Czech presidential candidates: test your English

Czech TV and LHC: Tonight, the Hyde Park Civilization [click for the full video] program of the ČT24 channel was airing an unusually high-brow episode about CERN. I haven't seen any remotely comparably advanced programs about particle physics in English.

In one week, Czechia will vote its new president who will replace Prof Klaus (who's been the Czech president for 10 years) in March in the first direct presidential election ever.

The two candidates who are expected to pass to the second round, Mr Miloš Zeman and Mr Jan Fischer, were facing one another in a direct TV debate last night: full 90-minute video.



Zeman was showing his beautiful daughter, Fischer was showing his son without excessive adjectives but with red socks. ;-)

Zeman was more convincing, entertaining, and he is widely considered the winner of the debate. The two Gentlemen have comparable chances to win; Schwarzenberg (the aristocrat who loves to sleep during talks and whose German is probably better than his Czech) and Franz (a blue hybrid of Avatar, a Smurf, and the native American totem: 90% of this artist's and professor's body is tattooed; he actually loves to call himself an Avatar) may be the two men who may surprisingly jump among the top two i.e. to the second round of the election. If I wouldn't have to care about realistic chances of the candidates, I could also vote for Ms Jana Bobošíková.

However, the video above also shows a test of their English which was performed by a U.S. journalist, Erik Best, who has been living in Czechia for decades.




You may see that Zeman's content (about journalists etc.) is more colorful than Fischer's dry comments about our prosperous economy.

Their English is idiosyncratic, Fischer's passive English may have some problems as well, and their pronunciation is far from that of native speakers (Zeman's "th" is just bad) – although your humble correspondent in no way wants to pretend that he is able to emulate native speakers. But I still think that my English is better than theirs while their English is better than the English spoken by an overwhelming majority of other Czech politicians. Well, I think that Klaus' English is better and there are of course a couple of politicians who have lived in the Anglo-Saxon world for so much time that they simply have to speak well.

Fischer is a former prime minister in a 2009 technocratic government (which hasn't done much, either positively or negatively) and the current vice-president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He tries to be a candidate liked by everyone and manipulates with a tolerable dose of populism. In the 1980s, Fischer was a rank-and-file member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, for career reasons, something he considers a "mistake" today. He is a pretty boring chap and he is ethnic Jewish.

Zeman, a former prime minister in the late 1990s as well as the ex-boss of the Parliament, a forecaster (who was only a communist party member for two years around the Prague Spring 1968), the moderate left-wing founder of the modern powerful Czech social democratic party who was often the natural legitimate opponent of right-wing Klaus in the TV debates of the 1990s before they realized that they were far closer to each other than they were to the traitors in the two parties they had led for quite some time :-), is quite a character. He's been employed as the pensioner at the Bohemian-Moravian hills for a decade now. He lived out of $500 a month or os and he owns a $100 boat, among other things. ;-)

He loves to tell anecdotes and he is never constrained by any political correctness; incidentally, he is also a climate skeptic of a sort. So he has ignited quite some excitement when he was the prime minister – e.g. when he compared Yasser Arafat to Adolf Hitler, something that apparently wasn't quite mainstream in the Western media of that time. :-) He wants to invite Israel to NATO and redefine NATO as the alliance to struggle against the "Anticivilization" stretching from North Africa through Indonesia that is partly funded by drugs and partly by oil. In order for me not to insult any bigots and their fifth columns in the Western countries, I won't name the Anticivilization by name.

Some jokes by Zeman are cool.

For example, Zeman and Klaus arrive to Hell. The Devil is sitting on the throne. He chooses Klaus to be the first one whose fate must be decided. Suddenly a disgusting old biddy with tons of warts appears next to Klaus and the Devil says: "You've been sinning all your life, Mr Klaus. You must be punished and the punishment is that you're obliged to copulate with this lady for the eternity."

The second man who has to face the Devil is Zeman. Suddenly Claudia Schiffer, a supermodel, appears next to him and the Devil says: "You've been sinning all your life, Ms Schiffer. In order to punish you, ..." :-)

Or I liked Zeman's apparently true story about his visit to the White House shortly after 9/11. Zeman is a passionate smoker who smokes everywhere – including nuclear power plants, he says (he's also known as a big fan of the Becherovka 17% herbal alcoholic beverage from Carlsbad but he claims he consumes less than a bottle today these days haha) – and he just couldn't live without a cigarette. But there was a problem: the boss of the house was Bush 43, a fanatical anti-smoker. However, Zeman showed him a diploma – a honorary citizenship – he just received from the governor of Texas a week earlier. So he told Bush, "as one Texan to another Texan, I tell you that we Texans have to help each other". He asked Bush to allow him to smoke. And Bush did, albeit he wasn't too happy. Years later, Bush seemed much happier about the incident.

