11-year-old quantum physicist enters a Texas college

Mr Carson Huey-You is a 11 years old boy who plays the piano and speaks Mandarin fluently. On 9/11/2001, the 75-pound, 4-foot-7 boy who finds calculus relaxing (basketball is OK, too) wasn't born yet but he wants to become a quantum physicist.



And as Fox News, TCU 360, Statesman, and others reveal, he just made a non-trivial step in order to become a quantum physicist.

He was just accepted to the Texas Christian University as a freshman physics major.




This surely sounds like a part of the CV of his fellow Texan Dr Sheldon Cooper, it's cool, so congratulations! ;-) My understanding is that his mother is black while his father is Chinese.

Of course, I don't know how hard the process of admission was and whether this story is more than just a media stunt by the university. But it surely does sound neat and convincing, especially because we're told that he got 1770 on his SAT which isn't bad. He's been reading approximately since his 2nd birthday. He knew the five basic mathematical operations – addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the Feynman path integral – a year later.




When I was 11, I was just barely starting to understand special relativity, having had almost no exposure to quantum physics or even the term "quantum physics".

At any rate, 11 years is a wonderful age to start with quantum physics. I would guess that it's low enough age so that if you start to learn related physics insights at this age, you are more likely to avoid Bohmian, Everettian, GRWian, material collapsian, and other delusions denying some fundamental and universal postulates of quantum mechanics.



At the age of 15-16, he wants to get a PhD and become a visiting professor. Because of this comment, I must remind the U.S. readers that the 7th season of The Big Bang Theory will begin next month, on 9/26.

Good luck!

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Encouraging high school students talented in physics

...and astronomy

In the afternoon, I spent about 5 hours in Techmania, our local science center/museum built in some no longer operational construction halls of Škoda Works, a major factory in our city.



Your humble correspondent was partly invited as a (now aged) kid who could have benefited from similar events and who could have an idea what kind of aid may be helpful to the kids. There were high school teachers, primarily from a gymnasium in Cheb (a town in the very Western corner of the Czech Republic) and a sport gymnasium in Pilsen (which has educated many excellent and famous Pilsner soccer, ice-hockey, tennis players, and more).




We were also shown a small model of the fulldome planetarium that will be opened in several months and that will probably be the most modern digital planetarium in Europe, or at least a part of Europe. (Some related YouTube videos.)

Everything is digital over there, one can project almost anything (not just the night sky), and visitors may also wear the 3D glasses. The facility will replace an old mechanical planetarium that old people like me knew at the "Hamburg" buildings – which nowadays host a court – when we were kids. Of course, nothing from the mechanical planetarium may be directly imported. Nevertheless, I guess that the new facility has a much greater potential because it can show everything. It's less obvious whether this potential will be correspondingly exploited. Less may sometimes be more. I am somewhat worried that the kids will be so overwhelmed by visually impressive animations that they won't learn much and they won't have enough time to focus on anything and/or fall in love with the subject.

I just sent a mass e-mail to some folks who have worked in the visualization of relativity with the proposal to update their videos for the high-resolution, 3D fulldomes like the Pilsner one – there may be just dozens of places in the world that use the same technology. It could be fun to see the relativistic rollercoaster or the infalling observer in the black hole from this totally realistic perspective.

(Andrew Hamilton of Colorado immediately replied that in 2006, NASA and NSF funded a fun dome show called Black Hole: the Other Side of Infinity.)




Concerning the discussion about the identification and support for the talented high school students, lots of ideas were presented, echoed, questioned, improved, abandoned.

I would spend hours if I were just enumerating all the aspects in this discussion and my opinions about them – lack of excitement, the role of applied vs theoretical training, agreement or disagreement between the school curriculum and the activities promoted by physics/math olympiads and science centers, experimental vs theoretical, inclusiveness of the search for the talented students, other nations' having more money, other nations' being more hard-working, how to motivate teachers to do something beyond their elementary duties, how to motivate and reward schools, whether physics olympiads and/or other contests are still "in" or obsolete, and so on, how to make sure that such debates will infuence more than about 5 high school teachers that happened to gather (together with a similar number of the Techmania employees) today ;-), and so on.

Please feel free to offer your ingenious opinions.

When I was returning home, I spent almost one hour with a de facto homeless guy, a construction worker from Carlsbad who is building our new theater (to be opened in 2015), if I believe him, who was left in Pilsen by his drunk colleagues today (or they were high, I forgot). I only gave him a dollar because paying him the full bus ticket to Carlsbad seemed too much for a person I didn't really know. He told me he was released during the 2013 Klaus amnesty. He had been arrested because he had attacked a cop who was spitting on the guy's friend. ;-) If that's true, it's another piece of anecdotal evidence that it's right to support an occasional amnesty. But yes, it's also a reason not to trust such people too much. I gave him a tour of Pilsen of a sort and dragged him through various places such as an information center at the city hall and some booths of charities. Of course, no one would help him, not even 10% of what I did for him, so I am not surprised that he identified me as a sort of the ultimate saint.

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President is right to veto Martin Putna's professorship

What is the most intensely discussed event in the Czech news these days?

Czech president Miloš Zeman decided to reject the recommendation of an academic council at the Charles University and not to name Dr Martin C. Putna as a full professor. The title "professor" is supposed to be somewhat more special in Czechia because the people with this proper title are named by the president of the country personally. In some sense, they're more analogous to the holders of the National Medal of Science. Like the amnesty, pardons, and members of the constitutional courts, the ability to influence the composition of the full professors is one of the traces of the power of the Czech president – a role that has become largely ceremonial over the decades.

