractive "minimal" option to extend the Standard Model with a minimal addition of parameters (still, quite a few, as in any Supersymmetric theory). Its appeal lies in the fact that one may basically study the resulting predicted phenomenology by just investigating five crucial parameters.

LM: This is a very superficial, intrinsically unscientific, lousy mode of reasoning about Nature. Nature doesn't give a damn whether it's easy for us to find or verify Her conjectures or theories. They're as hard for us as they are and if we find them hard, it's our problem. Things that are "attractive" for lazy folks aren't necessarily the same things that are "attractive" for those who are searching for the truth about Nature and who are willing to think carefully and work hard in order to achieve the goal.

In other words, you are saying that we should only look for our keys beneath the lamppost. But they don't have to be there, especially not if you require that it's the particular lamppost that you decided to worship at a random moment for a random would-be reason, usually (and in this case) a reason that was chosen because it can be used for a demagogic argument defending your flawed preconceptions.

So reducing the number of parameters by considering subspaces of parameter spaces may simplify someone's life but it's surely not a way to achieve a theory that's more likely or more profound or more motivated than others. In particular, cMSSM has been close to excluded for a year or so. But its fate is extremely far from being representative of the fate of SUSY. Even within the MSSM, cMSSM is simply not the state-of-the-art region that is investigated and the MSSM itself isn't the representative of the state-of-the-art SUSY phenomenology at all.

Some people knew that cMSSM wasn't an excessively natural or motivated slice of the parameter space, others didn't. At any rate, the experiments show that the first group probably had a point.

Superficial texts such as yours are the reason why people end up with utterly irrational opinions about science. It starts with assumptions that are known to be wrong or at least misleading both for theoretical reasons as well as experimental reasons, then it unsurprisingly derives some "surprises", and makes a big deal out of these "surprises" that wouldn't exist if your text were not all about your stupid assumptions and misconceptions.

Dorigo: The paper is nice because it keeps the discussion at a reasonably simple level, and it gives no previous knowledge for granted. You therefore may know nothing about SUSY and read it back to back without trouble.

LM: It is equally pernicious for you to suggest that a reader may end up with an informed opinion about the status (and viability) of cMSSM or MSSM or SUSY by reading a mediocre paper even if the reader knew nothing about SUSY to start with. This is really a hardcore populist nonsense and I think that you must know very well that what you wrote is a lie.

Readers who don't study SUSY at least for 20 hours - after they learned QFT to a reasonable extent - have no chance to end up with an informed opinion about the state of SUSY. After all, not even you are anywhere close to be able to make up an informed opinion about particular SUSY models, their relative importance, or even about the fate of SUSY itself which is much deeper a question - one that depends on the breadth of one's knowledge - than comparing a particular model to the data. You have virtually no chance and your generic readers' chance is smaller by several extra orders of magnitude.

At most, what you can achieve is to map SUSY to their communist conspiracy theories about the mortgage crisis - greetings to Hontas Farmer - an "analogy" that most dogs can think of without reading your stupid demagogic blog, too.

"SpringTheorist": This as you put it "very superficial, intrinsically unscientific, lousy mode of reasonin" is called Occam's razor.

LM: Well, even if this were an example of Occam's razor, it wouldn't be in conflict with the fact that it is superficially, lousy, and intrinsically unscientific mode of reasoning. Ockham wasn't a scientist; he was a theologian and Franciscan friar in the dark ages, centuries before science was born, so if you are assuming that everything he wrote must be dogmatically viewed as a pillar of science, you should visit your psychiatrist again.

Equally importantly, picking cMSSM out of MSSM or even out of SUSY model building is obviously not an example of Occam's razor, not even according to the original quote which was

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate

which means something like "the diversity of concepts shouldn't be inflated unless it's necessary", if I give it a somewhat more rigorous modern meaning.

First of all, MSSM doesn't introduce any new concepts that are not included in cMSSM so it is not increasing the "plurality" at all. Second of all, even more importantly and at any rate, much like Einstein when he authored his quote about simplicity, Ockham was very careful in saying "unless it is necessary". When we talk about the MSSM parameter space, it obviously *is* necessary to go outside cMSSM - for many reasons, including the reason that the cMSSM slice has been largely excluded, unlike the MSSM parameter space.