Zeman labeled this ability to get the permission as one of his life's achievements in foreign policy. At the end, Zeman's fellow economist Valtr Komárek improved the anecdote significantly when he said: To appreciate Zeman's story, we must understand that in the same room, the Oval Office, another person had already been smoking (=blowing, doing a blowjob in Czech) before Zeman. It was Monica Lewinsky. :-)

In the debate last night, Zeman tried to make funny comments on chess etc. when he revealed he didn't know "rock paper scissors". He chose Margaret Thatcher as his favorite female politician because she was willing to wage an offensive war against Argentina which led to the legalization of tango in that country. ;-) Imagine something like 90/2 minutes of similar gems.

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Theory of something: QM has reached limits

Several people have asked me about the following press release that was published a few days ago and that was reprinted at various servers such as one that belongs to San Francisco Chronicle:

Theory of Something Reveals Why Quantum Mechanics has Reached its Limits: Mass is Outside of Particles (press release)

We learn that quantum mechanics has been defeated. More colorfully, the mass is located in a grid outside particles that is 100,000 times larger than the particle itself. A proton has a core with 63 "negtrinos", electron has 9 of them, and the hydrogen atom has a "grid room" for 16,525 "negtrinos".

Lots of similar nonsensical sentences, mostly with additional nonsensical numbers and new words, follow, together with a bizarre YouTube video. The press release also promotes their website,

Theory of Something.COM

Let's pick a picture from that website.




The sidebar contains lots of amazing statements such as "all forces are electromagnetical", "\(F=ma\) has been finally derived", "neutrinos and negtrinos are in the grid and fill the space", and so on. Lots of infantile pictures are added. All big problems are claimed to be solved (dark energy is everywhere, too) although there is no evidence on that page that the author has understood what the problems actually are or, at least, how they're called.

But let's reproduce the following image:



Now, I must ask all the people who were intrigued by this stuff: Can't you just figure out that this is pure childish rubbish that someone has made up? If you can't, you just fail to understand science and Nature at the high school level. It's scary.

The same question may be asked in millions of other contexts in which various types of pure junk are being hyped. For example, there's a YouTube video (with 300,000+ views) promoting Keshe's Foundation's alleged "discovery" of a method to obtain unlimited free energy and the cure for any disease out of a plasma. Someone asked whether it was a legitimate science and I gave a long answer. Guess whether the answer was YES or NO. Needless to say, a wishful thinking is a big part of this belief. Genuinely sincere and genuinely ignorant people just want the future to be rosy, they want to be a part of it, and they're not capable or they're not willing to distinguish the actual evidence (or at least common sense) from their wishful thinking.

But look at the "model" of the particles that was shown on the picture a few paragraphs above. Could you really believe that something like that could be true, something like that could arise from a legitimate scientific research?

In this "model", particles resemble a tennis racket with an extra disk-shaped structure of concentric circles decorated by extra "grid points" in the middle. Could a sane person believe that Nature works in this way?

First of all, the plane of the tennis racket is really two-dimensional while objects in the real world are three-dimensional. Why would Nature confine Herself into two dimensions and wouldn't use the third dimension at all?

Now, look at the complicated pattern. Could it arise naturally? Why? Why don't you draw another grid, a hexagon grid with three holes, each containing a pair of concentric elephants? This is not just a satirical rhetorical question; I am totally serious about this question. If Nature allowed the "tennis racket" particles, it would have to allow "elephant triplets in honeycomb" as well. If it didn't allow it, what laws could possible justify that "tennis rackets" are allowed but "elephant triplets in honeycomb" are not?

In other words, can't you see that the pattern on the picture is hugely contrived, self-evidently man-made? Nature isn't man-made. The laws of physics that dictate the shape of patterns are natural mathematical laws. Why would they produce something so similar to complicated man-made objects such as modified "tennis rackets"? It's clearly preposterous, isn't it?

Such pictures must be attractive for the laymen because they are "very concrete" and the particles have been "visualized". The pattern has lots of features you may spent lots of time with and memorize, thus convincing yourself that you are thinking about a scientific model. At the intuitive level, people may like it. But people, it's exactly the opposite what one should expect when it comes to a description of Nature. A true description of Nature isn't necessarily easy to be visualized. However, what's even more obvious is that it doesn't contain (almost) any arbitrary features that would have to be memorized.