Judging by the screaming in the media and comments and votes in various discussions, about 95% if not 99% of the people in the political parties, schools, and various intellectuals and pseudointellectuals criticize president Zeman for the decision. I can't even imagine how isolated I would feel if I belonged to that environment. In certain cases, one simply has to remain a dissident. When one dares to agree with such a decision by the president of the country, it's clearly one of these heresies.

It must be politically incorrect to point out that Mr Putna is a decadent moron and bigot who shouldn't be considered a good scholar – and who would clearly devaluate and humiliate the ring of the word "professor" if he were elected one. President Zeman must see it in a similar way and he wrote the justification of the refusal to the ministry of education. Many people are screaming that he must publish the justification except that 1) it's not the president's duty, 2) it would only lead to an escalation of the problems. How would it help if President Zeman pointed out that from a scholarly perspective, Mr Putna is just a pile of politically correct decadent crap? (Update, Sunday: Zeman suggested that the problem with Putna was his presence at Prague Pride, a gay parade.)




Let me begin in the early 1990s. I started to study at the Charles University (Faculty of Mathematics and Physics) and because I was always kind of interested in politics, I repeatedly ran in the elections to the student senate and was elected as one of the 8 rank-and-file members.




We would be solving lots of silly things – parties, management of noticeboards, our opinions about the projects to expand the faculty etc., and so on, and so on. One of the things I was proud about was that as a secretary of sports of a sort ;-), I made it possible for students to register for a "workout in the student hostels' gym" as a sport course that saved lots of people's time.

But I want to talk about a different vote that is relevant here. Someone proposed to create a new, 18th faculty of the Charles University. The original faculties would include the Faculty of Maths and Physics; Natural Sciences; Law; some medical and theological faculties, and so on, you get the point. But the proposal was to add a "faculty of humanities".

We were even honestly explained what sort of "researchers" would be there. Feminist studies, professional blacks, postmodern philosophers, homosexual actitivists, and other perverse "fields" that were destined to flourish in the coming decades. I think that Alan Sokal just managed to publish his hoax in the Social Text around the same time. Of course that the student senate (of our faculty of maths and physics) rejected the proposal to create a new faculty of the ultimate pseudointellectual trash that would pretend to be on par with maths and physics but these folks had had already so many supporters that the faculty was created, anyway. For a while, it was just the Institute of Liberal Education (since 1994) but became a full-fledged Faculty of Humanities in 2000.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Martin Cyril Putna is already a representative of this new "faculty" that shouldn't have existed in the first place and he symbolizes pretty much everything that is wrong with these "humanities". I view him as the Czech counterpart of the feminist studies and professional whining blacks in the U.S., among others.

He is officially a historian of literature or a "comparative literature" expert. If you search Google Scholar for his name, you will find one extensive (800-page) 1998 monography about the Czech Catholic literature between 1848 and 1918 in the European context.

Several articles have closely related topics. The number of citations is 31 for the book and 7;4;4;3... for the several articles you will find. With two or three Polish and Russian exceptions, none of the papers referring to Putna was written by non-Czech authors. His work is not internationally competitive.

I have almost nothing against the history of the Czech Catholic literature except that it looks like an immensely narrow field and one shouldn't become a full professor if he only knows (or only knows how to copy and rearrange texts about) this narrow field (also, I believe that many amateurs who love to read books have the same if not more extensive knowledge of these special subtopics of the history and they don't demand to be even postdocs, surely not full professors). But this is not what I consider essential in this controversy. The essential thing is that he was recommended to become a professor for completely different reasons than several inconsequential articles about a topic no one really cares about.

He represents the ultimate political correctness of the most degenerated type.



In this video, Mr Putna tells us that he's been voting for the Green Party for 10 years or so because he views the party as the most profoundly spiritual one. Imagine that: these lunatics who are eating roots and earthworms, sleeping in the tree tops or in front of the power plants are "spiritual" from the viewpoint of a man who is supposed to become a distinguished professor.

You could expect Mr Putna to sort of support the Catholic Church. But he only supports a Catholic Church that would be led by homosexuals and all these things (that's why Zeman's refusal to promote him was praised by a Catholic official – a rare exception). So in the video above, we learn that the Green Party is spiritual because it supports homosexuals and other things! Holy cow. What is so spiritual about it? On the other hand, the churches are in no way spiritual because they are only interested about the church's assets and homophobia, we learn. A truly deep analysis of the church from someone who is supposed to become a distinguished professor focusing on the Catholic Church!

But that's not the main thing here. Putna was among the most intense critics of Mr Zeman during the presidential campaign. Zeman claims that he only learned about the fact yesterday, a long time after he wrote the refusal letter to the ministry of education, and if he had known about the criticism earlier, it could have increased (and not decreased) Putna's chances to be appointed. The most characteristic anti-Zeman tirade by Mr Putna is this would-be entertaining January 2013 video:



In a language that is supposed to resemble Russian but it's really the Russian language spoken by Czechs who don't really know Russian and who want to make fun of Russian, he pretends to be Mr Putin (their names are very similar, after all) who loved Mr Klaus and who will love Zeman, partly because Zeman also likes to drink alcohol. No other "ideas" may be found in the video.

(Well, I am not sure whether the hysterical support for Putna is mostly because he's anti-Zeman and anti-Klaus or because he is a gay activist but I am pretty sure that one of these two reasons is the key one. Let me clearly point out that one can't become a full professor just because he or she is gay: there are 250,000 gays in the Czech Republic which is still a rather high number.)