In fact, one could argue that according to Wikipedia, your usage of Occam's razor is upside down. The first sentence of the definition says that theories making "fewest assumptions" are preferred. But cMSSM makes a *greater* number of assumptions than MSSM. In particular, it has the extra *constraints* which are, you know, additional assumptions. That's also why the name of cMSSM is longer and more contrived than the name of MSSM, you know. So Occam's razor really favors MSSM over cMSSM.

Tommaso's hardcore populist articles of the type "you may understand everything about SUSY if you've never studied it as long as you read a low-brow review article" only help to make arrogant uneducated and intellectually defective idiots such as "SpringTheorist" even more arrogant.

Richard Feynman: birthday

2012-05-11T18:30:00.001+02:00

Richard Feynman was born on May 11th, 1918. If you have never watched his 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell, you should fix it. Here's the first one (one hour):

You may watch all these lectures via Bill Gates' Project Tuva: Microsoft Internet Explorer is needed.

These seven lectures are also available via YouTube and they will be available until Bill Gates tells Google's guys that Feynman should only be watched via Silverlight and not Flash. ;-)

High schools in Czechia

Yesterday, I was giving a 90-minute string talk (twice) to high school kids at the rather good high school where my uncle used to study and where my grandfather used to teach. I was invited by my classmate from the kindergarten, basic school, and high school, if I avoid the term "secret childhood love". ;-) Kind of fun but I think that it's clear that even this "real gymnasium" that would be highly math-and-physics oriented has been losing this focus. The interests and knowledge of the kids betrayed some of these trends even though the students were fun.

Some of their equipment, co-funded by the EU, looked pretty impressive. I don't think that physics students at Harvard would ever learn things in similar computer-laden classrooms, for example. ;-)

Thomas Bayes and supersymmetry

2012-05-10T21:05:00.002+02:00

Phil Gibbs wrote a nice article about an insightful puzzle, Bayes and SUSY, which is relevant for a sensible answer to the question "how much we should change our mind when we eliminate a big chunk of a parameter space", i.e. a big portion of the possible values of some parameters that specify a theory.

Consider three shells, similar to the four shells in the game below. ;-)

Full screen; the music stops in 33 seconds

Here is the puzzle.

You're told that the probability is 90% that a marble is hiding under one of them; and 10% that it is nowhere. Now you turn and look beneath two shells out of three and you don't find a marble. What is the probability that the marble is hiding behind the last shell now?

Phil tells us that some people have the inclination to simply divide 90% by three and say that the probability has dropped to 30%. This is, however, very far from the right result which is 75%. Why is the right result so high?

You may imagine that there are 10 equally likely possibilities. In 3 of them, the marble is under the first shell, in 3 of them it is under the second one, in 3 of them, it is under the third one, and in 1 of them (i.e. 10% of the cases), there is no marble.

By seeing that there's no marble under the first and second shell, we eliminate 3+3=6 possibilities out of the 10 possibilities we started with. The remaining 3+1=4 possibilities are still allowed and 3 of them (i.e. 75%) correspond to a marble under the third shell. So the probability resulting from this "frequentist calculation" is much higher than some naive guess that many people would quickly scream.

General numbers

Let me generalize the calculation to a generic prior probability $P$ that the marble was somewhere; and a fraction $F$ of the possible shells that have been eliminated. We may rephrase the situation by considering a larger parameter space (and a larger set of initial possibilities) that also contains the region in which the "marble is nowhere".

The size of this larger parameter space is $1/P$ times greater than the size of the original "marble is somewhere" parameter space. Out of this interval of length $1/P$, the length $F$ corresponds to possibilities that have already been eliminated. So the surviving possibilities correspond to the interval of length $1/P-F$ and "no marble" corresponds to the added length $1/P-1$.

So the probability that there's no marble anywhere after we eliminated the fraction of the possibilities is\[

\eq{
Prob(\text{no marble}) &= \frac{1/P-1}{1/P-F} =\\ &= \frac{1-P}{1-FP}
}

\] Note that neither the numerator nor the denominator can be negative because $F\lt 1$ and $P\lt 1$. The aforementioned probability 25% for "no marble" is obtained for $P=9/10$ and $F=2/3$.