You see that I am alluding to some activities that many people may have liked – or been good at – at school. They liked drawing and pointing and they liked to memorize things. But haven't you understood that these are skills that are not excessively important to understand Nature? Haven't you seen that physics works differently?

Nature simply has reasons explaining why the things are the way they are and they're often reasons that may only be accurately formulated in the language of mathematics. The picture of the "tennis racket" is exactly opposite in character. Its whole glory is about tons of features that don't have any justification.

It's sort of annoying that most of the people can't identify nonsense – "theories" that would look preposterous even to semi-intelligent people 2,000 years ago. But the situation is probably even worse because even a large number of people who have college degrees; and perhaps a majority of the journalists or even science journalists is constantly ready to buy (and resell) any piece of crap even though a reasonably rational person may see it is crap by looking at 1 or 2 sentences or 1/4 of a picture.

I have no idea whether this lack of ability to see that self-evident nonsense is nonsense is due to the people's intrinsic limitations and low intelligence or their life-long "revolt" against the physics teachers who were intimidating them at school or some mistakes in the education that could be fixed or due to the atmosphere in which people are taught to believe everything and anything that is written anywhere in the media or press releases despite the fact that much if not most of things that are written at similar places these days are garbage.

It would be nice to know the actual reasons but it would be even nicer if people weren't this staggeringly gullible or this unbelievably stupid.

And that's the memo.

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The world as seen by the LHC protons

Off-topic paragraph: Today, we celebrate 370 years from the birth of Isaac Newton, arguably the brightest scientist ever. He was born on January 4th, 1643 (New System: it's December 25th, 1642, in the Old System). He was the founder of classical physics (and, in fact, physics in the modern sense), the universal law of gravitation, co-inventor of calculus, the discoverer of lots of mathematical methods, laws in optics, and so on. He was also a reliable executioner of counterfeiters and a devout Christian whose literal belief in the Bible and in the existence of the Holy Spirit permeating the whole space actually powered his physics research.

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But in the text below, we're going to discuss an example illustrating the special theory of relativity, one of the theoretical frameworks that superseded Newton's theories.

Our cars and trains and airplanes are fast but the speed is negligible relatively to the speed of light \(c\) which is why Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity remains abstract for most of us. It hasn't been hardwired in our brains.



However, all the relativistic effects are mundane at the particle accelerators such as the LHC. Protons are accelerated to speeds that are very close to the speed of light.

If you did it with a slightly higher number of protons, you could accelerate whole human beings to such speeds – assuming you would find out how to accelerate electrons as well and add them to the atoms again (it's hard to accelerate the electrically neutral human bodies directly). That's why the experience of the protons isn't something "totally different" from what humans could experience. With a little bit of extra work, we could experience it.

But what do the protons experience?




First, let us determine the speed of the protons. The rest mass of a proton is\[

m_0 = 0.938272\GeV/c^2.

\] It's almost one gigaelectronvolt (divided by the squared speed of light). However, the total energy carried by the proton is enhanced by the Lorentz gamma factor:\[

\gamma\equiv \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}} = \frac{4,000\GeV}{0.9383\GeV}\approx 4,263.

\] This factor exceeds four thousand. It is not hard to calculate the actual speed by inverting the \(v\)-\(\gamma\) relationship:\[

\eq{
\frac{1}{\gamma^2} &= 1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}\\
\frac{v^2}{c^2}&=1-\frac{1}{\gamma^2}\\
\frac{v}{c}&=\sqrt{1-\frac{1}{\gamma^2}}
}

\] If you substitute \(\gamma\approx 4,263\), you will obtain\[

\frac{v}{c}\approx 0.999999972

\] There are seven digits "nine" followed by a "seven". If you multiply this number "almost equal to one" by the speed of light, \(c=299,792,458\,{\rm m/s}\) (exactly), you will find out that the proton's speed is just nine meters per second smaller than the speed of light in the vacuum! The proton's speed only differs from the speed of light by the speed of an Olympic runner; however, don't forget that the simple addition of speeds isn't the right way to calculate the relative velocities in relativity.

