Salon: AGW cause confined to a left-wing ghetto

Salon has reprinted an interesting sociological essay on the climate debate originally written by Geoff Dembicki for Canada's The Tyee:

How to talk to a conservative about climate change

Dembicki, a left-wing alarmist, starts by admitting that during the recent two decades, the climate worries have become increasingly confined to an intellectually sterile environment of brainwashed and stubborn people whose ideology strongly influences their very perception, something that Dembicki calls the "left-wing ghetto".



People not heavily invested into the left-wing ideology tend to reject the climate propaganda in the U.S., the U.K., and even in Canada. We're told something that folks like the Czech ex-president Václav Klaus have been saying for many and many years, namely that the purpose of the climate alarm isn't to care about the environment but to rebuild the human society.




We're shown examples of the differing moral compasses that the left-wing and right-wing people are using in decisions about questions. For example:

People who identify as politically liberal tend to have strong emotional reactions to questions of “care/harm” (protecting vulnerable elements of society) and “fairness/cheating” (making sure that justice is upheld).

Environmental arguments often evoke both. For instance: “Alberta oil sands firms are not held accountable (fairness/cheating) for their contribution to a warming climate that will ultimately harm the planet’s poorest people (care/harm).”

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The logical left-wing reaction is to demand strict limits on oil sands emissions. But that climate change solution can provoke strong emotional reactions from people who identify as politically right-wing.

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That’s because conservative morality tends to emphasize questions of “loyalty/betrayal” (staying true to your cultural group), “authority/subversion” (upholding long-held institutions) and “sanctity/degradation” (fending off defilement).

So the right-wing response to oil sands limits might be: “Since all Canadians benefit from our oil and gas industry (loyalty/betrayal), we shouldn’t restrict free markets (authority/subversion) to limit a naturally-occurring, odorless gas (sanctity/degradation).”

These are interesting thoughts and they're undoubtedly valid for most of the contexts but I would say that in this form, they just don't apply to your humble correspondent. While many have a good reason to count me as a rightwinger, my morality is actually closer to what is represented by the left-wing morality by Dembicki: I do care about "fairness/cheating" as well as "care/harm" more than about "authority/subversion" and "sanctity/degradation" (while I would probably disagree with most leftists on the question who and what needs to be protected, taken care of, and even what and who is vulnerable; and what is fair and what is cheating).




So Dembicki's precise description of the political correlations may only be accurate for the Anglo-Saxon world, and perhaps not the whole Anglo-Saxon world. The high correlation between Christianity and conservative politics is typical over there but this correlation is mostly worthless in my homeland (and, to a lesser extent, in other countries) where atheism is dominant on both sides.

In fact, the inaccuracies aren't confined to religion. It just happens that the most powerful self-described left-wing politicians in our country – such as the current president Miloš Zeman – also think that the global warming panic is a fabrication created by 2nd league politicians and activists. Proposals to "fight the climate change" would cost – and, to a smaller extent, have already cost – enormous amounts of money. Just yesterday, the Zeman-appointed non-partisan Rusnok government proposed to end the support for all renewable energy since 2014 (thanks, Soylent!): the proposed policy is called "stop a strop" (stop and ceiling): it stops for all projects not ended before 2014 and any increases of the support for existing projects. In economies of the right-wing type, this project would be paid from individual and well-defined corporate pockets; in economies of the left-wing type, this project would be paid from the shared coffers because most of the money is supposed to be in shared coffins. But it's a waste of money in both cases!

That's why at the end, I don't think that your answer to the question "Is it a great idea to waste trillions of dollars for this non-existent problem?" depends on whether or not you believe that people, peoples, and nations should share their assets and work. Of course, what increases your inclination to waste the money is the situation in which the money will be spent mostly from someone else's pockets – especially if you will actually be one of the rare profiteers who benefit (e.g. the parasites who are paid for the "climate change research").

Dembicki argues that people are always a bit irrational; information is rarely neutral; too much fearmongering is actually likely to increase the opposition to the panic; the green color has its limits. And without explicitly mentioning Al Gore's or James Hansen's or Michael Mann's names or the method ;-), he recommends the environmental activists to assassinate these three people because the messengers are often more important than the message and some messengers simply do a counterproductive job.

Another philosophical difference between left-wingers and right-wingers is mentioned by Dembicki: right-wingers mostly believe in the stability of the world and the justice, especially in the long run, while left-wingers don't. Even when it comes to this point, I am not so sure whether I am such a right-winger. I don't believe in an afterlife and justice on this side of the world is a very subtle thing. It often or mostly doesn't work and in all environments where it works much more often than dysfunctions, subtle work had to be done to achieve this state.

However, I obviously agree that the planet has been around for more than 4 billion years and it's a very long time. This long-term stability of the planet – and even of life on Earth – is an important general argument against pretty much all kinds of catastrophic scenarios (but just to be sure, I wouldn't endorse the general thesis that the life in the next centuries is guaranteed to survive any test; it's just very unlikely that a random threat you invent could be existential and the specific ones that have been hyped can be shown in detail not to be existential). So people who are more familiar with geology etc. are more likely to figure out that the climate fearmongering is pseudoscientific in character.

But as soon as you start to think about Dembicki's correlation between the climate panic and this piece of knowledge, you should realize that something strange is going on. What do I mean? Well, it should be the left-wingers who appreciate the longevity of the world, cosmology, geology, Darwin's evolution, and all that, and who also look at the Earth through the "Copernican" or "cosmic" lenses – we're a genetically garden-variety species on a mediocre planet orbiting an average star in a rank-and-file galaxy. The right-wingers are those who routinely believe in a Young Earth, who often reduce the history of the world to the history of the civilization in recent six millennia (a history that is full of exceptions), and who imagine the scheme of the world to be focused on the humans and their interests. At least this is the caricature of the narrow-minded right-wingers that the left-wingers love to present – and just to be sure, they pretend that they aren't talking just about the most deeply believing Christians.

So how did it happen that it's the left-wingers who are suddenly ignorant (and expected to be ignorant) about the longevity of the Earth, the negligible magnitude of the recent changes of the temperature and other environmental parameters relatively to the geological record, and the tiny percentage of mass that the CO2 makes in the atmosphere, that the atmosphere makes in the Earth, that the Earth makes in the Solar System, that the Solar System occupies in the Milky Way, and that our galaxy represents in the Universe?

The people believing in the climate hysteria have become so irrational about so many things that they're ready to abandon certain beliefs even if they represent the foundations of what they have been previously saying about the essence of the world for many decades! When you think about it, what really matters isn't whether they are left-wing or right-wing. What matters is that they are obsessed by this particular incoherent network of implausible assertions about the man-made carbon dioxide, the climate, and the hypothetical consequences of tiny changes of the temperature that may occur. The alarmists' opinions don't really have to agree with their scientific knowledge; they don't have to agree with the most general philosophical framework that they used to hold dear. This harmony isn't necessary because they have switched to the climate hysteria as the new #1 foundation of their belief system. The climate orthodoxy has become as important for them as the Islamic terrorists' reading of the Quran is for these terrorists. Everything else is secondary.

Almost all the climate alarmists are left-wing simply because the major left-wing belief systems have been rebuilt into the climate alarmist belief system more thoroughly than any right-wing belief system. More or less everything that Marxists, Maoists, and similar groups used to care about has been superseded by a good enough (for them) "replacement component" in the ideology of climatism which is why they don't think they're losing anything by switching. On the other hand, no version of climate alarmism has been reorganized and presented as a v2 version of Christianity or Hayekism or any other right-wing ideology. Even if you managed to invent a climatism that is meant to resemble a right-wing ideology, it couldn't lead to results that would be satisfactory for the left-wing climate alarmists. Why? Because for the hypothetical right-wing climatism to be really acceptable to right-wingers, it would have to fundamentally differ in certain respects and these differences would make the left-wing alarmists hate the new "right-wing alarmists" at least as much as the left-wing alarmists hate the climate realists in the real world. The real problem is that Marxism may be smelled in pretty much every paragraph of the actual climate alarmism we know. The real-world climate alarmism as we know it is a mutation of socialism or Marxism. Climate alarmism is just an environmentally sounding name but the detailed content of the package you buy with it is a reorganized socialism or Marxism. And socialism or Marxism, however reorganized, can't ever be happy with people who realize that these ideologies are pernicious, whether or not these people use climatic labels for themselves. That's why the left-wingers have murdered tens of millions of decent people and they're always ready to do it again.