Of course, the main marble we are interested in is supersymmetry; it's the single most likely marble that is hiding under the shells of CERN. One reason that makes SUSY the winner in this contest is that the lower bound on the sparticle masses are among the "lightest" i.e. "least constraining" lower bounds we may find in physics. Other new objects such as black holes, Kaluza-Klein particles, new massive gauge bosons etc. have been eliminated up to masses of a few TeVs or so and these "already high" thresholds are not going to grow too quickly if you talk about the percentage growth which you should because the chances are approximately uniformly distributed on the log axis (logarithm of the mass).

On the other hand, the stop squark may still exist near 300 GeV or so and the interval between 300 GeV and 600 GeV is going to be investigated within a few months (it is already being investigated) – a whole doubling – so the stop has a relatively higher chance to be discovered.

What are the numbers for SUSY? Of course, the main quantity that influences the result is the prior probability $P$ that SUSY exists. Now, one must be a bit careful what we mean by its existence. If we mean its existence at an arbitrarily high scale, the probability $P$ is very close to one, something like $P=0.9999$, pretty much guaranteed by string theory. However, $P$ as estimated by your humble correspondent may have been as low as 60% if we mean the low-energy SUSY that is available to the LHC searches.

The value of $F$ is problematic as well. How big a portion of the possibilities has been eliminated by the LHC searches so far? It could be $F=2/3$ or much less. Of course, there is no "canonical measure" on the parameter spaces.

Moreover, we don't really know all the disconnected components of the parameter spaces because the MSSM isn't the only supersymmetric model. We don't know their relative weights. We don't know how strongly we should favor "simplified Ansätze" and values of parameters that favor unification and/or preserve flavors or CP in a simple way, and so on. And we must decide about some natural decrease of the probability distribution function for large values of masses – something that is needed both for naturalness as well as for the normalizability of the overall probability. We don't know the rate of this decrease. We don't know the detailed shape of the distribution at all.

There's no canonical calculation. All these factors depend on subjective preferences. But if you say that 2/3 of the "shells" under which SUSY may be hiding have been eliminated, you may calculate the probability that there's no SUSY. For the existence of SUSY "anywhere", we get\[

\eq{
Prob({\text{no SUSY}}) &= \frac{1-P}{1-FP} =\\ &= \frac{0.0001}{1-0.0002/3} = 0.0001000066...
}

\] Note that before we excluded two thirds of the parameter space, the probability was 0.0001 so the change of this probability has been almost non-existent! The probability of "no SUSY" has only increased by 0.0066% of its original value; in absolute numbers, the increase has only been 0.0000000066 or so.

Of course, the elimination of 2/3 of the parameter space makes a much greater difference for $P=0.6$ which I said to be the pre-LHC probability that SUSY is accessible by the LHC. For this question, the post-elimination probability is\[

\eq{
Prob(\text{no LHC SUSY}) &= \frac{1-P}{1-FP}\\ &= \frac{1/3}{1-2/3\times 0.6} = 0.5555...
}

\] So the probability that the LHC will find SUSY remains at 44.4% according to these numbers; it has only dropped by 26% of its previous value. At any rate, Phil's point is very important. One must be careful not get get caught in the trap and reducing the "Yes SUSY" probability in direct proportionality with the percentage of the surviving parameter spaces because this is not at all what the correct probabilistic calculation says!

Pessimists' maths looks different

Let me mention that if your prior probability that "SUSY is right" were extremely low, $P\ll 1$, while $F$, the fraction of the excluded parameter space, were far both from zero and one, then $(1-P)/(1-FP)$ would be essentially one in the limit. It would be more insightful to calculate the (in this case small) probability that SUSY is right,\[

\eq{
1 - \frac{1-P}{1-FP} &= \frac{1-FP-1+P}{1-FP} =\\ &= P\frac{1-F}{1-FP}\sim P(1-F)
}

\] so indeed, the prior probability that SUSY is right, $P$, would be suppressed in proportionality with the fraction of the parameter space that has survived. But this approximation only holds if you were considering SUSY as very unlikely to start with. If you were not, the decrease of the probability is much more gentle and the exclusion of a moderate fraction of the parameter space doesn't have enough potential to change the odds dramatically.

EU lawmakers won't go to Rio+20, can't afford the hotel

2012-05-10T18:22:00.000+02:00

Next month, there will be a conference in Rio – called Rio+20 or Earth Summit 2012 – which will take place exactly 20 years after the 1992 conference in Rio that helped environmentalism in general and global warming in particular to penetrate deeply into the mainstream media and the mainstream politics.