Now, the proton's speed is associated with a particular world line in the spacetime. There is a certain kind of a "hyperbolic angle" called the rapidity \(\varphi\) in between the moving LHC proton's world line and a static proton's world line. Its value is\[

\varphi = {\rm arctanh}(v/c) \approx {\rm arctanh}(0.999999972)\approx 9.05.

\] The angle is slightly above nine "hyperbolic/imaginary radians". Note that the rapidity isn't periodic – because the hyperbola, unlike the circle, isn't closed. Nevertheless, the total amount of acceleration that the proton had to experience from its own viewpoint is analogous to the rotation by nine radians – except that we are talking about a rotation in the Minkowski spacetime. The value of the rapidity isn't terribly high but it corresponds to speeds that are very close to the speed of light and whose \(\gamma\) is huge.

The fact that the proton has this huge speed has consequences. First of all, in the proton's instantaneous inertial reference frame, the circular LHC ring looks like an ellipse. It is a hugely squeezed ellipse, almost a line interval. This ellipse is \(4,263\) times wider than tall. It's insane. Even if your horizontal display resolution were \(4,263\) pixels, the vertical height of the picture of the LHC would be as small as one pixel. I won't even try to insert a real picture here. A horizontal line may be more appropriate.

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And this is how the world "is" according to the proton's natural reference frame. Note that the proton is moving vertically right now – it is either on the left or the right endpoint of this "ellipse pretending to be a line interval". This very unusual shape of the LHC ring is no sleight-of-hand. It's how Nature works.

I have already mentioned that the total mass – or the total energy – of the LHC proton is \(4,263\) times greater than what it is when the proton is at rest. Aside from the total mass/energy, other things get expanded or shrunk by the same factor. For example, imagine that the proton is replaced by an unstable particle (such as a pion) that lives for time \(t_0\), if measured in its rest frame. For the sake of simplicity, imagine that the total lifetime is exactly \(t_0\) instead of being statistically distributed with the right average. Let's also assume that the particle flies along a straight path for a while, instead of the circular ring.

How far can such a particle get during its lifetime? In Newton's theory, you would simply say that at the given speed \(v\), very close to the speed of light \(c\), the distance traveled would be\[

s \neq vt_0.

\] I wrote \(\neq\) because Newton's theory isn't the right theory of space and time. Instead, in the lab frame, the particle may traverse a much longer distance\[

s = \gamma vt_0.

\] It is \(\gamma\approx 4,263\) times longer than it is according to Newton's theory! There are two simple ways to explain the origin of this extra factor of \(\gamma\). In the lab frame associated with the LHC physicists, all the processes occurring "inside" the moving particle are slowed down due to the "time dilation" by the factor of \(\gamma\). That's true for the "aging process" of the particle, too. Because the particle ages \(4,263\) times more slowly, it is able to fly a \(4,263\) times longer a distance during its lifetime.

The explanation of the "enhancement" is different in the particle's own inertial system but the result is the same. According to the particle's own reference frame, the longitudinal distances (in the direction of motion) are shrunk \(\gamma\approx 4,263\) times (recall the thin ellipse above). The time goes "normally" and the particle sees its lifetime as \(t_0\). So in its rest frame, it really travels over the "Newtonian" distance \(vt_0\). However, when you ultimately want to translate this distance to some actual places in France and Switzerland, you must appreciate that the particle sees shorter longitudinal (=in the direction of motion) distances due to the "Lorentz contraction", so the actual distances "on the map" are \(\gamma\approx 4,263\) times longer than they seem to be from the particle's viewpoint. Again, the distance on the map of Europe traversed over the particle's lifetime is equal to \(\gamma v t_0\).

I have discussed the mass increase, the time dilation, and the Lorentz contraction. There are lots of other unfamiliar effects at those speeds. The relativity of the simultaneity is a characteristic feature of special relativity but I won't spend much time with it in this blog entry. But there are others. For example, the proton (let's return to the proton) sees modified colors due to the Doppler effect. It's the apparent change in the frequency of a wave caused by relative motion between the source of the wave and the observer. (Reference: Sheldon. No other sitcom has ever squeezed so many valid definitions of physical concepts into a few minutes. One could argue that even most of the "popular scientific" programs contain a smaller amount of truly correct and accurate statements about physics than TBBT. Incidentally, Sheldon got accused of sexual harassment last night.)

Now, in Newton's physics, the frequency gets modified either by the factor of \(1\pm v/c\) or by the factor of \(1/(1\pm v/c)\), depending on whether the source or the observer is moving and depending on whether the motion is "away from each other" or "towards each other". In Newton's theory, it matters whether the source or the observer is moving because there's a static environment (air for sound; the notorious luminiferous aether for the light) in between which has its own preferred frame.