Dembicki is right that most people accept or reject various claims about the climate debate according to their political affiliation. But he heavily oversimplifies what these political pressures are; strongly underestimates the easy-to-understand egotist, economic, and societal interests that actually turn most of the slight majority of the left-wing Academia (and similar groups) to supporters of this pathological ideology; and he also completely overlooks the people who should matter most if the debate were sensible – those who actually study these questions as impartially and honestly as they can. By implicitly assuming that those de facto don't exist, he implicitly admits that he doesn't belong to this honest group himself.

But many skeptics – I am not ready to say most skeptics but I insist that it is many skeptics – surely do belong to this group. These people know how to separate the scientific questions from the political ones and so on and how to rationally answer most of the questions that are relevant. The conclusion that these people end up with is that it is insane to try to "fight the climate change" by regulating the carbon dioxide.

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Shmoits face a German competitor

Book market flooded with garden-variety cranks

In 2010, a German conspiracy theorist and high school teacher named Alexander Unzicker released his anti-physics tirade that was reformatted as a book. The title was "Vom Urknall zum Durchknall" which I would translate as "From the Big Bang to Their Big Butts' Being Banged" but that was translated as "Bankrupting Physics" by the unimaginative translator. The English translation will appear tomorrow. You may pre-order it.

Most of the 21 chapters have titles saying things like "something is rotten in the state of physics", "why cosmology is going the wrong way", "how physics became a junk drawer", "branes, multiverses, and other supersicknesses: physics goes nuts", "string theory: how the elite became a sect and mafia", "what's wrong with the physics business", "get ready for the crash". You get the point.

I haven't read and I won't read the book because I consider the table of contents to be fully sufficient to know what's inside the book. It's surely not the first time when most of the 20th century physics is being trashed by an aggressive stupid asshole who has no clue about science. But a review of the book written by a TRF reader may be published later.




Alexander Unzicker is undoubtedly the most accurate German counterpart of his U.S.-based "colleagues", especially Lee Smolin and Peter Woit. I am totally confident that well over 95% of the readers of these two hacks agree with this assessment. That's why the readers of the U.S. crackpot – the one who is the grandson of a top Nazi official in a European country – had to be stunned when they saw this review of Unzicker's book.




We learn that Unzicker is a garden-variety crank and his book is depressing, tedious, nonsense, worth ignoring, unpublishable, and (which is most damning) parroting Woit's crackpot blog and book. Well, yes, it is parroting it very well, indeed. The only problem with Woit's criticism is that he is attacking his intellectual twin brother. We learn that Woit is sometimes aware of this fact:

Well, maybe he does get something right… I have to admit that one of the things that every so often makes me wonder if I’m completely misguided, and maybe there is a lot more value to strings/SUSY/branes/extra dimensions etc. than I think, is reading rants like Unzicker’s.

However, Woit always forgets that he's the same dull pile of feces as his fellow garden-variety crank from Germany and continues to do what he is best at – polluting the intellectual landscape by hateful lies and demagogy.

A difference between Unzicker and Woit is that Unzicker rejects about 20-30 more years of modern theoretical physics than Woit does. However, if I compared Unzicker and Smolin, even this possible difference would largely disappear because Smolin hates much of the 1900-1950 physics as well while Unzicker has a positive attitude to some of it, too. They're more or less exact equivalents in this respect.

Concerning the Woit-Unzicker difference, I have mixed feelings about the question which of these two crackpots is worse. On one hand, Unzicker must be even more stupid than Woit because he misunderstands – and slings mud at – old and therefore more elementary physics insights than Woit. On the other hand, Unzicker is more internally consistent than Woit. He distributes the "initial moment" when physics allegedly began to move in a wrong direction over much of the 20th century. On the contrary, Woit loves to create the picture that theoretical physics took the wrong direction exactly at one moment in the early 1980s, just when the physics job market determined that Peter Woit, incapable of even learning string theory, is – diplomatically speaking – a worthless pile of stinky shit who hasn't contribute anything and who probably won't contribute anything (this prediction remains as rock-solid today as it was 30 years ago).

Such an abrupt change of the direction of physics research, moreover one that is so exactly correlated with the events in Woit's life, is a remarkable claim. Everyone who actually understands physics knows that there has been no "existential" discontinuity or conceptual change in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. Modern physics has been steadily marching and doing remarkable technical progress but it has continued to build on the spirit and philosophical foundations that have been around for a century or so. Moreover, the AdS/CFT and other developments have taught us that string theory as the only consistent theory of quantum gravity is really physically equivalent to gauge theories, the key addition to theoretical particle physics from the 1960s (at least when both sides of the equivalence are applied to some specific classes of problems), so it is utterly ludicrous to say that one of them is right and one of them is wrong.

It means that Peter Woit is displaying some shocking inconsistency when he tries to talk positively about the physics of the 1960s but negatively about physics of the following decades. The actual facts don't allow any such inconsistency.

Moreover, Woit hasn't sold a single copy of his own rant by his occasionally positive words about gauge theories etc. The hardcore crackpots who read his book and blog – and yes, all these people are just stupid scum – tolerated and suffered through the positive words about gauge theories. These positive words – something that could have been copied from every relevant undergraduate course or a popular presentation of the physics developed 50 years ago – were the "necessary evil" for them. What they bought the book for were the hostile dishonest rants against physics from the 1970s through the present. And when it comes to any of these topics that really matter for the ability of the books to be sold – and influence imbeciles, including those employed in the media – Woit and Smolin are exactly equivalent to Unzicker. That's also why Unzicker's book was praised by German counterparts of those who have praised the two American Shmoits' books, e.g. by the incompetent journalists in the German edition of Scientific Americans and maverick astronomers such as the Czech-German anti-dark-matter warrior Pavel Kroupa (Kroupa is surely in a much higher league than Unzicker but he just agreed to endorse the Unzicker jerk).



So I urge Mr Woit to stop his breathtaking hypocrisy. If he admits that Mr Unzicker and his "work" are dirty garbage, then it is completely obvious that the very same statement applies to Mr Woit, Mr Smolin, and their "work". All the readers of "Not Even Wrong" know this much as well as I do. Germany is able to compete in most industries and as we can see, the industry of hardcore anti-physics demagogues and populist crackpots addressing their "work" to the ultimate bottom of the human society is undoubtedly among those in which Germany is competitive.

And that's the memo.

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ER-EPR correspondence and bipartite closed strings

This text is just an experiment. I want to know the number of viewers of a blog entry on a related topic and the composition and character of comments if there are any. The insight below is not necessary correct; and it is not necessarily fundamental. ;-)

The Maldacena-Susskind ER-EPR correspondence invites one to think that (non-traversable) wormholes are natural, sort of inevitable – because spacetimes with this topology are physically equivalent to ordinary spacetimes with entangled degrees of freedom in two regions.

One of the things I was thinking about was whether there are other dual descriptions of such spacetimes. Consider, for example, two faraway Strominger-Vafa black holes in type IIB stringy vacua with 5 large dimensions and connect them with the ER bridge. Now, reduce the coupling \(g_s\) to a very low value. What will you get?