The policies resulting from the Rio talks and a few related events brought us to the current world, a world which spends several billion dollars a year for climate change research, about ten billion dollars for climate change analysts and journalists, and... about half a trillion dollars a year for the actual policies trying to curb the CO2 emissions (which don't work but still introduce huge and costly inefficiencies to the system).

It may be helpful to write down that half a trillion is $500,000,000,000 dollars. Try to appreciate the number of zeros. For this reason, I was bemused to learn that

MEPs cancel Rio+20 participation (European Voice)

(via Benny Peiser) where MEPs stands for "members of the European Parliament". But it was even more amazing to learn what is the justification why the European Parliament – the only people at the EU level who are actually lawmakers and who could "imprint" some negotiations into reality – won't attend Rio+20: the European Union can't afford $1,000 per night in the hotel which is "too exorbitant". Cool.

The conference will only last for three days – between June 20th and June 22th – so even if the European Union sent all 754 European Parliament deputies to the event to the event (and I hope it is a huge overestimate), it would only pay $2,000,000 for the hotels. That's more than 100,000 times smaller an amount than the amount of money that the EU is already wasting every year for miscalculated efforts to curb the CO2 emissions.

Now, the EU finds out it can't afford to increase this wasting by 10 parts per million or 0.001%. Amazing. And the real percentage is probably smaller by two more orders of magnitude because the EU Parliament should only send a dozen of folks.

This is one of the kinds of a breathtaking idiocy and detachment from reality that wouldn't happen in the private sector. A businessman knows how much actual things cost so if a certain goal requires several steps and one of the steps is 100,000 times cheaper than another step, the private entrepreneur will be capable of figuring out that this smaller expense is negligible and may be easily paid.

The public sector isn't capable of figuring out such basic things. The public apparatchiks and government employees are both morons as well as people who don't give a damn whether their "employer" will end up with a profit or not and how large the profit is. Their decisions are illogical and mindless. They don't know the value of the money and even if they could learn the value of the money, they just don't care.

If the EU – and the European Parliament – wants to save some money in these "hard times" (add your favorite pessimist's pile of wrong judgments), then it should primarily stop, abolish, and outlaw all policies that make the economy less effective because they are trying to curb the CO2 emissions. In this way, the amount of money that will be saved will be 100,000+ times higher than the amount of money they can save for the hotels in Rio.

Of course, a part of these attitudes are deliberately irrational. People are eager to waste huge amounts and decide not to pay for negligible amounts because they want to impress some other irrational people by "symbols" and there are just way too many irrational people everywhere.

Because the text above may have sounded too positive for Rio+20. So let me say that much like during similar recent events, it is pretty much guaranteed that we may only expect infinite talks that lead nowhere because many countries ultimately know what they're doing and they know that it would be suicidal to adopt various proposed global policies, at least those policies that don't transfer wealth from others to them. ;-)

So most of the money that is wasted due to the anti-CO2 delusions boils down to the stupidity of the individual nationwide political bodies rather than international conferences. Active idiots (people who actively and enthusiastically want to push a self-evident idiotic agenda) are overrepresented in the political elites of most countries in the world, especially the advanced Western ones. In the scheme of things, the international conferences such as those in Rio only play one role: they help the local, national idiots look more important. They must surely be very important if thousands of similar idiots are gathering at similar large conferences, mustn't they?

So the EU lawmakers won't attend Rio+20. But maybe I am missing the point. Maybe that's how the EU wants the policies to be established. The partially democratically elected representatives should have nothing to do with the decisions; the CO2 decisions should be imposed on everyone by unelected dictators.

Because I mentioned the idiocy of government-funded apparatchiks, it's a good context to link to a new essay by James Hansen written for the New York Times. He was devastated to hear Barack Obama who believes that Canada will benefit out of its natural resources regardless of what the United States decide to do. Instead, the U.S. should invade Canada and make sure that they don't behave rationally, in order to save the world from... the Pliocene (with non-existing causal relationships), global warming which isn't a prediction, and from tons of other psychopathic delusions that you may predict to be represented in a text by James Hansen.

LM: I prefer good relations between Canada and the U.S. which is why I embedded this 6-minute introduction to Canada for the Americans which I enjoyed, too. The only places close to Canada where I have been are the Niagara Falls (twice) and the 1,000 islands (once).