In special relativity, there's no luminiferous aether. There's no preferred frame. Consequently, it doesn't matter whether the source is moving, or whether the observer is moving. There is a unified formula for the Doppler change in the frequency:\[

\frac{f}{f_0} = \sqrt{ \frac{1\pm v/c}{1\mp v/c} } .

\] Note that the sign in the denominator is the opposite sign than the sign in the numerator. And if you change the sign of \(v\), it has the same effect as inverting the square root (\( f/f_0\to f_0/ f \)). Fine. So how many times do the frequencies change for our speed \(0.9999999724c\)? A simple calculation shows that the result is actually \[

\frac{f}{f_0} \approx 8,513.

\] It is no coincidence that the numerical value is approximately equal to \(2\gamma\), two times our "four thousand". That's the right approximation of the Doppler ratio for any ultrarelativistic speed (=very close to the speed of light). It means that if there is some light moving against or towards the proton, the proton observes the frequency as \(8,500\) times higher than what it is in the lab frame! If some photons are "catching up with the photon" from its back, they ultimately catch up and are "seen" by the proton but the proton sees the frequency as \(8,500\) times lower than it is in the lab frame!

So you may send two photons of the same color (according to the LHC lab frame) from two directions and the proton will think that the frequencies of the photons are different. The photon coming from the front side has \(8,513^2\approx 72,500,000\) times higher frequency than the photon coming from the opposite side. The frequency ratio observed by the proton exceeds the stunning factor of seventy-two million. And this is no science-fiction. We are talking about genuine protons at their speed they have had in the LHC. In early 2015 when the LHC restarts, the energy will be almost doubled to \(13\TeV\) – i.e. \(6.5\TeV\) per proton – so the numbers will be even more extreme: \(\gamma\approx 6,928\), \(v/c\approx 0.99999999\), \(f/f_0\approx 13,800\).

I can't resist to mention an additional extreme number, one related to collisions. In the lab frame, we had two colliding \(4\TeV\) protons. It's interesting to ask what the oppositely moving proton looks like in our proton's reference frame. The mutual speed is calculated through the relativistic formula\[

V_{\rm relative} = \frac{v_1+v_2}{1+v_1 v_2/c^2}

\] where we want to use \(v_1=v_2=v\) for our situation to get\[

\frac{V_{\rm relative}}{c} = \frac{2v/c}{1+v^2/c^2}\approx 1-4.4\times 10^{-16}.

\] In the numerical form of \(V/c\), there are fifteen digits "nine" followed by a "five". The corresponding \(\gamma_{\rm relative}\) exceeds 33 million (this is the factor appearing in the Lorentz contraction and time dilation, too). So the left-moving proton sees its right-moving friend (or foe) as having a 33 million times greater energy relatively to the rest mass/energy. It means that the other proton's energy is over \(31,000\TeV\) in the first proton's inertial system. However, one can't probe the energy scale at thousands of \(\TeV\)s (which would be great for the discovery of all the superpartners) because only the total energy in the center-of-mass frame determines how deeply the LHC sees into the matter – and it's been "just" \(8\TeV\).

People aren't really observing the world through the fast protons' eyes. They always see what happens from the inertial frame of the LHC detectors. However, this single frame is enough to tell us how the world actually works. And the answer is that it works in agreement with relativity. Because relativity implies that it is legitimate to switch to any other inertial frame, including the inertial system of the fast proton, the extreme perceptions of the proton that we have discussed are genuine according to the experimental evidence that the LHC is giving us.

The special theory of relativity is a mundane set of facts and the LHC is showing the special theory of relativity every day, in every collision. It just works. One could argue that people who work with the observations at the LHC have hardwired special relativity into their brains. Most of them have gotten used to Nature's being fundamentally quantum mechanical, too.

Sometime in the distant future, you may imagine an advanced civilization that will be able to push spaceships to the same speed as the speed of the protons at the LHC. Well, I actually doubt this will ever occur but what do I know. If it occurs, you may apply the ideas above to interstellar and intergalactic space travel. Due to the time dilation and/or Lorentz contraction, an astronaut will actually be able to get "almost arbitrarily far", even thousands or millions of light years away, during his lifetime.

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Al Jazeera buys TV from Al Gore et al.