The single Strominger-Vafa black hole's microstates are mapped to particular excited states of D1-branes, D5-branes, and momenta. All these excitations of collections of D-branes may be expressed as degrees of freedom carried by open fundamental strings.




Open strings have Neumann boundary conditions for some spacetime coordinates, e.g.\[

\partial_\sigma(X^0)|_{\sigma=0,\pi} = 0

\] and, as Joe Polchinski in particular has taught us, Dirichlet boundary conditions for other coordinates, e.g.\[

X^1_{\sigma=0,\pi} = X^1_\text{D-brane location}.

\] It seems that if you want to entangle the two Strominger-Vafa D-brane stacks, you have to create the same open string to the vicinity of both stacks. You literally want to "tensor square" the information in the microstates, so the state should contain each open string in pairs of copies. Just to be sure, this is different from having a single open string in a permutation-symmetric state.

These open strings end on the two stacks of D-branes and they correspond to objects connected by a bridge. So it seems natural to imagine that there is another object, a closed string that is split to two open strings, that has\[

X^1_{\sigma=0^\pm} = (X^1)_{\pm,\text{D-brane location}}

\] This was an example of what happens with a Dirichlet boundary condition; the two branes were labeled by the symbols \(\pm\). So the closed strings are allowed to have a discontinuity \(\Delta X^1\) at \(\sigma=0\) and \(-\Delta X^1\) at \(\sigma=\pi\) but only if these points of the string are sitting at the right position in space (locations of the D-brane stacks etc.).

Assuming that the dynamics away from \(\sigma=0\) and \(\sigma=\pi\) is ordinary, the only way to guarantee that these points of the closed string remain at the right place is to make the function \(X^1(\sigma)\) odd. If we ask what it means for the excited strings, it means that we only allow the excitations by\[

\alpha^1_{-n}\tilde \alpha^1_{-n}

\] i.e. by products (not sums – that would be a way to produce unorientable closed string states whose Hilbert space is "less reduced") of left-moving and right-moving oscillators. Needless to say, such a Hilbert space of "very special" closed string states is isomorphic to the Hilbert space of open string states (but the basis vectors are squared). One may see that the \(L_0=\tilde L_0\) level-matching condition isn't challenged because the left-moving and right-moving excitations are paired.

This picture generalizes the old Susskind's idea of an open string as a closed string whose half was stuck beneath the event horizon. Now, "deeply" beneath the event horizon, there's the other black hole, so an open string should really be one-half of a closed string whose other half is an open string on the opposite side of the wormhole or ER bridge.

Note that the individual D-branes represent a "topological defect" which allows the existence of open strings with the corresponding boundary conditions. The pairs of perfectly entangled D-brane stacks also changes the state of the spacetime. This topological defect allows the existence of the closed strings with the discontinuity that may only exist at points where the closed string hits a throat of the wormhole.

The closed string states considered above – in which the excitations are only allowed in the \(\alpha^1_{-n}\tilde \alpha^1_{-n}\) pairs – create extremely special states of the closed string and it is not allowed to "permanently" impose non-local identifications on the paths taken by closed strings. At any rate, if you allow this closed string looking like a "doubled open string" to interact with other, more ordinary strings, those that ignore the bridge, you will generically create closed strings that don't respect the \(\ZZ_2\) symmetry and that consequently deviate from the right value of \(X^1(\sigma)\) for \(\sigma=0,\pi\) at a later time.

I am confused what it could mean. The discontinuity allowing the closed string to jump from one throat to another is only allowed at the right location of the D-brane (stack) but if the closed string gets kicked, it will deviate from the place where the discontinuity is allowed. Does it mean that the bipartite strings aren't allowed at all? Is the picture inconsistent?

Quite generally, the Hilbert space of the connected pair should have the form\[

\HH_\text{one BH}\otimes \HH_\text{one BH}

\] but the closed-string visualization of this Hilbert space could give us a new natural basis optimized for the bridge, i.e. for the heavily entangled states.

How many readers who aren't shy are there who can give sensible answers or observations about similar questions? String theorists who are in e-mail contact with me may send me an e-mail message, too, of course. ;-)

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New iPhone likely to have a fingerprint scanner

One year ago, Apple bought AuthenTec, a Prague-based security company (7 Husinecká Street), for $356 million. One may now check the Czech commercial register shows two key people from Cupertino, California, aside from a Czech male and Czech female name that started the company with the basic registered capital of $10,000 (too late for great investments). ;-)



Yesterday, the Czech technological media reported that the iOS7 beta4 code contains a BiometricKitUI.axbundle folder along with some sentences suggesting that the fingerprint scanner will read your thumb when it touches the home button.




The Apple Insider (plus others) quickly added some extra comments about the new technological approach to the fingerprint reading that this Apple/AuthenTec team chose. As you may imagine, the fingerprint must be sufficiently tolerant so that it doesn't reject the actual owner when his or her fingerprint changes a bit for whatever temporary or other reasons. On the other hand, it shouldn't be too tolerant which would make the security non-existent.

There's a special concern here as well – criminals may acquire a copy of your fingerprint. The authentication in general depends on what you have, not necessarily what you are. If they have the information about your skin (they don't even need to cut your thumb for that), they could fake you even though their fake thumb isn't live and connected to your body. ;-)




The Apple Insider suggest that while the usual approaches were building on simple optical or thermal quantities, the new approach uses a combination of capacitance- and radio-frequency-based data to read the fingerprints – not just what you see on the very surface which contains some dead cells but what is actually hiding in the layer of live skin underneath the surface.



Some sources argue that a problem of coating interfering with the sensor will inevitably cause delays. Incidentally, it is also expected – because of plastic "iPhone 5C" boxes spotted in China – that Apple is going to offer a cheaper/colorful version of the newest iPhone 5S, too.

Quite generally, I would guess that there's a huge potential for various security devices that may be produced cheaply and that may be rather effective these days. For example, I think that I could design a system for a few dozens of dollars that detects someone who breaks into your house or apartment or car and quickly notifies the most appropriate person or office. Similar for a stolen smartphone or stolen laptop and so on.

Some people are bound to earn many more billions while the not-so-illegal consumers are likely to benefit.

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Isidor Isaac Rabi: 115th birthday

Isidor Isaac Rabi was born on July 29th, 1898, to an orthodox Jewish family in Galicia, Northeastern Austria-Hungary. The town of Rymanów, sometimes shared with Ukraine, belongs to Poland these days (it's about 20 km from the Slovak borders). He died of cancer (after doctors would monitor him via magnetic resonance imaging) in New York about 25 years ago, in 1988.

Soon after he was born, his family moved to the New York City where his dad ran a grocery store in Brooklyn. Books about heliocentrism turned Izzy into an atheist. He asked: "Who ordered God?" if I improve his question a little bit. His compromise with the parents involved a lecture on the electric light he gave during a ceremony that turns 13-year-old Jewish boys into adults.




He would build his own radio as a kid; attended a manual training high school; entered Cornell to study engineering; quickly switched to chemistry (he would investigate oxidation states of manganese) and the Cornell's student army training corps. Jobs weren't quite ready for Jews at that time so he would briefly work in a lab and then as a bookkeeper.




In 1922, he would return to Cornell as a chemistry student and would gradually be converted to a topic that wasn't interesting for him, magnetism – he got a "magnetically susceptible" job at the City College of New York in 1924 (the research involved torsion balances and crystals, too). Needless to say, magnetism is also what earned him the 1944 Physics Nobel Prize for the magnetic nuclear resonance.

Since 1927, he would be spending years in Europe and got familiar with the big shots of the quantum revolutionary generation. He would later teach at Columbia (Norman Ramsey agreed with everyone else that Rabi was the worst teacher ever), work for the Manhattan Project, on radars and radiation during the war, for the Atomic Energy Commission, as a science adviser to Dwight Eisenhower, in Brookhaven labs, and for UNESCO where he participated in the conception of CERN. In the 1930s, he welcomed the discovery of the muon by the famous sentence "Who ordered that?"

