Gore's investment firm: no green investments

Al Gore has repeatedly said that he was putting his money where his mouth is. However, it was just revealed that in the real world, Al Gore is stealing the money where almost every green criminal steals them, and he is putting them where almost every rich person or investor puts them. Be sure that these two places are very different from one another.WND.com just published a very interesting text with the title:Al Gore bails from green energy investmentBill...

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Raphael Bousso is right about firewalls

Five days ago, I reviewed the discussions on black hole firewalls, started by AMPS in July 2012. Joe Polchinski wrote a guest blog for Cosmic Variance yesterday.During the days, I had enough time to sort all these issues and I am confident that Raphael Bousso is right and Polchinski and others are wrong.Here is Raphael's 33-minute talk from Strings 2012and here is his July 22nd paper:Observer Complementarity Upholds the Equivalence Principle(The...

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President Klaus survives "assassination attempt"

There's a national holiday in the Czech Republic today. We call it the Day of Czech Statehood. On September 28th, 935 – or perhaps 929 – Good King Wenceslaus (later St Wenceslas, the patron of the Czech nation) whom you know from a Christmas Carol was murdered by his brother Boleslav the Cruel. It's probably unusual to celebrate anniversaries of the assassination but that's how it works here. No one knows the exact birthday of the king in 907, anyway.Today...

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Exotic branes, U-branes, and U-folds

TBBT: All American readers should notice that the first episode of the 6th season of The Big Bang Theory was aired by CBS yesterday. Howard was in space.Holes: Joe Polchinski wrote a Cosmic Variance guest blog on black hole firewalls.SUSY: Dave Goldberg at IO9 asks what's so super about it.The first hep-th paper on the arXiv today is a wonderul 94-page-long articleExotic Branes in String Theoryby Jan de Boer and Masaki Shigemori of Amsterdam. It...

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Fifty years after Silent Spring

Conservationism or environmentalism as an ideology has its roots in Nazi Germany and one could probably go even further.But the Western environmentalism in the form we are familiar with today was born exactly 50 years when Rachel Carson began to release her book Silent Spring. It's such an inconvenient anniversary that most of the articles about the anniversary listed by Google News have been written by the critics of environmentalism.!-- google_ad_client...

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Experimenters, SUSY, frustrations, and anthropic ideas

High-energy phenomenologists and experimenters may be entering a psychological stage that was predictable – and that, in fact, many of us including your humble correspondent were predicting. The LHC is a great machine that works very well and pushes many frontiers but it's not a "miracle machine" that may answer all open questions about physics, at least not within two years.Fashion for naturalnessSo almost everyone who is building his or her interest...

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Albert Einstein 1911-12, 1922-23

Several events related to Albert Einstein's life occurred in recent days and months. If you consider yourself a sort of Einstein fan, you may let me mention some of them.First, you may finally buy Einstein's brain for $9.99 (or $13.99 now?), no strings or hair attached. See Google News or go to the iTunes AppStore.Second, Caltech and Princeton University Presses teamed up and released the 13th volume of Einstein papers. They cover January 1922-March...

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Street View: Antarctica, deep ocean, Alps, Mars, etc.

If you haven't played with Google Maps for some time, you may want to try some of the wonderful links below. Note that the Street View always allows you to "drag" and change your point of view – or press \(\langle\) and \(\rangle\) arrows on the photograph itself and walk a little bit further. You may think that Street View doesn't allow you to enter the living rooms but at least in some cases, this opinion is wrong.So try these links near the Antarctica:South Pole TelescopeShackleton's HutCeremonial South PoleScott's HutCape Royds Adélie Penguin...

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Witten's new trilogy on RNS diagrams

Witten is such a big guy in physics that I will probably not attempt to write a single article attempting to cover all his important contributions to physics, something I did and I plan with other inaugural Milner Prize winners. Instead, we may talk about specific new papers.I have already mentioned Edward Witten's work on technical issues of RNS Feynman diagrams but because the full trilogy is now out, it may be appropriate to summarize the links...

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BBC: Who's afraid of a big black hole?

Another episode about fundamental physics of the BBC 2 "Horizon" program, featuring people such as Andy Strominger (in a dark classroom of the Jefferson Lab and in his office), was aired in November 2009.Here's the 59-minute video:At the beginning, they edit a few interviews so that all the physicists say that no one understands black holes. A little bit over the edge but funny.After 5:00, they switch to an astronomer who explains what stars and black holes are. He believes that a bright star went supernova and then it became a black hole because...

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Did EPA test toxins on humans?

Steve Milloy of JunkScience.COM and pals have sued Lisa Jackson's EPA for having deliberately exposed unhealthy humans to harmful and lethal substances:EPA Human Testing.COM, a special website about the storyThe initial text over thereCanada Free Press, WUWT, PR Web, Tucson Citizen, NLPC story (Paul Chesser)Milloy et al. claim to have gone through hundreds of pages obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. The documents imply, he says, that at...

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Almost all particle physics papers will be free

Journals will sign a deal with librariesIn many other fields such as Earth sciences, people are dreaming about the free access for everyone. In high energy physics, this dream is becoming a reality. After all, most high energy physicists have relied on arXiv.org, a freely accessible preprint server (see a NYT story about it), as their main source of information for more than two decades.Nature tells us some details about the deal that will make the...

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