I just can't help myself. People who are satisfied with these extraordinarily shallow, oversimplified caricatures – Klaus is pro-Russian; Zeman is pro-Russian; Russia is always bad; someone's drinking habits are what politics is all about – are just indisputable imbeciles. I see no way how I could overlook this self-evident fact. It seems crazy to consider this moron a scholar, especially if he's supposed to be a scholar in the humanities, and the existence of other "scholars" who are ready to recommend this idiot for the highest academic titles must be viewed as a serious problem, not an example of the "academic freedom" which is how the would-be right of similar idiots to call themselves professors has been framed by many people in the media.

One could say that the video above is just a fun video, like my interpretation of the Tom and Jerry theme song. However, there's a difference: Tom and Jerry has manifestly nothing to do with theoretical physics, the reason why I had worked in the scholarly environment. On the other hand, Putna is a social scientist and videos such as the video above do reflect his opinions about his own field or closely related fields. This is really what his professorship would symbolize. (Also, the Russian in my YouTube videos e.g. in Jožin z Bažin in Russian is almost completely correct and the Russian viewers appreciate it for that reason, too. Putna is satisfied with the cheapest conceivable anti-Russian hatred and stereotypes.)

Let me avoid repetitiveness in the expression of my feelings and summarize. Most of the Czech nation – and not only Czech nation – is composed of gullible manipulated stupid sheep who have no idea about this would-be professor, his work, the functioning of the university system, and other things but they don't hesitate for a second if they can support a pseudointellectual wee-wee in his disagreement with the president of the Czech Republic who is actually a much more genuine scholar and intellectual than Mr Putna or anyone at the Faculty of Humanities, for that matter.

Ex-president Klaus hasn't used the right to veto the professors (he just said that in Putna's case, he would sigh but he has always approved the proposals) but I think that the president has always had this right. For Zeman, this part of the presidential rights seems more important than e.g. the amnesties and pardons. This is what the law says. So if people disagree about something, there is still something we should respect: the law. The situation seems completely clear to me. The president's right to veto such proposals isn't just legally sound: It's very healthy that an external authority that stands "above all the fields" is allowed to intervene into the decisions that would otherwise be made purely by cliques of friends who are often as intellectually inferior as the people at the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University. I think that Larry Summers had played an analogous role at Harvard and everyone should have been grateful to him for that work.



A Prague Pride scene that, according to Zeman's weekend hints, may have decided about the veto of the professorship. The banner held by Mr Putna says "Catholic fagg*ts [uncensored on the picture] are greeting Mr Bátora [a conservative]". Putna's participation at this event wouldn't be my primary reason to reject his professorship but it's a negative issue, anyway, especially because these opinions about homosexuality aren't just his work-unrelated hobby. The promotion of the Catholic Church is a gay-promoting organization is what much of his work – or what they consider his present work – is all about. And sorry, this activism just isn't scholarly work compatible with the title of a distinguished professor.

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Learning physics is futile without practicing

LHC news: CMS released two papers with 20/fb of the 8 TeV 2012 data. Remarkably enough, both the dijet paper (Figure 5) and the dilepton paper (Figure 5) show 2-sigma excesses for a possible new object of mass 1,750 GeV or so. They're much weaker signals than what is expected from the typical theories for the objects searched in these papers but the overlap of these excesses is still a bit interesting.

After a break, I answered a package of questions at the Physics Stack Exchange. It's sometimes fun and some of the questions are even interesting but there are also some omnipresent sources of frustration.

Let me mention some of them.

Pretty much every day, there is a question or two that tries to announce the discovery that quantum mechanics has been overthrown and/or may be employed to send faster-than-light signals, and so on. See e.g. user1247 yesterday. Or another question by the same user that tries to overthrow the postulates of quantum mechanics within quantum field theory "only". Or joshphysics who is convinced that observables can't be observable. And so on.




This is a topic that will probably never go away. A physics discussion forum that is open to the laymen must probably inevitably become a place for street rallies where protesters protest against what they hate about modern physics – and its very foundations, principles of quantum mechanics, are of course among the most hated aspects of modern physics.

Very rarely, one feels that they're starting to get the basic points which are really simple if you're impartial. All physically meaningful questions are questions about observables. All observables are represented by linear operators on the Hilbert space. The a priori allowed values of their measurements are given by the eigenvalues. Only the probabilities of each possible outcome may be predicted through a simple and universal formula, the Born rule – in one form or another. This is the framework for modern physics.

If a question can't be formulated in this way, as a question about probabilities of observables (linear operators), it doesn't belong to science. If an answer to a question uses different rules than the quantum-evolution-based and Born-rule-backed calculations of probabilities of propositions about observables (or some legitimately derived approximate theories that ultimately boil down to quantum mechanics), it's wrong. These claims have no exceptions, loopholes, and they don't allow any excuses. Everything else are "technical details" – what the observables are, how they commute or not commute with each other, how they act on various states and how they evolve – and one needs lots of experience. But the conceptual foundations may be summarized in the few principles fully captured by the few sentences above.




The foundations of quantum mechanics are almost never taught correctly, especially outside top universities. The teacher usually never understands modern physics himself or herself so even if the material is presented in some way, it's sold along with a completely wrong focus and "comments surrounding the material". It leads the students to reinforce their misconceptions. It leads them to believe that the foundations of quantum mechanics are a controversial optional luxury that may be replaced by something else at any point. It leads them to believe that \(|\psi(x)|^2\) doesn't have to be interpreted as the probability density.

Perhaps it's "ugly" and it may also be the number of sex partners that a woman has had, a voltage in a vibrator, or anything else. They think that everything goes and anything goes. They don't care that the probabilistic interpretation of the objects is a directly observable experimental fact and any modification of it would instantly invalidate the whole theory. Virtually every question about quantum mechanics starts with some deeply emotional words proving the writer's discomfort with some very basic principles of quantum mechanics.