Despite his bad teaching skills and his weak publication record, the early 1930s would already see Rabi as an important enough researcher in quantum mechanics, especially in topics related to resonances. He was intrigued by the Stern-Gerlach experiment and realized that the same mechanism probably affected the nuclear spins and not just the atomic ones. It still took him years to develop NMR – whose importance not only in medicine seems self-evident today. The Rabi problem and the Rabi cycle show his focus on the near-resonance evolution of two-level and several-level systems in quantum mechanics – analyses that are applicable not only to nuclear spins.



Incidentally, tomorrow, on July 30th, we will remember the 150th anniversary of the birth of Henry Ford, the greatest 20th century carmaker who was able to change a luxurious line of products to a part of everyday people's everyday lives. His total wealth is sometimes converted to $188 billion of present dollars – pi times Bill Gates. He would struggle to spread consumerism and therefore peace throughout the world – if you allow me to overlook his antisemitic ideas.

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Some amazing technological advances

I am getting lots of similar news and sometimes I collide with some of them in the media. Sometimes they sound amazing.

First, MIT has developed a perfect mirror – a material that reflects electromagnetic waves without any losses.



Now, Tesla Motors and Colorado's company SpaceX believe that they can build an amazingly fast superhighway of evacuated tubes where you can drive from California to NYC in an hour.



A combination of magnetic levitation, vacuum would allow minivan-sized capsules to travel up to 6,000 kph and the replacement for the EastCoast-WestCoast air ticket would cost just $100.




Slingatron is a mechanical hypervelocity launcher, a railroad to space, by HyperV Technologies Corp. You may contribute your dollars to that project but this particular project – endorsed by Freeman Dyson – seems a bit premature if not amateurish to me.

Tel Aviv is building SkyTran, a futuristic public transportation system where people are transferred much like the packets on the Internet (physical internet).



The military and navy aren't sleeping, either.




DARPA, the U.S. defense research unit, is planning to build Hydra, an undersea drone carrier.



If you want something that can be inserted into your pocket, what about a mobile smartphone DNA analysis?



Well, the Biomeme's device has a docking station performing a polymerase chain reaction. The results may be sent to the cloud in real time and it's not hard to imagine a speedy system that immediately informs one about diseases by seeing their DNA or RNA signatures.

Let's continue with the medical miracles. Many people have transparent brains – because nothing ever gets absorbed into them. But what about a transparent brain that does its job? Stanford folks developed Clarity, a hydrogel process that makes the mice's brain transparent.



Mice are very helpful collaborators the medical researchers. They implanted fake memories into mice.

Geeks may now use Nerdydata.com, a search engine the focuses on the source code. Habitable planets may be out there but they are very far. We can't get there anytime soon.

3D printing will explode next year as some key patents expire. Arcam AB will grow as well, a Swedish metal 3D printing company. 3D Systems buys a metal printer. Now, people will also be able to print in liquid metals. Boeing is switching to PrintRite3D. 3D printing may change supply chains.



Kawasaki's stainless steel robotic arm has seven degrees of freedom.

Some important paperwork was signed 3 days ago for the Hawaii thirty-meter telescope.

Chromecast, Google's little and cheap $35 cork that you USB-insert into your stupid HDMI TV to create a smart one has been sold out.

It will cost you nothing if you want to detonate a nuclear bomb in a city of your choice. Google Earth is everything you need. ;-)

Impressive technological revolutions are occurring around us. They're driven by a tiny portion of the human population – and those behind each of them are often very specialized, anyway. I am afraid that we're entering a world in which the bulk of the mankind doesn't know what's going on around them which is bad not only because knowledge is good but because the people may be cheated in many new ways. Maybe it's not such a bad thing, however.

Via Viktor Kožený, Czech media, U.S. media etc.

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Arctic methane bubbles will destroy 1/2 of your wealth

Tons of journalists have promoted a "Stern review on steroids", namely a commentary about the Arctic methane that Gail Whiteman, Chris Hope & Peter Wadhams have published in Nature:

Climate science: Vast costs of Arctic change.

For the sake of brevity and accuracy, I will refer to the authors as the three imbeciles. We're told that some frozen permafrost in the Arctic will melt within a decade and via the methane-induced global warming and sea level rise and other things, this will destroy $60 trillion of wealth in the next decade.



The figure is approximately equal to the global annual GDP – what the whole mankind produces in one year – or one-half of the total mankind's household assets ($125 trillion). A few bubbles of natural gas in an irrelevant faraway empire of ice will destroy 1/2 of the wealth of the average human. Holy cow.




Even if some damage were in the pipeline, and I don't think so, the estimate would be an overestimate at least by 4-5 orders of magnitude. The authors offer some amazing science-fiction mechanisms that are supposed to achieve this tour de force.




The Nature article was so implausible that even much of the hyperalarmed mainstream media started to write down stories that the paper is probably wrong. For example, the Washington Post climate blog titled its story

Methane mischief: misleading commentary published in Nature.

RealClimate's major fearmonger Gavin Schmidt – whom I praise at least for efforts to look like a hard scientist even though he is far from one – wrote his first tweet-based guest blog at Anthony Watts' famous skeptical blog,

Gavin on why the Arctic methane alarm is implausible.

It's very likely that I would subscribe to every single sentence in his list of 16 tweets. On the other hand, sadly, RealClimate only allowed Gavin to publish a relatively petty and off-topic attack against Christopher Booker – and nothing else about the Arctic methane issue. Similarly to Gavin at WUWT, however, Judith Curry describes the methane paper as depending on several implausible assumptions which makes its claims impossible.

Just to be sure, methane is a potent greenhouse gas but its concentration is only 1.8 ppm instead of 400 ppm as CO2; the human activities have more than doubled that concentration from 0.7 ppm. The dependence is mostly logarithmic so an exponential rise of methane (CH4) would only lead to an approximately linear rise of the temperature. When the coefficients are quantified, it turns out that the methane-induced warming has been about 1/10 of the observed warming in the 20th century. It's pretty much a practically negligible – although theoretically possibly detectable – player.

The methane can't be released too quickly – the required mechanisms would just contradict some laws of physics – but even if it could be released too quickly, it just couldn't have any of the proposed consequences. Bob Carter's and John Spooner's excellent new book, Taxing Air, also mentions the methane issue, e.g. around page 92 (paperback) of Chapter IV.

The facts seem clear: the three imbeciles' statement that the $60-trillion evolution is "likely" is indefensible. Some reports in the media are unusually sensible. For example, The Register wrote an article called

DON'T PANIC: '$60 Trillion' Arctic METHANE SCARE is already DISPROVEN

that summarizes some voices claiming that the observed methane release isn't caused by the warming oceans at all, thus invalidating a crucial assumption of the three imbeciles' thesis. The New American has a story called Arctic Ice Scare — Climate Price Tag Claim Melts Under Scrutiny. Also, James Taylor released a similar story about the warmists who debunk this story. Andrew Revkin talks about the Arctic methane credibility bomb. But I particularly liked a modestly titled story at LiveScience.COM,

Arctic Methane Claims Questioned.

Among the technical topics, they discuss whether 50 billion tons of CH4 could be farted off in the next few decades. Voices of experts including Gavin Schmidt are collected to argue that the answer is No. The main evidence comes from interglacials – 8,000 and 125,000 years ago, the Arctic was warmer than it will be in a few decades and there's no signal of a permafrost-related bump in the icecore data whatsoever.

Another alarmist, David Archer, agrees with Gavin's conclusion but focuses on the impossibility of the required fast release.

Peter Wadhams, one of the three imbeciles, tried to defend the indefensible, namely their paper, by the following claims:

The mechanism which is causing the observed mass of rising methane plumes in the East Siberian Sea is itself unprecedented, and the scientists who dismissed the idea of extensive methane release in earlier research were simply not aware of the new mechanism that is causing it.