There's been lots of interesting science news – for example, Neil Armstrong has apparently lied to us when he was saying that he invented the "one small step for man" line on the Moon. He had been thinking about it for quite some time, his brother recently told the BBC, and he was even collecting feedback e.g. from his brother.

I am sure that most readers follow the news, especially those related to science. But this news is kind of special:

Al Jazeera buys Current TV, will launch new channel (CNN Money)

The failed 2000 U.S. presidential candidate and the failed demagogic promoter of the failed climate hysteria has sold his and Joel Hyatt's failed TV station, Current TV, to an Arab broadcaster.




Current TV is dead; long live Al Jazeera TV U.S. Al Gore has shown his pride that his failed product could have been sold at all – and moreover, to a company located in a region that gave the world a climate alarmist who was even more famous than Al Gore himself, namely Osama bin Laden, before he was neutralized by Al Gore's former ally, Barack Obama.

Let me admit that this "marriage" doesn't sound surprising to me at all. Al Jazeera has always been driving me up the wall. It's a kind of an Arab station but it's clearly not a typical Arab station reflecting the Arab culture and the medieval traditions that are still hot in the Arab world. Instead, Al Jazeera tries to resemble the Western stations – and what it takes from the Western stations is the most shameful and disgusting part of the contemporary Western lifestyle, namely some kind of a generalized political correctness.

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Feynman's "Ode to a Flower": an animation

You must have heard Richard Feynman's monologue on the beauty of a flower from the scientist's viewpoint.

It was aired at the very beginning of the interesting 1981 BBC program The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.



But this may be the first time when you're encouraged to watch this animation that was created on the background of Feynman's wise words.




Incidentally, a language question: is Feynman's pronouncement of the word "interesting" the most common way to do so in the U.S. English? I believe that e.g. Leonard Susskind says the word in the same way but it's still rare. Is it some kind of a New York City accent?

In the monologue above, Feynman forgot to say that science also allows you to do various things with the flower which make us very happy. For example, you may squeeze an orange juice out of it: :-)



Via Maria Popova (a neat Christmas gift I received from Peter F., in a box)

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NYT urges Obama to introduce socialism

Off-topic, firewalls: Ted Jacobson wrote the 26th followup of the AMPS firewall paper and he joined the majority that disagrees with the "original perpetrators", as he calls Polchinski et al. He declares that their paper assumes that one may tensor-factorize the Hilbert space and isolate inner and outer degrees of freedom which is incorrect in quantum gravity where the Hilbert space is "a priori constrained", something that doesn't make local measurements impossible. I rarely agree with Jacobson but here he's on the right side.

Many American conservatives remain significantly proud about their country that they believe to be much more immune against socialism, top-down bureaucratic control, and other things they associate with the Eurotrash in their own old continent.

Well, I am afraid that this pride is exaggerated.

Economist John Cochrane (via Patria.CZ) noticed that The New York Times has published a breathtaking editorial (the opinion of all the important editors) on Saturday:

Why the Economy Needs Tax Reform

The term "tax reform" may sound refreshing and intriguing but if you read the editorial, or just a part of it, you will quickly realize what they actually mean by or hide behind the term "tax reform".




They just want the taxes to be high, more progressive, and they want all the types of taxes that were ever abandoned to be resuscitated and all the new taxes that have never existed but that were mentioned by anyone to be introduced.

So the Obama administration is told not only to increase the corporate taxes – in which the U.S. is already the 2nd most taxed Western country – but also to restore the real estate tax, surcharges on multi-million-dollar incomes, end to the deferral of tax for companies stashing their earning abroad, and to work on the establishment of new carbon taxes, value-added taxes, and financial transaction taxes.

The editors are clearly convinced that the closer to North Korea the American IRS will become, the more prosperous the country will be. When people don't have too much money to waste, the editors say, the government will have much more room to increase the GDP. Holy cow.



Der Steuersong (The Tax Song) was recorded by a rubber German ex-chancellor, Gerhard Schröder (SPD), as a satire – a great one. But if you look at the lyrics translated to English, you may notice that the content is pretty much equivalent to the "plan" of The New York Times that is apparently meant seriously!

So while I am still more worried about old Old Continent, I am almost equally worried about that great country that we could have relied upon as a reservoir and defender of freedom for the Western world. If the U.S. joins the EU and its Orwellian policies, the Western world may be screwed rather soon.

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Greenhouse effect doesn't contradict any laws of physics

It's the new year, 2013, and I will start it with some sort of "hardcore skeptic bashing".