Sometimes I tell myself not to answer because it's completely unproductive – it's just beyond the people's abilities; the emotions sometimes look so deep that I decide that the question was asked by a psychiatrically ill person who should better not be told the truth because it may lead to dangerous situations. Sometimes I react differently when I tell myself: It's just not possible that the folks are this breathtakingly stupid and can't understand these simple points. In the latter case, I am usually destined to a journey towards a pedagogical failure. The people simply are breathtakingly stupid, prejudiced without any limitations, closed-minded, thoroughly incompatible with modern physics.

But that doesn't mean that everything is pleasing about the questions by those who shut up, who kind of correctly use the formalism of quantum mechanics, and who ask different questions. As the title of this blog entry indicates, this blog entry is about the practicing, exercises, particular examples, applications of abstract physical knowledge. Needless to say, this is ultimately what physics and science is good for. It's the bulk through which physics manifests itself in the human society.

Physicists have the working knowledge of all the things in the Universe – OK, I mean all the important things in the Universe – but they only have it if they can actually think. If they know not only the laws and principles of physics but if they also operationally mean what the laws and principles mean and if they have mastered a sufficient chunk of maths that is needed to connect the statements about physical phenomena with each other and with the mathematical expressions, structures, and propositions.

At the same moment, I would agree that too much exercising becomes useless, too. Physics – and research-level maths – is ultimately not about following some procedures and protocols infinitely many times. We want to find new ones. When we have mastered some old classes of problems, we understandably lose our interest in them. This is how physics differs from chess or recreational mathematics. We just don't want to play chess millions of times because it's ultimately almost the same thing. We don't want to solve billions of Sudokus. A person who has the curiosity of a physicist simply wants to learn new things that are qualitatively different from the things he has already learned.

So I want to say that it is indeed natural if a physicist doesn't want to spend too much time with practicing the same thing. Engineers or athletes spend much more time by doing the same things all the time – which may ultimately be a good idea for practical or financial reasons. A physicist wants to get as far as he can in his mastery of the Universe or its chosen part. On the other hand, and this is what the title is about, a certain amount of practicing is simply necessary even for the most exercise-hating physicists because it's needed to guarantee that the knowledge is genuine and usable.

When we study a course or a book, it doesn't mean that we must understand every letter of it. An analogous claim holds for research, too. We shouldn't get completely stuck and terminate all learning or further thinking when we encounter first equation or question that seems confusing to us. After some attempts to lift the fog, we must live with it, remember that the confusion was there, and try to continue, probably using the assumption that the answer obtained differently (or the claim by the author of a textbook or the instructor in a course) is right.

There are also gaps that may seem technically demanding and we may sometimes uncritically accept claims by the instructor, textbook, or fellow researchers that "if you calculate this and that, you obtain this". Because of assorted sociological criteria, such a claim may look plausible and we sometimes need to save the time. I would say that a good scientist should ultimately rely on almost no examples of "blind faith" of this kind. He or she should verify and/or "rediscover" everything that he or she wants to use as a starting point for further research or calculations.

However, in some cases, e.g. when you're learning a body of knowledge someone has packaged for you and you were not necessarily interested in every product in the package, it's natural to skip certain aspects, especially if the other material doesn't seem to depend on them (much). But the gaps in our knowledge that is created in this way should stay "under control". You must "almost know" that if you will need to learn some method or verify the proof of a claim or something of the sort, you will return "here or there" and spend roughly XY hours of time and you will be done.



I would argue that these gaps must be "mostly exceptions", perhaps like the holes in a Swiss cheese that still holds together. I don't say that the critical percentage is 50% but there is some rough percentage and if the number of holes is just too large, the Swiss cheese of your knowledge decays into hundreds of Swiss cheese balls that don't hold together.

When the amount of ignorance and the number of holes grow too large, you not only fail to know many particular things but you also lose the idea about how many things you're actually ignorant about and how to ask questions that would give you a chance to fill the holes, and so on. Your physics knowledge becomes unusable.

I had this feeling when user6818 asked four questions about Polchinski's textbook on string theory. How to derive the Green's functions on a sphere, disk, projective sphere, why this is canceled, and so on? The questions are based on Chapter 6, Volume I.

Superficially, they're legitimate, even high-brow questions. What's problematic about them is that every person – even person who knows no physics, not to mention string theory – could ask such questions. You pick an equation in a book and ask "Why is it true?" But in physics, statements such as equations for Green's functions don't have simple, generally understandable (by everyone), and self-explanatory one-sentence answers. They're derivations that may be compressed or need to be inflated depending on one's knowledge or experience or the lack of it, derivations that always depend on lots of other background.

When one asks why is [relatively straightforward] eqn. (6.2.17) right – without specifying any details about his or her confusion etc. – it suggests that he or she has made no attempt to derive the equation. And it seems that he or she probably can't solve or prove even similar, simpler equations. And although I don't have any rigorous proof, I would bet that these worries are justified by the facts – in this case and many others.

To meaningfully answer such questions and to have an idea how many details the answer should discuss, one needs to know how much the person who asks something actually understands. Does he understand why the logarithm solves the Poisson equation in two dimensions? Can he use substitutions while solving differential equations similar to the known ones? Does he know how to calculate Gaussian integrals? Does he understand why the holomorphic functions have a vanishing Laplacian? Does he know that the sphere is conformally equivalent to the plane, that the disk is conformally equivalent to the half-plane, that the projective sphere may be obtained by identifying opposite points on the sphere as well? Does he know what the boundary conditions at infinity must be for the plane to conformally represent the sphere? Does he really want to explain the blind mechanical calculation proving some independence on the conformal factor or the conceptual reasons? Does he understand the general concept of "solving differential equations", especially the fact that there exists no mechanical procedure that would lead to the solution of any equation?