I can't believe that someone who thinks in this way may be employed as a scientist. I wouldn't accept a kid that is this retarded to an elementary school for healthy children. Saying that a "mechanism [in Nature] is unprecedented" is tantamount to saying that the laws of Nature are changing in front of our eyes. He may very well shake his hand with Lee Smolin and similar psychopaths.

Carolyn Ruppel, a methane hydrate specialist, also says that the three imbeciles' proposed "new mechanisms" are nearly impossible.

The humans have changed many things in the centers of their civilization and some miles behind its borders but the bulk of Nature is living in one of the most average periods of the 4.7-billion-year-long history of our blue, not green planet. Even in recent millions of years (a very recent era relatively to the planet's long history), the Arctic Ocean was both much warmer and much cooler than it is today – and no other quantity than the local temperature over there (and a few others) can really matter. Nature has been obeying the same laws for 13.73 billion years, since the birth of the observable Universe. That's surely true for the fundamental laws but even the emergent, effective, approximate laws that may be used in geology or climatology have been pretty much identical for billions of years.

To say that a mechanism they propose may be "unprecedented" means that you either don't understand that the laws of physics are fixed or you don't understand that the life of the Earth is much longer than that of the humans' industrial civilization. Among imbeciles on steroids, e.g. the environmental activists, you may look cool if you say that mechanisms of the Arctic methane release are "unprecedented" and these environmentalist loons may emit lots of lies about your being a good scientist but you will be immediately identified as a science-ignorant imbecile by everyone who actually has a clue about natural sciences.

So I encourage the bosses and presidents of the universities that dared to employ these three imbeciles to fire them and do everything that is necessary for these individuals not to damage the good name of science and the good name of homo sapiens as a species. When I meet a dog on the street, I must often be ashamed to be a human – whenever I imagine that some of these dogs could have seen what the imbeciles have written in Nature. ;-) They're a disgrace. Also, the journalists who have parroted this breathtakingly stupid piece of climate alarm pornography – and be sure that their number is still much higher than the number of journalists who have been equipped with a brain – should be treated on par with those who sell child pornography because their behavior is actually more dangerous than child pornography.

And that's the memo.

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John Dalton: an anniversary

...and also Baron Loránd Eötvös...

This CV looks ordinary but it is an experiment. ;-)

John Dalton was born to a family of a weaver (and Quakers, independent Christians dissatisfied with the existing denominations) in Northwest England on September 6th, 1766.

He died on July 27th, 1844 i.e. 169 years ago.




He is known for insights on color blindness (Daltonism), atomic theory (that we will discuss in detail), chemistry, and meteorology (the Dalton minimum of solar activity is named after him, too). He also wrote a book on English grammar in 1801. ;-)

He died in 1844 after his third stroke.

As a kid, he was already helping his brother to run a Quaker school. Elihu Robinson, a competent Quaker experimental weather scientist, inspired John to study the weather. Dalton did quite a lot of original work in meteorology that was mostly ignored. Later, John Gough, a blind philosopher and polymath, also taught John Dalton a lot of other science and helped him to become a teacher of maths and natural sciences in Manchester.

Color blindness

He was actually the first man who scientifically talked about color blindness in 1794, in his paper for the Manchester "Lit & Phil" (not to be confused with Lit Crit!) society. It was a pioneering contribution but his theory was wrong, as he learned in his lifetime. He thought that the eyeball liquid was discolored in color-blind people.




His own eyeball was preserved and it turned out that he had a rare type of color blindness in which the "green" (medium wavelength) cones are completely missing. Imagine that you see #RR00BB instead of #RRGGBB in the red-green-blue notation. This disorder is called deuteroanopia: see his "rainbow". In most cases of color blindness, these "green" cones are not quite missing but they have a mutated pigment.



I won't talk about the Dalton minimum and sunspots here because the climate is not supposed to be the main focus of this text. Instead, let us look at:



Atomic theory

First, in 1800 when he became a secretary of the "Lit & Phil" society, he began to study pressure of liquids and gases. A few years before the official discoveries, he verbally (and vaguely) formulated Gay-Lussac's and/or Charles's law about the expansion of liquids.

In 1801, he stated his Dalton's law: partial pressures of individual gases should be added to get the total result. Note that this law, one that can be given experimental evidence, strongly suggests that the different gases may "overlap" i.e. they should occupy different parts of the volume. That is already a strong hint of the atomic theory.

More importantly, he formulated the law of multiple proportions: when chemical elements combine, the ratios of their "amounts" are given by rational numbers with small numerators and denominators. We have CO and CO₂ but not CO_1.8. The "amounts" must be measured in moles: however, the actual term "mole" was only introduced in 1893, almost a century later.

For each compound, one mole corresponds to a different mass so we must choose different units in which the "amounts" are integer-valued. (But if you evaporate them, one "mole" always corresponds to the same volume under the same pressure and temperature. I don't quite understand whether Dalton was aware of this correct normalization: probably not.)

At any rate, in some proper units, the mixing ratios are rational. This strongly suggests a discrete underlying structure: atoms. He was not the first one to talk about this concept: Democritus and Lucretius did it millenia ago. But Dalton's picture was somewhat more modern. He also introduced a terminology for molecules that wasn't quite modern: the compounds with 2,3,4 atoms were called binary, ternary, quaternary compounds: see his picture of a new system of chemical philosophy.

He understood the following points properly:

1. Elements are made out of atoms
2. All atoms in the same element are identical
3. For different elements, the atoms are different and have different atomic weights
4. Atoms can combine to create compounds which have fixed rational ratios of the number of atoms
5. Atoms can't be created or destroyed: chemical reactions only regroup them

There was also one point that wasn't so good:

• When atoms only combine in one ratio, it must be binary (1:1)

He clearly assumed that things had to be "simple" and he has cut his throat by Occam's razor in this case ;-) because he had to believe that water was HO (not H2O) and ammonia was NH (not NH3). Well, Nature is obviously not the "simplest one" in this particular sense even if your chemical "philosophy" would lead someone to believe such a principle. In fact, when he determines that the ratios should be given by integers, it would be extremely stupid if Nature didn't prefer other integers beyond the number 1, at least in some cases. :-) Nature would be wasting its possibilities: there are many good reasons why the number of legs is 2 or 4 and not 1 all the time.

Of course, Dalton neglected nuclear physics in his principles: atoms of the same element may differ by the number of neutrons (isotopes) and other reactions, nuclear reactions, can also change the identity of the atoms. But we shouldn't ask for too much from a thinker in 1800.

Testability

I want to add some comments about the testability of ideas and the time-dependence of the amount and character of evidence in favor of the atomic theory. In the ancient Greece, comments about atoms were pure philosophy that was scientifically as good (or bad) as other conceivable philosophies.

But during Dalton's life, things were already very different. The law of partial pressures and especially the rational mixing ratios were extremely powerful weapons that could falsify or at least strongly disfavor many specific enough models that contradicted the existence of atoms. These laws surely didn't tell us everything we wanted to know about the structure of matter: however, they certainly told us something - a lot, in fact - and only scientific dilletantes could think otherwise.

Once the moles were introduced, people could verify new consistency checks about the atoms. Finally, the scientific enemies of the atoms evaporated in 1905 when Einstein correctly explained the Brownian motion (in work also independently pursued by Marian Smoluchowski in 1906). The alternative theories that would explain the chaotic motion of particles in liquids had to be extremely contrived, especially if they wanted to achieve the "distance goes like square root of time" power law for the random walk.