Needless to say, it's not the first time when you can read a text on this blog that could be described in this way. Your humble correspondent is balanced when it comes to the catching of mistakes spread by "alarmists" as well as "skeptics", "believers" as well as "infidels", and so on.



The glass greenhouses resemble the greenhouse effect in the sense that they make it harder for the heat to escape. However, the methods to achieve so are different. The greenhouse mechanically stops convection; the greenhouse effect reduces the escaping thermal radiation by absorption and re-emission of some of it downwards.

Roy Spencer wrote the following text today:

Misunderstood Basic Concepts and the Greenhouse Effect

It's of course a basic stuff but I still think it's useful to start with the comment that I agree with every word he wrote. Amusingly enough, Spencer starts with pointing out that the definition of the greenhouse effect is wrong because it suggests that the greenhouse effect depends on the sunlight and its ability to get from the Sun to the Earth's surface easily.




In reality, the greenhouse effect doesn't depend on the sunlight at all. Also, as Spencer says, it would work even if the atmosphere were absorbing the visible (solar) radiation more proactively than the infrared (thermal) radiation from the Earth.

The wrong idea that the sunlight is essential for the greenhouse effect is actually widespread – and some slightly misguided and mixed-up popular presentations of the greenhouse effect (in movies, perhaps on both sides) may be blamed for this situation. The first Google hit I get for greenhouse effect definition is the free dictionary.com and it also says that it's essential for the Earth to allow the incoming light to get through.

Let me reformulate Spencer's six basic "corrections of generally popular misconceptions" in my words:

1. Greenhouse effect requires a warm surface but the origin of the heat may be arbitrary, e.g. geothermal, not necessarily solar. This differs from the popular delusion that the sunlight has to be there to drive the essential processes in the greenhouse effect.
   
   
2. To determine the temperature at a given place, one must consider both incoming and outgoing energy. At thermal equilibrium, these fluxes (in the opposite directions) are equal. This contrasts with the general misconception that only the incoming energy matters.
   
   
3. Entropy still increases, in agreement with the second law of thermodynamics, despite the preserved increased temperature difference. The usual misconception seems to assume that the thermal exchange has to lead to the equal temperatures everywhere (higher entropy) – and this thermal exchange becomes stronger when we add the infrared absorption etc. However, in reality, significant temperature differences may be created with a tiny flow of energy per second as long as the energy loss is even smaller i.e. as long as you insulate the surface well enough which is what the greenhouse effect does.
   
   
4. Infrared absorption rate and infrared emission rate are almost always (for each layer of the air) very different from one another. This contrasts with some (mainly) skeptics' incorrect idea of a perfect balance. When you derive the rates, they're different because the emission rate grows with the fourth power of the absolute temperature while the absorption rate doesn't. What the absorption rate may depend upon is the amount of radiation around which may depend on the fourth power of the layer that emitted the heat which is mostly a hotter layer (closer to the surface) – that's really why the absorption mostly wins. Also, you can't derive the equality between the two rates from equilibrium because there are many other terms (convection etc.) that must be added to the budget when you demand that the budget is balanced. The infrared radiation-related terms don't have to cancel and usually don't cancel by themselves.
   
   
5. Radiation going up and radiation going down from a layer aren't equal, either. This is a similar point as the previous one. The emission of radiation mostly depends on the "last molecules" on the surface and their temperature and the molecules at the top of a thin layer are slightly cooler due to the lapse rate (note that the temperature outside the flying aircraft is chilly) which means that in this discipline, the radiation going downwards slightly wins again. Despite Roy Spencer's explanation of the origin of the asymmetry, the first commenter Docmartyn seems to pretend that he hasn't seen any explanation.
   
   
6. The existence of the lapse rate requires the greenhouse effect by itself. In the previous points, I suggested the point that the lapse rate is a necessary condition for the asymmetries that allow the greenhouse effect to operate. Once the greenhouse effect operates, it increases the insulation of the surface which means that the lapse rate becomes even larger. But the opposite causal relationship holds, too. There wouldn't be any lapse rate to start with – no cooling with the altitude – if there were no greenhouse gases (mostly water wapor) in the atmosphere. The lapse rate is close to the adiabatic one which arises because the colder air at higher altitudes is heavier (at the same pressure) so it drops down, shrinks (because the pressure is higher at lower attitudes), and heats up (squeezing a gas makes it hotter). But you see that this mechanism only works if the air at higher altitudes is actually colder then the air near the surface – and the greenhouse-effect-induced heating from the surface up is a necessary condition.