There are tons of questions – the list above isn't complete. If the answer to some of the question(s) above is "No", the thing may be given a meaningful answer. But if someone just asks why is (6.2.17) and three more formulae right, it looks like the answers to all the questions above are "No". What I mean is that the person must be taught complex numbers, calculus, integrals, conformal transformations, symmetries in physics, two-dimensional Riemann manifolds and their relationships, and many other things pretty much from scratch, and in a more detailed way than Polchinski's book. (Of course, the equation (6.2.17) isn't the first equation where the ignorance about any of these topics should show up – but that is just another detail that makes the question about a seemingly random equation in the middle of the book slightly more surprising.) That's a big task, however, because Joe Polchinski spent a decade by writing his perfectionist textbook on string theory so you may need 50+ years to write the more detailed one.

But would it make sense? I don't think so. If someone really needed to explain all the things above – and I don't claim it's the case of user6818 – he or she simply shouldn't study Chapter 6 of Polchinski's book because he doesn't have the background for that. It's useless to learn some material if you can't use it. And if you can't understand how the material is derived – and the derivation is just an application of a "simpler" material you should have known before – then it shows that you probably can't apply this material (because you can't apply even simpler one) so it's useless to learn it.

The number of questions on Physics Stack Exchange where the answer could very well be 100 times longer than the question itself is significant. (A particular user named Anirbit has asked 60+ questions that mostly fall into this category: "Explain everything in a paper to me".) I am afraid that it is a waste of time to be answering these questions – questions of the type "explain every line of a paper or chapter to me" even though the paper or book have already been written with the assumption that they speak for themselves. A meaningful communication and explanation only occurs when the two sides are at least a little bit on the same frequency and/or if the "teacher" has some idea about the things that the "student" knows. Without such a context, it is impossible to teach physics. And if you teach physics to someone who will ask you "Why it is so?" almost after every claim he sees (and sometimes again – many times – after you already answer it), it's like training armless boys to become construction workers. A teacher may build a house out of bricks but it won't make any impact on the skills of the student simply because he can't do it. So if the "pedagogical house" is useless, you may better avoid this futile pedagogic exercise.

In this respect, physics differs from literature or many other subjects – that often include natural sciences – where the structure of the background isn't hierarchical or is much less hierarchical than in physics. In other words, you don't need much and you may immediately learn some isolated insight from advanced research. You may have never read a book but you may memorize two sentences from a play by Shakespeare and some naive people will instantly think that you're a cultural human being. And so on.

But in physics, this doesn't work. String theory is arguably the tip of a pyramid of knowledge that has almost as many floors as the Empire State Building, if I count if in a fine-grained way. Memorization of an isolated insight or rule is almost worthless in physics because the meaning and power only emerges when many prerequisites are understood.

Needless to say, this is why some people hate physics – and maths – at school. If I don't count gyms and similar things, almost all other subjects at school are about memorization, a universal method that requires lots of RAM (or hard disk space) and almost no CPU or GPU, if I compare the students to computers. At most, some subjects require that the students learn how to follow a relatively mechanical procedure or two to "derive something".

Paradoxically enough, it's the same people who don't like maths and physics for their "requirements of creativity and practicing" who most frequently complain that maths and physics are mechanical, dull, narrow-minded, isolated from practice, and that they reduce people to mindless mechanical machines. When you look rationally at the situation, you notice that the truth is exactly the opposite. These critics of maths and physics are the mindless unthinking machines that only do mechanical things and they hate maths and physics exactly because they can't be mastered in this way! ;-)

But I was thinking about folks who would never open Chapter 6 of Polchinski's textbook, of course. ;-)

Let me return back and say that to learn a subject such as quantum field theory or string theory, one needs to practice, rediscover, verify his own predictions (against well-known insights if not experiments), and think about the implications a lot. Ignorance about particular things is permissible if not inevitable in science. But even ignorance has to be tamed and brought "under some control". We must have an idea how many things we probably misunderstand, how many things about them may be known to other people, how or where to find the answers if necessary, how much time it may take to find the answers or verify some results, and – perhaps most importantly – we must roughly know to what extent the things we're ignorant about may affect the things we think we know (where are the boundaries of our ignorance).

The holes in the Swiss cheese should never break our knowledge into a large collection of disconnected marbles. If that happens, physics ceases to be physics. It ceases to be the lively mechanism to find and incorporate all important insights about everything in the Universe.

And that's the memo.

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Can physics blogs reach the general public?

The Higgs boson, apparently considered to be a musician or athlete of a sort, was nominated as the Time Magazine person of the year 2012, among 39 other candidates:

Who Should Be TIME's Person of the Year 2012? (Higgs boson)

It's fun that particle physics has some impact on the mass culture; everything else that will be said about the nomination is going to be mostly negative.



Jeffrey Kluger wrote five sentences. Amusingly enough, Matt Strassler wanted to correct all the flagrant mistakes in these five sentences so he wrote something like a book (a somewhat angry book):

TIME for a Little Soul-Searching

See also Particles Are People Too.

Of course, I agree with Matt Strassler, well, almost entirely, but this particular thing just doesn't drive me up the wall as intensely as it annoys himself because it's been many, many years when I abandoned the idea that ordinary people – and ordinary journalists who are really just average people – could understand the meaning of cutting-edge fundamental physics. Since that time, I have only been angry about the ignorance of people whom I still expected to know better – but of course, my expectations are gradually decreasing with the people's knowledge, too.




