Prediction isn't the right method to learn about the past

Happy New Year 2013 = 33 * 61!The last day of the year is a natural moment for a blog entry about time. At various moments, I wanted to write about the things that the year 2012 brought us.The most important event in science was the discovery of the \(126\GeV\) Higgs boson (something that made me $500 richer but that's of course the least important consequence of the discovery) but those of us who were following the events and thinking about them...

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Richard Dawkins vs Peter Higgs

The reverse fundamentalist vs the peaceful atheistTwo days ago, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and other mostly British outlets amplified an amusing yet potentially serious battle between two famous scientists, Richard Dawkins and Peter Higgs:Battle of the professors: Richard Dawkins branded a fundamentalist by expert behind the 'God particle' (The Daily Mail)Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious 'fundamentalism' (The Guardian)Google...

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Amplitudes, permutations, Grassmannians

Back in July, I mentioned some new highly intriguing results by a group of physicists and mathematicians including Nima Arkani-Hamed and others:Permutations join twistor minirevolutionThat report echoed a talk at Strings 2012. Finally, the paper is out.One of the 263 figures in the paper.On the 154 pages of their new article, Scattering Amplitudes and the Positive Grassmannian (PDF),Nima Arkani-Hamed, Jacob L. Bourjaily, Freddy Cachazo, Alexander...

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Christmas rumor: \(105\GeV\) dimuon excess at 5 sigma

Update: The best physicist on the territory of Argentina right now, Paul Frampton, wrote me that the signal could perhaps be a sign of a dilepton from the 331 models which enhance the electroweak \(SU(2)_L\) to an \(SU(3)_L\). The lower limit on the mass of such states also seems to be \(1\TeV\) but weaker coupling constants could perhaps work. Check e.g. this 2000 paper for a quick review of the particle content of the 331 models or, even more relevantly,...

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Obama gives medal to Drell, Gates, Mazur

I hate honors but this list is kind of interesting. Barack Obama gave the National Medal of Science to 12 scientists and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to 11 technologists and innovators:Obama names 23 scientists and innovators as medal winners (Cosmic Log)The scientists include Sidney Drell, an accomplished violinist, hadron collisions specialist, and arms control expert at SLAC who is also the father of Persis Drell, the current SLAC director.The generation that is not quite the youngest one knows Sidney Drell's name from one...

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SciAm, firewalls, and deterioration of the physics community

Jennifer Ouellette wrote a nice piece on black hole firewalls for the Simons Foundation and for Scientific American:Black Hole Firewalls Confound Theoretical Physicists (via Synch).Well, more precisely, it's nice and informative if you assume that her task was to uncritically promote the views of Joe Polchinski, Leonard Susskind, Raphael Bousso, and a few others. From a more objective viewpoint, the article's main message is wrong and the text misinterprets the state of the research, too.Somewhat but not entirely typical Czech skeptical and blasphemous...

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Subir Sachdev on AdS/CMT

Yes, it's the date of another major failed end of the world ;-)My ex-colleague and fellow superhero, condensed matter physicist Subir Sachdev wrote a neat article for a mostly bad magazine called Scientific American,Strange and StringyIt does a good job in explaining one skill of string theory from a viewpoint of someone who was definitely not trained as a string theorist. In condensed matter physics, there are various phases of matter displaying numerous kinds of behavior (and critical behavior) and things can get very complicated. However, under...

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Czechia opposes harsh anti-smoking EU policies

European health commissioner Tonio Borg (Malta) – who has been in this job just for one month – is behind the latest insanely harsh EU proposals to fight against the smokers. See e.g. The Guardian.Horror-like pictures – such as the Australian graphics above – could become mandatory across the Old Continent. Flavored cigarettes – with menthol, vanilla, strawberries etc. – would also be banned, much like slim (and "natural" and "organic") cigarettes...

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Hawking, Nurse, Rees, lords demand Alan Turing's pardon

The Atlantic and others reveal that Stephen Hawking along with Paul Nurse, Martin Rees, and many lords I don't know wrote a petition to David Cameron in which they urge the leader to formally rehabilitate a British hero and top computer scientist, Alan Turing, who was born 100 years ago.Even though this man invented the concept of a Turing machine, a cornerstone of computer science, and led the team of Enigma codebreakers during the war, he wasn't...

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Energy from man-made tornadoes

Peter Thiel, a favorite venture capitalist of mine, just paid $300,000 to Louis Michaud, a Canadian inventor on the picture below who plans to build artificial tornadoes – the so-called [atmospheric] vortex engines: Wikipedia, Michaud's web – that may supply us with lots of energy.This idea surely sounds provoking at first – way too close to a description of a perpetual motion machine – but I am already in a different stage in which I tend to think...

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Anti-string delusions and political correctness

A science babe working for the Huffington Post left-wing website recorded a video interview with Mark Jackson who is now in Paris:The title matches the first sentence of the interview and it is annoying.Well, the title is:'Superstring Theory Is A Bit Controversial,' Theoretical Physicist Mark Jackson Explains (VIDEO)The interview has attracted over 500 comments.While most of the interview is an okay and highly conventional layperson's introduction to string theory and cosmology (CMB), I would love to know who had the idea that the interview could...

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Victor Hess, Joseph Henry: anniversaries

Victor Franz Hess (24 June 1883 – 17 December 1964) was born to a royal forester in Waldstein Castle, Styria (South Austria proper). He attended various local schools and was interested in radiation.His key work was done between 1911-1913. Hess wanted to show that, as expected, the radiation we detect decreases with the altitude – because it originates in the Earth and gets absorbed by the atmosphere. So he took risky balloon trips to 5 kilometers...

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Exorcising Maxwell's daemons

And the lowest allowed power consumption of PCsIn our discussions about information and heat, James Gallagher said some of the usual wrong things about irreversibility – for example, he believes that the proof of the H-theorem is invalid because of the molecular chaos assumption (this assumption is a pure technicality allowing explicit calculations but the overall conclusion, the increasing entropy, is independent of any such Ansatz!).However, he...

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