Needless to say, I do think that the physical mistakes leading some people to believe and say that the greenhouse effect is impossible as a matter of principle are mostly spread among certain groups of climate skeptics. Climate alarmists would probably not even dare to question any of the tenets – and not even learn them or verify them because even that would already be a blasphemy for most of them. ;-)

The skeptics mentioned in the previous paragraph make the right first step – to question and look for possible symmetry arguments and related arguments that could imply that the overall effect (the strength of the would-be greenhouse effect) is obliged to be zero. Some of them think that they have found such arguments but all such arguments are ultimately wrong even though one could argue that the reasons why these arguments are wrong are somewhat subtle. In some sense, you could say that the necessary asymmetries (pre-requisites) for the greenhouse effect resemble Sakharov's conditions for baryogenesis – and Sakharov had to be pretty smart to realize that they're necessary and (in principle, if you don't care about the magnitude) sufficient.

Now, every effect that can't be proved to be zero (by symmetry arguments etc.) is guaranteed to be nonzero; particle physicists call this rule "Gell-Mann's totalitarian principle" (everything that isn't forbidden is mandatory: I remember pre-1989 Czechoslovakia, too).

Still, I find it a bit frustrating that almost all the comments on Spencer's blog show the commenters' lack of understanding of the basic physical mechanisms here. Some people say that Spencer hasn't explained the origin of the downward/upward radiation asymmetry – he has. Other people claim that the greenhouse gases reduce the insulating ability of the atmosphere – the truth is the opposite. And there are lots of comments that just uncritically repeat variations of some of the "symmetry myths".

Commenter Nullius in Verba claims that the lapse rate could exist even without the greenhouse gases because of the Hadley cells. This claim is still wrong but it is really, really subtle. I think that the relevant comment here is that even the existence of the Hadley cell circulation depends on the assumption that the temperature of the air depends on the altitude – that's why the winds have altitude-dependent velocities (including direction). One needs a pre-existing lapse rate again and the greenhouse gases – heating from the surface – is necessary for that, too. Quite generally, the temperature's dependence on the latitude is thousands of times smaller than the dependence on the altitude so it would be strange to imagine that the latter is "caused" by the former. The vertical gradients are primary and they're caused directly by the (mostly) "vertical" (mostly) radiation effects – solar radiation and the greenhouse effect. The lapse rate already enters as a pre-existing condition to any sensible derivation of the Hadley cells. Another argument: you may ask how high the troposphere (with the lapse rate) is – i.e. where is its upper boundary, the tropopause. You will find out that the tropopause is determined by a balance between the downward (solar) radiation and the upward (mostly thermal) radiation and without the greenhouse effect, the tropopause would drop to the surface, a flaw that no Hadley cells could really "lift".

Finally, I find it sort of necessary to add the disclaimer that the existence of the greenhouse effect – something that has been known to physics since the 1824 arguments by Joseph Fourier – is extremely far from having any evidence that any dangerous climate change is behind the corner. What's important is how strong these effects are. We find out that the water vapor in the atmosphere is responsible for roughly 30 °C of warming near the Earth's surface while all other greenhouse gases may add 3-5 °C or so.

All these gases are contributors to the normal climate we know and love and hate, depending on the weather and our mood. If you want to study the temperature changes due to changes of the greenhouse gases, you find out that the concentration of the main contributor – water vapor – may be changing and these changes may be important for the regional climate change etc. but there's no reason to expect any trend or our contribution to this trend because the average global water vapor concentration in the air tends to quickly return to the equilibrium that is dictated mainly by the temperature. And the changes of the non-water greenhouse gases lead to pretty much negligible changes of the temperature – probably well below one Celsius degree since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

As we often say, the question whether the carbon dioxide may have a substantial effect depends on the existence of large positive feedbacks – that would amplify the "bare effect" 3 times or 5 times or more. The overall feedbacks are almost certainly not positive and large, at least not this large. I have presented tons of arguments over the years. Let me offer you a simple new one. If the greenhouse effect were amplified by a brutal multiplicative coefficient, this amplification would probably apply to the greenhouse effect caused by water, too. But the bare greenhouse effect caused by the actual water vapor in the atmosphere may be shown to be close to 30 °C and we may empirically exclude that the greenhouse effect from water adds 100 or 150 °C. So we may apparently rule out a 3-fold or 5-fold amplification of the CO₂ greenhouse effect, too.

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