The inkspiller in the magazine was confused about various issues, for example:

1. whether the Higgs mechanism is performed by the particle or the field
2. whether you would still have "mass" without the Higgs mechanism
3. whether the mass of the Universe could abruptly shift if the Higgs vev were set to zero
4. whether Peter Higgs is an English physicist or a Scottish one
5. whether Peter Higgs was the only man who contributed to these insights
6. what is the difference between energy, mass, and matter
7. whether the LHC experiments are made just by 3 political puppets, the so-called spokespersons
8. whether the Higgs mechanism is the culmination of general relativity
9. whether all particles are unstable
10. whether the decay products are "more fundamental particles" than the initial ones
11. whether physicists dream about the boson's getting awards designed for the people

You may predict what the Time Magazine writer wrote about these eleven questions if you have a bit creativity and if I tell you that he is about as ignorant as a Joe Sixpack on the street. Well, I exaggerate: I do believe that Joe Sixpack knows even less about the Higgs issues than the writer.

Unrelated but interesting: The DNA of the European Gypsies, especially the male Y chromosome, was found to match the lowest "untouchable" (Dalit) caste in Northwestern India by an Estonian-UK_Cambridge-Stanford team.

In some cases, I would argue that the mistake wasn't "too bad". Let me offer you some apologies – while you should understand that I could offer you many additional critiques but Matt Strassler has done it pretty well.

So, whether the Higgs mechanism is realized by the field or the particle depends on the formalism a bit. Everything that may be described by fields may also be reformulated in terms of particles. The Higgs condensate may be viewed as a coherent state with many zero-momentum Higgs bosons – actual excitations of the Higgs field – and the extra mass terms may be viewed as vertices with external legs connected to the Higgs bosons in this condensate. So while it's unusual, it's plausible you could turn the statement "the Higgs mechanism is caused by the Higgs boson" to a mathematically convincing picture.

Also, I have some understanding for the layman's way to distinguish "mass" and "energy". They're the same thing due to \(E=mc^2\). However, it makes sense to emphasize the word "mass" when the mass/energy is stored in particles with a significant/corresponding rest mass which can't be reduced further; and the mass/energy carried by massless particles ("radiation" in the cosmological jargon) may be called "energy". Of course, I don't have any excuse for those who confuse mass (a quantity, with a number) and matter (an object) – perhaps except that "hmota" is used in the Czech language for both (although the right modern word for "mass" is "hmotnost" and "hmota" for the mass is archaic and obsolete).

The contribution that protons and neutrons get from QCD – and what would happen in various worlds in which the Higgs mechanism and/or QCD is turned off – is a rather advanced stuff. I know very well that non-physicists, including some non-physicists who have been trying to understand physics for many and many years, just aren't capable of "getting" these basic things. Their resolution ends with "one physics" or perhaps "one particle physics".

But to distinguish the four forces and what they're responsible for, it's already too much to ask for. Almost all laymen I know confuse gravity which makes the mass important by allowing it to curve the space with the Higgs mechanism where the rest mass is produced by interactions with the Higgs field. What they "know" about both of these things is that they're fundamental new insights about the "mass". At this resolution, what they know about both is the same thing so the two physics mechanisms must be the same, they (totally incorrectly) conclude, too. But the conclusion is almost unavoidable if you just don't know enough.

All the filmmakers and movie people behind the Impact TV miniseries, for example (which I watched again a week ago or so), are routinely confusing electromagnetism with gravity. Everything they say about each of these two most well-known long-range forces is a confusing statement about some non-existent hybrid of electromagnetism and gravity. This comment actually applies to almost all catastrophic movies of this type. Distinguishing the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force is pretty much impossible for a non-physicist. I have some doubts whether one may actively distinguish all these things without realizing the mathematical meaning of the underlying formulae – which almost no layman can achieve.

There must be a moment at which one gives up certain pedagogical ambitions that are utterly unrealistic. While I think that the image of the world as painted by theoretical physics is a major part of the culture of our epoch (and knowing nothing about the W-boson or the genes is as bad as knowing nothing about Shakespeare), I find it obvious that an overwhelming majority of the mankind just can't understand its basics. The reason is an insufficient intelligence, insufficient motivation to follow these things, or both.

Journalists don't have any significant advantage. The average IQ of undergraduate students of communication/journalism is around 112 (compare with physics with 130 at the top). Among the college students, only education (109) and public administration (106) are closer to the average IQ (100). You simply can't expect too visible differences between journalists and average people on the street. They're not elite in any sense. In fact, this "mediocrity" of the writers is imposed upon us because if the journalists were too much smarter than the readers, the readers wouldn't be capable of reading the articles or they wouldn't be willing to do so.

In my family background, the discussions that start to reveal the limitations (or, politically correctly, the "differences") are discussions on whether the behavior of the human body (or other things of this kind) may be uncovered by biology (or other natural sciences) or by witches with tarot cards (or anyone else with self-described parapsychopathological "abilities"). If you were treated as a narrow-minded heretic for knowing (PC: thinking) that science is the right approach to learn reliable insights about all the observations, or even for daring to suggest that these scientific insights ultimately boil down to the laws of physics that you've mastered, you would surely forget about explaining subtleties of the chiral symmetry breaking to the general laymen. It's just utterly impossible.

In fact, even if I restrict my attention to people who have dedicated a significant part of decades of their lives to studying physics at home and following events in modern physical sciences, the results are pretty weak. I would say that if most of these people were forced to learn a 2-hour introductory physics lecture in the same way they had to learn at school (otherwise they would be spanked), they would know much more than they know after 20 years of "being interested" in physics. In spite of that, many people are very proud about their "unusual extra knowledge of physics" – something that may be worth $50 if converted to tuition in some sensible way. Of course, the extra pride often arises from the individual folks' "different knowledge" – they know something that others don't and they're proud about it even if it's unusually wrong (well, unusually when it comes to the precise type of the wrong knowledge; the very fact that the knowledge is wrong is usual).