It had to be a random walk and its typical constants were pretty much universal so they had to prove some discrete collisions of basic and rather universal building blocks of all materials: the atoms and molecules. The coefficients told us something about the size of the atoms, too. All these things occurred long before we could actually "see" atoms just a few decades ago. The people who say that they must first see quarks or strings before they take the theory seriously don't tell us anything valuable about science: the only thing these people reveal is that they're narrow-minded, uncreative, slow idiots.

Baron Loránd Eötvös de Vásárosnamény: 165th birthday

Baron Loránd von Eötvös was born in Buda into an aristocratic family connected with Vásárosnamény, Hungary - a town near Ukraine - 165 years ago, on July 27th, 1848.

Fortunately, Lóránd wrote both in Hungarian and German which is why most of the world can learn about his results (and forget about his full Hungarian name, Vásárosnaményi Báro Eötvös Lóránd). He focused on surface tension of liquids and gravity.

His father József was a statesman, educator, and novelist who was also a friend with Franz Liszt, the composer. When Lóránd was born, his father was a minister in the 1848 revolutionary government for a while. Gusztáv Keleti, a painter, was chosen as Lóránd's tutor, and the young future physicist turned out to be real good in drawing (especially on his trips) and poetry. Later, he became one of Europe's best mountaineers (and took a lot of photographs on his trips). He has also climbed a few peaks in the Dolomites so that one of them (in the middle of the picture below) is even named after him!



He wasn't bad. But let's return to his youth.

He studied many subjects at school. His interest in maths and physics clashed with the family tradition. So he entered the University of Pest in 1865 to study the law and become a politician. (The city was merged with Buda into Budapest in 1872.) Lóránd was taking private math lessons from Otto Petzval. His father accepted that it was science, not the law, that his son should pursue.

Lóránd worked in a chemistry lab before he moved to Heidelberg in 1867 (under Kirchhoff who taught him to make accurate measurements and Helmholtz who showed him the power of personal discussions - and others) where police cautioned him just because he was loudly singing on the street with his friends! :-)

Incidentally, the current students of the Eötvös Loránd University clearly follow his example.

After some time in Königsberg (where Franz Neumann taught him a lot about potentials and theoretical physics in general), he received a PhD in Heidelberg in 1870 (the thesis was about Fizeau's problems, one of the early steps that helped special relativity).

Once his dad died in 1871, he returned to Hungary and inherited the dad's title and a chair in the upper house of the Hungarian Parliament in 1872. In politics, he would later do some things related to education and research - for example, he founded the Mathematical and Physical Society, later named after him. But let's return to 1871. Lóránd instantly became a privatdozent of theoretical physics and added experimental physics a few years later. He married Gizella Horváth, a politician's daughter and a skillful pianist with a cool handwriting who spoke French well. Their daughters - see/click the picture on the left - became celebrities as athletes.

He returned to the problem of surface tension (from his student years in Königsberg) in 1876 and spent a decade with it. He measured it accurately and showed that its temperature dependence is universal for all liquids (Eötvös rule):\[

{\rm SurfaceTension} \times {\rm MolarVolume}^{2/3} =\\
= {\rm EötvösConst} \times ({\rm TemperatureCritical} - {\rm Temperature})

\] In 1886, he fully focused on gravity which was his big scientific topic until the end of his life in 1919. And of course, he is most famous for his experiments that I will discuss in the rest of this text:

Torsion balance experiments

How did he begin to study this problem? Well, the University of Göttingen offered a prize for someone who would improve the experiments initiated by Galileo that show that the acceleration in the gravitational field is universal for all materials. And Lóránd was the right one to recycle and update the design of Henry Cavendish's experiment from the late 18th century and to improve the accuracy behind the weak equivalence principle to 5 parts per billion, much better than what Newton and Bessel have achieved previously.

In the Eötvös experiment, two different masses are attached to the ends of a horizontal rod, hung from a thin string. The rotation of the rod is monitored by looking at a mirror attached to the rod (or string) through a telescope.



If the inertial and gravitational masses were different, the Earth's gravitational acceleration (proportional to the gravitational masses) would act on the masses differently than the centrifugal "radius times omega squared" force from the Earth's spin (proportional to the inertial masses). I assume that I can afford a simple jargon because you know how to calculate these things and I don't have to introduce more accurate concepts such as the "centripetal force". This mismatch would make the rod rotate which could be seen pretty well through the telescope.

Of course no mismatch of this sort has ever been measured - even though the experimenters in the 21st century such as those in the Eot-Wash group in the Washington state are almost 1 million times more accurate than their old Hungarian colleagues.

Consequences

The weak equivalence principle demonstrated by this experiment is, of course, one of the key principles behind the general theory of relativity. General relativity satisfies this principle: it was, in fact, historically constructed by Einstein who assumed this principle once he appreciated its strength. Newton's theory agreed with this principle by choice. However, unlike general relativity, it didn't explain the principle because one could have written down a similar theory where the masses are different.

This old-fashioned, classical principle is a huge problem for all speculative physicists who try to invent a theory of "emergent" gravity where the gravitational force results from something else than the curvature of space and time - such as new kinds of superconductivity. If you can't find a reason why the description of gravity at long distances in your theory is going to be exactly equivalent to the curved spacetime as envisioned by general relativity, it is pretty much guaranteed that your theory doesn't satisfy the principle exactly.

The probability that your theory satisfies the principle approximately and it is compatible with the experimental bounds on the violation of the principle is equal to \(10^{-16}\) or less, a number related to the accuracy of the experimental tests of the equivalence principle. If there's no good reason for the double ratio of inertial and gravitational masses of protons and neutrons to be equal to one, a generic theory is going to predict this double ratio to be a "random number different from one". And the probability that such a random number differs from one by less than \(10^{-16}\) is comparable to \(10^{-16}\). Different materials, with different proportions of protons and neutrons, will respond differently and twist the torsion gadget.

In other words, people like Robert Laughlin are pretty much screwed.

How does it work in string theory? In perturbative string theory, you may derive gravity through the interactions caused by the exchange of gravitons which are closed strings in a particular vibrational state. At the beginning, you don't see any equivalence principle over here and you might be afraid that string theory is going to follow the fate of Laughlin's or Smolin's theories of gravity and go glub, glub, glub to the bottom of the sea before they even get a chance to put them out there. ;-)

However, when you study the theory more carefully, you will be able to prove that the presence of an additional graviton - a particular closed string - in any particular scattering process has an indistinguishable physical impact from a modification of the background geometry where all the strings propagate: see

Why string theory includes gravity

More precisely, the amplitudes in the original - e.g. flat - space including additional gravitons are equal to the derivatives of the amplitudes without the graviton in a general curved space, differentiated with respect to the curvature and evaluated at the original geometry. The amplitudes of particles not including gravitons at arbitrary curved backgrounds are the generating functionals for all amplitudes at a chosen background with an arbitrary number of gravitons. These words are probably useless if you don't know the formulae, anyway.

At any rate, the equivalence principle is exactly satisfied by string theory even though some descriptions of string theory are able to obscure the reasons and make the principle look like a miracle to a physicist who hasn't studied physics of the theory intensely enough. But if the reasons behind a feature of a theory are obscured, it is just the theorist's potential problem or a complication: it is not a problem of the theory itself. What matters for the fate of a theory is whether its propositions are true, as checked by observations, not whether they are easy to see. And for string theory, it is the case: its predictions related to the equivalence principle are right.

Matrix theory and AdS/CFT obscure the reasons, too. These two approaches don't even allow you to start with a general curved background, at least not in a simple way. Also, you can see the physical polarizations of the gravitons only: the pure gauge polarizations are absent from scratch. However, one can still prove that all the general facts about gravity that normally follow from general relativity are exactly satisfied because these theories - e.g. Matrix theory and AdS/CFT - can be shown to be exactly equivalent to other descriptions where the equivalence principle is manifest.