A major reason behind this unreasonable ineffectiveness of the "home learning" of physics is that almost all these people pick sources that are full of garbage and myths spread by similarly confused and deluded average people. So this community of "not quite physicists" is keeping itself in the mud by cohesion. And of course that they teach each other to use the word "physics" and the best compliments for this mud. Authors of popular books usually contribute to this situation, too – even if they're good experts in their fields.

It's because for a book to sell well, it must apparently contain a significant fraction either of some widely popular garbage or idiosyncratic garbage. There's pretty much just one way to answer physics questions – and the truth is just one possibility among millions of others, the book market tells you, so if you repeated all the time, it would be boring or otherwise wrong. So most of the stuff written in popular physics books has to be wrong. There's just almost no natural selection that would prefer "true" books to be sold to the general public. And maybe the selection is flipped upside down, too.

A decade ago, I considered Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe to be an unbelievable counterexample. It became a bestseller despite the fact that it was indeed presenting the proper science that the best experts would endorse. The book explained what was important and only a modest fraction was dedicated to Brian's personal contributions – although there had been many – and his idiosyncrasies. Brian's later books stayed close to this description although much of The Fabric of the Cosmos was more elementary and much of The Hidden Reality was dedicated to speculations, usually twisted in the misled way that's dominant in the popular literature (the anti-Copenhagen propaganda on quantum mechanics is the most irritating example of that).

Related: The Guardian says that Brian Greene will compete against Steve Pinker and others for some Royal Society popular science book award. Someone else won but they debated what good popularization meant. Via Chimp.

But most other popular books that (just several) millions of people in the world use as "sources to learn physics" are much worse when it comes to the validity of the statements. Most of these books try to make profit with the perfect knowledge that most potential readers aren't really interested in real physics – and its sometimes modest and unsurprising implications for our observations, implications that still require hard work, attention, and precision to be derived – at all. Most people are only interested in the applications when they're useful – and they don't even want to know how they work.

The minority that declares some interest in "physics" for the sake of its knowledge is interested in "physics" as some kind of a buzzword that makes them feel special in the same sense as religious people are feeling special. I would even say that the largest group of readers of self-described "popular physics books" (some of the worst ones even try to pretend that they're not just popular books) are people who think that they have been harassed because of their lower intelligence and science skills but they want to be proved they were always right. So what they're eagerly waiting for are some revolutions that show that all the smart folks were wrong and vice versa. This is my best explanation why self-evident toxic junk written by dishonest scumbags and crackpots such as Woit and Smolin (and many other authors I don't want to enumerate) has been bought by many people (and is still being sold as you are reading this paragraph). Needless to say, this bias and desire to destroy physics as it exists isn't a good starting point to doing physics research – and it's a bad starting point to learning physics, too. Famous (or, using a different rule, the most typical) scientists may be wrong and they are often wrong but constantly betting that they must be wrong about everything isn't a viable strategy to make progress – it's probably even worse than assuming that they're always right although the two strategies are "comparably bad". Even when scientific revolutions take place, the previous wisdom is given a convenient armchair to spend the retirement age in. If you didn't understand the science before the revolution, chances are that your position will be even weaker after the revolution. True "counter-revolution" can't really occur in science because the acquired knowledge about the invalidity of obsolete theories is irreversible. If something has been ruled out, there's just no way to return to that defunct theory; a newer, usually more abstract or sophisticated theory, has become a "must".

So physics is interesting as a source of potential miracles, magic, telepathy, superluminal warp drives, and so on. But what about a solid proof that some of these things can't exist? Those insights just don't sell well. People are not interested in genuine physics; they are not interested in the truth whatever it is. They are interested in statements that pander to their prejudices and their special role among their peers. Either this sad fact or the reduced intelligence – or some superposition; it's often hard to disentangle what is at the very beginning – is the primary reason why we don't see any positive progress in the public's understanding of science. The public just doesn't want to understand those things well.

I believe that Matt Strassler still holds totally unrealistic ambitions. It's great to struggle for a better understanding of physics in the general public but if you want too much, you will be fighting the windmills. Various more or less inclusive parts of the public only have a chance to understand physics up to various levels of depth and sensible explanations of physics are likely to be a waste of time if they completely deny this distribution. That's why various types of simplifications (and various degrees of tolerance for certain misconceptions) have to be designed for variously inclusive target groups.

After all, the number of people in the general public who read (close to fundamental/particle/cosmology) physics blogs at least once a week – and redistribute tweets etc. going to physics blogs – is just totally tiny. It's really at most tens of thousands of people in the world. Even if we talk just about "interested laymen", it is just a few parts per million! The genuinely interested laymen aren't too much more widespread than the actual scientists. A larger group follows (and retweets!) science in the "mainstream media" and the distortions of science inevitably follow from this fact because the journalists usually don't know much more than the readers (and can't really know much more, for the communication to work efficiently).

We should think whether the public's belief in the "authority of the mainstream media" is inevitable, whether it brings more advantages or disadvantages, and whether we should struggle to undermine it in some way or not. Of course that there are many events after which I am tempted to think that the answer is a resounding Yes. But when I see what kind of much worse junk may be written in – and read from – some totally non-mainstream sources, I often change my mind again. In most cases, one has to choose between the bad, worse, and worst. ;-)

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Livescribe Smartpen

I just learned from Technet, a Czech sci-tech server, about the Livescribe Smartpen – something I've never seen before even though it has already arrived to the Czech market.



It's kind of cool. I feel that many students may want to buy such a gadget, it starts at $100 or so. The product on the left is more expensive because it has more memory.