So if a theory has any chance to describe gravity as we know it today, the metric tensor must be demonstrably present in its low-energy limit and it must be possible to see that other kinds of matter depend on this metric tensor in the same way as they depend in general relativity. Because the metric tensor without anything else can't lead to finite amplitudes at higher energies, we also need some additional players in the story.

The physical phenomena and backgrounds connected in the rich network that we continue to call string theory are the only mathematically possible quantum solutions to the combined problem of finiteness and equivalence principle. It's the only framework where the curved geometry is sufficiently emergent to tame the infinities and to tell us about the inner nature of the force but also sufficiently manifest to agree with the equivalence principle as tested by the experiments initiated by this Hungarian nobleman.

And that's the memo.

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Reuters' climate alarmism down by 50% since 2012

Media Matters for America, a propaganda arm of the neo-Stalinist movement in the U.S., has complained that the number of articles published by Reuters that promote the unlimited climate hysteria has dropped by 48 percent in the recent 12 months.

They take the data and interpretations from David Fogarty, an indisputable hardcore climate activist, who would be employed until recently as the "climate change correspondent for Asia".

Just try to appreciate how crazy such an arrangement was. A biased activist who makes Lysenko fair and balanced in comparison was hired by an agency for which the truth and accuracy is the main asset.

And he wasn't employed for a proper job that should exist in peaceful times. He wasn't hired to cover all of physical sciences or the whole Wall Street or the culture. He was hired to cover just stories about a fabricated tiny appendix of one of the least significant, least hard, and least prestigious subdisciplines of physical sciences. And in fact, he wasn't supposed to follow the whole climatology because it would be still too hard for him; he would only cover the catastrophic climatology. And he wasn't even supposed to cover all of catastrophic climatology; he could make living out of climate change articles about Asia.

So he was inventing, cherry-picking, and spinning stories about the environment in Asia, its hypothetical dark future, and the mankind's hypothetical cause behind that dark future, especially the carbon dioxide. He was earning tens of thousands of dollars by writing the same junk you may still see on his Twitter account.




Fortunately, in 2012, Managing Editor Paul Ingrassia took over and came out of closet as a "climate skeptic". See YouTube videos featuring him.




Well, I wouldn't say that Ingrassia – who has previously worked for the Wall Street Journal in... Detroit – is a true climate sceptic. He just can't be counted as a full-fledged climate activist. And in fact, he didn't even pretend to be a clearcut skeptic. The most accurate wording we have is this one from Fogarty:

In April last year, Paul Ingrassia (then deputy editor-in-chief) and I met and had a chat at a company function. He told me he was a climate change sceptic. Not a rabid sceptic, just someone who wanted to see more evidence mankind was changing the global climate.

Incidentally, the full quote mentioned by Junk Science (and, consequently, Climate Depot) is completely omitted by Media Matters for America and other far left sources that just say that Ingrassia is a "skeptic". Clearly, they mean this label as an accusation of heresy and their goal is to activate the remaining cells of their movement and make them work to hurt Mr Ingrassia.

The quote itself and other signs make it rather clear that Ingrassia is a classic example of a "lukewarmer". Similar people react to the social environment that surrounds them. These opportunists' courage and their spine's rigidity is arguably bounded from above but they have some personal integrity and if the external pressures decrease beneath a certain threshold, they just start to behave honestly. It's encouraging to see that the atmosphere at Reuters has improved sufficiently so that lukewarmers such as Mr Ingrassia may have corrected their and their agency's behavior in this way. This particular manager could finally have done something that is expected from his job – to require impartiality as well as genuine news and information from the correspondents instead of propaganda that may be fabricated pretty much at any moment, regardless of the existence of any significant events that Reuters should impartially cover.

52% of the climate hysteria we had seen before April 2012 is still too much, however. Moreover, there are many other agencies and news outlets that haven't been dehysterized, not even to Reuters' modest extent. But Reuters is an important enough agency and this order-one correction is moderately good news, anyway.

Incidentally, Spain chose an amusing way to get out of the out-of-control photovoltaic fiscal black hole. By a new royal decree, they de facto nationalized the Sun by stating that whoever absorbs the sunlight without taxation may pay up to EUR 30 million in fines. So be careful not to get suntan while in Spain. When you analyze what this bizarre decree is supposed to achieve, you may see that it was written by the sensible people. Nevertheless, the detailed steps meant to undo some absurdities from the years when the climate hysteria peaked look comparably absurd. Via soylentrefuge.blogspot.com.

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Spanish train crash: quantifying the acceleration

A tragically motivated homework problem in mechanics

Chances are that you have already seen the dramatic video of the Wednesday Santiago de Compostela derailment. Warning: the following video is brutal.



78 people died and 145 extra ones were injured. In total, it's 223 people – more than the number of passengers, 218 (homework for you: why?). A map allows one to determine that the crash occurred at the top middle point of this Google map.

Using a piece of paper, I estimated the radius of this arc of circle to be \(R\sim 380\,{\rm m}\) or so.




Now, we will need the formula for the centrifugal acceleration\[

a = \frac{v^2}{R}.

\] We will calculate the acceleration for the official speed limit as well as the actual speed.




The official speed limit is \[

v_1=80\,{\rm km/h}\approx 22\,{\rm m/s}

\] while the actual estimated speed was\[

v_1=190\,{\rm km/h}\approx 53\,{\rm m/s}.

\] It's not hard to approximately extract this speed from the video at the top. Google Maps (see the link above) indicates that the distance between the two bridges above the tracks is 250-280 meters and the train made it in 5 seconds or so, between 0:02 and 0:07 of the video. Divide 265 meters by 5 seconds and you get 53 meters per second.

Recall that the speed gets squared when we compute the acceleration. Because the driver exceeded the maximum allowed speed \(2.375\) times, the maximum centrifugal acceleration was surpassed by the factor of \(5.64025\) (all this precision is bogus, of course: it's for you to accurately verify your calculations). That's quite a factor. At any rate, the two accelerations are – using the simple formula\[

a_1 \approx 1.3\,{\rm m/s}^2,\quad a_2 \approx 7.3\,{\rm m/s}^2.

\] While the first, allowed one is about \(1/7\) of \(g\), the second one is about \(3/4\) of the Earth's attractive gravitational acceleration. And that makes a difference.

The train is subject to \(9.8\,{\rm m/s}^2\) of the vertical acceleration and \(1.3\) or \(7.3\,{\rm m/s}^2\) of horizontal acceleration. The angles (away from the vertical axis) determining the direction of the total centrifugal-plus-gravitational acceleration (the "total gravity" from the passengers' viewpoint in the sense of general relativity) obey \[

\tan\alpha_{1,2} = \frac{a_{1,2}}{g}

\] and they are \[

\alpha_1\approx 0.13\,{\rm rad}\approx 7.5^\circ \text{ and }\alpha_2\approx 0.64\,{\rm rad}\approx 36.7^\circ

\] for the speed limit and the actual speed, respectively. The first angle is modest; the second, actual angle is stunning. Even if the tracks were optimized (non-horizontal) for the recommended speed limit, \(80\,{\rm km/h}\), the direction of the total acceleration during the actual ride of death would still be almost \(30^\circ\) away from the vertical direction.

Should it be enough for derailment? Well, experimentally speaking, it was enough.

Theoretically, it's useful to imagine that the direction of the total acceleration as the vertical one; the actual "down the train" direction deviates from it by those \(36.5^\circ\).

In the most naive model, if the cross section of the train were a square, the center-of-mass were in the middle of the square, and the wheels were at the extreme left-and-right endpoints of the square, then the critical angle would be \(45^\circ\). In reality, the train is a "slightly tall" rectangle and the wheels are "somewhat closer to each other". Both of these deviations from the simplest model make the overturning more likely i.e. they reduce the critical angle. The wheel flanges are pushing in the opposite direction and make the train somewhat more stable in similar situations but it wasn't enough. I don't know what was the height of the center of mass of the wagons. There are many subtler points in derailment that you may learn e.g. from Wikipedia.

At any rate, I wonder whether the driver was calculating the angle of the total acceleration before he or she tried whether \(190\,{\rm km/h}\) is an OK speed for that curve. He or she should have. I am saying "he or she" to fight against the stereotype that killers are male, and to fight against the underrepresentation of women among killers. I hope that the Feminazis will praise me for that. It seems to me that the Spanish bureaucrats spend much more time by overwhelming self-employed babes with impenetrable paperwork than by verifying a remotely acceptable speed of the trains. ;-)



Don't forget about the "conical wheels" explanation by Feynman why trains don't need a differential, why they don't get derailed in curves under normal circumstances (low enough speeds), and why the flanges aren't the heart of the right answer.

BTW if you want to see that Czech kids are better engine drivers than Spanish adults, see this 2-minute 1960 video on the Pioneer Railway in front of the Pilsner zoo that was fully operated by kids between 1959 and 1976. The adults only donated the trains to the kids and they decorated the kids by the communist symbols. My father (who was living just 200 meters away from the tracks) was already building capitalism as a kid – during the very construction, he was taking some iron/tracks from the Pioneer Railway and selling it as a raw material. ;-)

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Fermion masses from the Δ(27) group

Ivo de Medeiros Varzielas of Basel, Switzerland and Daniel Pidt of Dortmund, Germany released an interesting paper about the family symmetries

Geometrical CP violation with a complete fermion sector

They continue in the authors' three-weeks-old research of quark masses and Varzielas' 2012 research and other developments and argue that the \(\Delta(27)\) family symmetry seems fully appropriate to obtain not only quark masses but also lepton masses and the CP violation.




These models have (not just one but) several Higgs doublets – e.g. three Higgs doublets or a multiple of three – and a discrete symmetry is required to be respected by the scalar potential. This condition implies a relationship between the vacuum expectation values and leads to realistic patterns for quark and lepton masses. In some cases with three or more generations, the CP violation is made inevitable, too.




It's interesting because the same multi-Higgs paradigm using the \(\Delta(27)\) symmetry was exploited in Standard-Model-like braneworld models in type IIB string theory written down by Berenstein, Jejjala, and Leigh in their 2000 and 2001 papers. They had considered type IIB string theory on the \(\RR^4\times \CC^3/\Delta(27)\) orbifold.

At that time, their braneworlds looked particularly intriguing because they reduced to the almost pure supersymmetric Standard Model and inevitably predicted SUSY breaking approximately at the \(3\TeV\) scale and the stringy spectrum (!!!) at the \(10\TeV\) scale. David Berenstein believes that the model has been ruled out years ago but I forgot the exact reasons.

Nevertheless, the maths of such models seems irresistibly attractive. For decades, I tended to think that it's no coincidence that the number of extra dimensions in string theory compactifications is six, a multiple of the number of generations of fermions (three). There seem to be various constructions that promote this observation to much more than just numerology.



Symmetries are important in physics. Steven Weinberg just recorded a monologue on that very theme yesterday. Well, I have seen this "dancing Weinberg" video some time ago ;-) but if it were new, it would be a funnier coincidence. Hat tip: Phil Gibbs

Moreover, the \(\Delta(27)\) group is extremely simple and natural for the \(T^6\) compactifications: yes, it may act not just on \(\CC^3\) but also on the simply compactified sibling of it, the six-torus. How does it act? It's simple. Consider the group \(\Delta(3n^2)\) – where \(3n^2\) is the number of elements – generated by the following three transformations of three complex variables \(z_1,z_2,z_3\):\[

\eq{
e_1:\quad & (z_1,z_2,z_3)\to (\omega_n z_1,\omega_n^{-1} z_2,z_3),\\
e_2:\quad & (z_1,z_2,z_3)\to (z_1,\omega_n z_2,\omega_n^{-1} z_3),\\
e_3:\quad & (z_1,z_2,z_3)\to (z_3,z_1,z_2).
}

\] Here, \(\omega_n\) is an/the \(n\)-th root of unity. The first two generators only change the phases of the three complex variables while the third generator cyclically permutes them. Note that for \(n=3\), the group has \(27\) elements and preserves a honeycomb-cubed-like hexagonal lattice that makes it compatible with a toroidal compactification. (I can't resist thinking that there are other copies of the fixed points in the six-torus and the matter living there may look like dark matter to us although it may follow the same laws of particle physics as the matter we know. This possibility could even imply that the ratio of the dark and visible matter density in the Universe is a simple integer such as five.)



These finite groups may be easily seen to be subgroups of \(SU(3)\); see e.g. this paper on discrete subgroups of \(SU(3)\). Recall that the finite subgroups of \(SU(2)\) are classified by the ADE classification.

These groups \(\Delta(3n^2)\) may also be fully specified by the following short exact sequence:\[

0\to \ZZ_n\times \ZZ_n \to \Delta(3n^2)\to \ZZ_3\to 0.

\] The adjective "short" means that the sequence only has five elements if we also count the trivial one-element groups \(0\) at both sides. The term "exact sequence" means that in the sequence, each arrow describes a homomorphism of groups and the image (the set of possible results) of one homomorphism coincides with the kernel (the subset of the group that is mapped to the identity) of the following homomorphism.

This concept beloved by mathematicians may sound convoluted but they use it often and in this case, it's trivial to see how it works. The \(\ZZ_n\times \ZZ_n\) group is generated by the mutually commuting generators \(e_1,e_2\) above – but not \(e_3\). The first map starting in the trivial group \(0\) has image composed of the identity element of \(\ZZ_n\times\ZZ_n\) – because that's where the identity (i.e. only) element of the trivial group is mapped.

This image, the identity element of \(\ZZ_n\times\ZZ_n\), must coincide with the kernel of the following map. And indeed, the following map is simple because \(\ZZ_n\times \ZZ_n\) is mapped to a larger group by a (technically) "simple" map. The image of that map is composed of all the elements of \(\Delta(3n^2)\) that don't need the generator \(e_3\) to be written down. And indeed, this image coincides with the kernel of the following map that classifies the elements of \(\Delta(3n^2)\) by the exponent we need above \(e_3\) which is either \(0\) or \(1\) or \(2\), thus producing a \(\ZZ_3\) group. The image of that map in \(\ZZ_3\) is "everything" because the whole \(\ZZ_3\) may appear as a result and indeed, it's the kernel of the last map going to \(0\) because each element of \(\ZZ_3\) has to be mapped to the identity element of the trivial group (because this group has no other element).

There are many short exact sequences and if you just replace the 3 non-trivial groups above by something else, the story is pretty much "isomorphic" (in the colloquial sense) to the story above.

But that was just a segment of the text dedicated to some group theory. The dynamics of D-branes in the braneworlds on the orbifolds by the non-Abelian groups \(\Delta(3n^2)\) are described by the Douglas-Moore quiver theories – gauge theories with numerous simple factors (nodes in the quiver/moose diagram) and lots of added "bifundamental" matter (depicted as arrows in between those nodes). Berenstein et al. are among those who have played with this exciting technical tools in string theory for quite some time.

The anthropic fanatics may argue that there exists an overwhelming majority of \(10^{500}\) stringy compactifications that don't respect such a structure but I don't care about these majority arguments. The probability that the right compactification of string/M-theory uses the \(\Delta(27)\) group in a rather fundamental way and explains the three generations and the mass matrices of the leptons and quarks in these generations in this way seems very high to me – perhaps 10 percent if not higher – because this construction is mathematically natural and seems to explain certain things.

It can't be excluded that experimental hints of this scenario could arrive in a few years. A possible discovery of "several or many new Higgs bosons" could be a straightforward method for Nature to strengthen this sort of reasoning among the intelligent humans.

Stay tuned.

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