It is an intelligent pen that allows you to draw a calculator or a piano and play it or compute with it. You may write "Hello beer" and it easily translates it (in audio) as "Hola Cerveza" to Spanish. ;-) However, most importantly, it is a tape recorder that is able to synchronize the recorded sound with the notes on the paper.

The gadget may remember thousands of pages of notes and almost a thousand of hours of sound.




A condition is that you must write all your notes to special paper notebooks that have lots of unique codes printed over them, something like barcodes, that allow the pen to identify the page as well as a point on the page rather accurately and reliably.

So you write some notes and when you're rereading them, you discover an equation you can't understand. What the hell was the instructor talking about? You point your Smartpen at the equation and it will replay for you what the instructor was talking about.

There are lots of new technologies that could supersede and improve the old methods of learning. Some of them are pretty cheap. For example, this universal pen is as expensive as a single expensive textbook. But it may be used everywhere. It's surprising that the society hasn't made a more significant progress in the way how these new technologies are used in education.



Next week, Microsoft is also releasing Microsoft Surface, its iPad competitor. Samsung is releasing its Samsung Chromebook, starting at $250 (video).

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Harvard's divestments: Israel and fossil fuels

Harvard-related fun news: Next Tuesday, on October 9th at 10 am, Czech President Václav Klaus will host Larry Summers at the Prague Castle. Two important politically incorrect economists who know me in person. ;-)

When I was at faculty of Harvard, I also got familiar with many undergraduate students, went to the (usually Harvard) Pub with some of them, and deduced a realistic picture what they look like and what they care about.



There is a very high percentage of highly talented young people among them. (Philip Streich from Howard Georgi's house who tragically died a week ago in a family farm accident was probably one of them: an Intel Foundation bronze medal winner, a graphene company CEO since his teenage.) On the other hand, when it comes to aptitudes, I believe that the average Harvard undergraduate doesn't differ "strikingly" from the average student at other colleges that are just OK. Those folks are later unusually successful as well – but I tend to think that the Harvard diploma (and the contacts they develop over the years in the college) may be more important for that than their actual skills and hard work.

While the Harvard faculty is insanely super duper left-wing, Harvard students are much more moderate. This is manifested in many ways. For example, they would largely endorse Larry Summers when the far left (for readers who are U.S. conservatives: Larry doesn't belong to this set, according to Harvard's conventions!) organized the witch hunts against him. Of course, Harvard students are far less ideological and more practically oriented than the Harvard faculty. After all, we could say that they're normal kids with pretty normal interests.

While they drink stuff and have lots of sex, they are publishing an "adult" daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, too. I feel that the students – because everyone knows that they pay tuition etc. – have a significant impact on the Harvard policies. And Harvard University is a sort of a role model for many other U.S. universities, institutions, and even corporations. So you may want to follow what those kids think. They are kids who are programmed to "control the world" and to be pro-actual-establishment in every single dimension you may think of. So they're still highly politically correct – especially the self-proclaimed spokespeople of the student body. When it comes to students whom the Harvard environment naturally converts into spokesmen, think of slick, superficial, and self-centered folks like Sean Carroll; he used to be a Harvard graduate, not undergraduate student, but you may still get the idea.

I will discuss divestments – decisions to sell all holdings related to XY whenever XY becomes politically inconvenient or politically incorrect.




In 2002, a community of Harvard's anti-Semites and outcast Semites decided to ventilate their anger with the most functional country in the Middle East by proposing that Harvard isolates itself from the "dirty Jewish state" and that its management company should sell all its holdings related to Israel.

Many people at Harvard supported the move. Alan Dershowitz was one of the brave exceptions who were fighting the bigots. The discussion continued for years and the divestment wasn't coming. However, it was suddenly revealed in August 2010 that Harvard had sold all its Israeli holdings even though two days later, Harvard stated it wasn't divestment (because Harvard stated it wasn't one), it was just financially indistinguishable from one. ;-)

Clearly, the management company chose to please the anti-Semites while verbally pretending to be a "neutral party". Still, Harvard has helped to legitimize the efforts to treat Israel in a bad way – in a way that no rogue state in the region could ever be treated. The direct impact of the decision on Israel was negligible, of course; however, the indirect impact caused by the "legal" anti-Israel attitudes seen at Harvard may be significant.

Now, the climate

In 2009, some Harvard students founded a college chapter of Students for a Just and Stable Future which – despite the vague progressive name – is just another climate alarmist organization. They want Harvard to sell all its holdings that are related to fossil fuels and perhaps any other carbon-dependent industry, too.

Five days ago, the Crimson published an editorial which said that Harvard students should help the alarmist cause by all other means but the divestment was a bad idea because in the past, all proposals for a divestment were restricted to companies linked to human rights violation (I guess that the implicit assertion was that the most respectable country in the Middle East when it comes to human rights, Israel, may also be criticized for human rights violation).

However, two students who are fighting for the "just and stable future" were allowed to publish a response today. So they scream that the divestment is necessary, repeat some usual alarmist talking points, and – now, this is the shocking point – they argue that global warming is a human rights issue, indeed. Holy cow.

I know that there are many sensible people among the students at Harvard but the environment and its habits just immediately downgrades them to "also students" who are obliged to be quiet. Be sure that I have met a couple of Harvard undergraduates who complained that they were heavily harassed for their world view – especially those who were practicing Christians. This is apparently the "good", semi-officially sponsored harassment.

Kids who propose to launch a war against fossil fuel companies – which belong among the pillars of the modern civilization – should be intensely spanked by their parents at least for half an hour. At Harvard, some of these deeply confused, spoiled frats not only fail to be spanked but they indirectly influence the thinking in the whole American society. Many of us are underestimating how much harm stupid kids at disproportionately influential places may do.

And that's the memo.

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