Competing Japanese regions shoot videos to win the ILC

...a poll...

Japan is clearly getting serious about hosting the International Linear Collider, a planned 250+250 GeV (or later 500+500 GeV) electron-positron collider which could measure properties of the Higgs boson and perhaps other new things much more accurately than the LHC.

As the Symmetry Magazine informs us, two main candidate places in Japan recently released promotional video to defend their candidacies. It looks like the construction is a hot topic although it's expected to begin between 2015 and 2016 and collisions won't start before 2026.



This 4-minute music, choreography-based video featuring some famous actors and cartoons, among other real and virtual artists, is a reason why you should vote for the Sefuri mountains, Kyushu, Southern Japan [Facebook]. Big Ben's music and a short excerpt from Beethoven's fifth symphony – Japan has been crazy about Beethoven since the First World War – can't be absent in the video, either. Can you find it? You must have previously heard Asagohan (Breakfast), an amazing Japanese rendition of the symphony.




I will refer to this place as the "South". The competitors' promotional video couldn't be more different.




The Kitakami mountains in Tohoku, Northeastern Honshu [Facebook], have shot this 21-minute video featuring, among others, Hitoshi Murayama, a top Japanese particle phenomenologist from Berkeley (whom I met a few times).



It's a very serious, 21-minute educational video that isn't trying to be the coolest thing in the world. It's conceivable that only a small portion of the readers will watch the whole film.

I agree with you that it's unwise to choose the place according to some silly promotional videos only. Nevertheless, you're going to vote in a poll, anyway. Based on the films above and no other information:

Choose your preferred place in Japan for the ILC

South: 4-minute dancing videoNorth: 21-minute educational videoNone of them

pollcode.com free polls

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Sea temperature trend: 1.35 ± 0.15 °C per century

I made the following easy-to-understand calculation of the warming trend, including an error margin, of the global sea surface temperatures since the late 1970s, as seen by the UAH AMSU satellite dataset.



First, I loaded the file of the monthly data, isolated the third temperature-like column, the global ocean temperature anomaly, and calculated the linear regressions.




It's straightforward to use one simple Mathematica command to compute the slope of the linear regression but the non-trivial addition I made was an estimate of the error margin of the resulting slope. My logic is that for different initial months and final months of the interval, you get different slopes. Then you draw the histogram and the width of this histogram approximately informs you about the error margin of the slope.




So I picked the interval from the \(i\)-th month of the dataset through the \(j\)-th month from the end of the dataset and allowed \(i,j\) to be integers between one and fifty. One gets 2,500 different slopes from the linear regression. When the month-on-month average slope is multiplied by 1,200 to get the warming per century, those 2,500 slopes are distributed along the following histogram:



One may easily compute the mean value 1.33 °C per century while the root-mean-square width of the curve is 0.12 °C.\[

\ddfrac{T}{t}\sim (1.33\pm 0.12)^\circ {\rm C} / {\rm century}

\] It's also possible to replace the number 50 by another number of months, like 60, and the qualitative conclusions are unchanged.

This really means that the data from the last 33 years – when the observed warming trend was faster than in longer intervals or previous intervals, so we're likely to get an overestimate – the warming trend was just 1.35 °C per century with a relatively small error margin. In particular, we can't exclude that the "right" warming trend is below 1 °C per century. However, we can rather reliably exclude the hypothesis that the centennial trend exceeds 2 °C per century.

If you need some very simple Mathematica code I used:

a = Import["http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt",
"Table"];
aaa = a[[2 ;; -12]][[All, 3]];
more = a[[2 ;; -12]][[All, 5]];
laaa = Length[aaa]

ListLinePlot[more]

trends = {};
For[i = 1, i <= 50, i++,
For[j = 1, j <= 50, j++,
morekus = more[[i ;; -j]];
trend = D[Normal[LinearModelFit[morekus, x, x]], x]*1200;
trends = trends~Join~{trend};
]
]

Histogram[trends]
avtrend = Total[trends]/2500
Sqrt[Total[trends^2 - avtrend^2]/2500]

I chose the sea temperatures because they seem to be less variable in the short run; the nearly white noise apparently contributing to the temperatures has a smaller prefactor. The latest, May 2013 temperature anomaly which sits at –0.01 °C, wasn't incorporated to the calculation yet. It would reduce the trends but just by a very tiny amount.

Needless to say, nothing guarantees that the underlying trend implicitly assumed above to be linear will remain constant in the future. Climatologists are often naively describing the temperatures as a combination of a superfast, nearly white noise (very high frequencies of the randomness) and a superslow, nearly linear and permanent, increase of the temperature (very low frequencies). In reality, there are contributions from many characteristic intermediate timescales, including one or two years or so from El Niño cycles, decades from PDO and AMO and all these things, and probably many other sub-centennial and near-centennial and multi-centennial cycles, some of which are more regular or periodic or predictable than others while others are chaotic.

Even the assumption that the cherry-picked high trend is going to continue doesn't look worrisome in any sense and the underlying trends are safely lower than the lower end point of the IPCC interval.

Note that the IPCC should publish the fifth report, AR5, later in 2013. I am not too curious what will happen but I am still approximately infinitesimally curious how the usual talking points by these mostly dishonest hired guns will change or not change relatively to AR4. ;-)

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David Gross on youth, revolutions, conservatives, QM, QFT, QCD, ST, multiverse etc.

Wired has reprinted an interview of Simons Science News with David Gross:

Nobel Laureate Says Physics Is in Need of a Revolution

Well, I don't think that the title accurately summarizes what Gross said.

He mentioned that he was attracted to physics as a kid, partly by Einstein's and Infeld's book when he was 13. He gives some clues to the interviewer about the meaning of quantum mechanics, fields, quantum fields, asymptotic freedom, and so on.

His adviser Geoffrey Chew has ordered Gross to spark a new revolution by showing that quantum field theory is fundamentally wrong and one needs some revolutionary self-determining theory based on no special "elementary" particles, one satisfying the bootstrap paradigm. Instead, Gross ended up showing that quantum field theory works very well. Thank you.




The younger big shots understood his or their discoveries quickly; the old chaps didn't know quantum field theory well enough so they needed some easily understandable experiments to grasp the idea of the seemingly "unphysical" quarks.

At any rate, this story about an old revolutionary who hires a young gun but the young gun ends up being conservative is presented as something that is rather standard in science. Heisenberg, Dirac, and Bohr were already old chaps who were expecting a new revolution but the Standard Model that ultimately explained the data did nothing of the sort. Instead, it provided us with a conservative accurate reductionist theory based on the well-established concepts and postulates that have passed the tests of time.




You may see that the usual stereotype that the young people are rebels and old people are conservatives doesn't always work in physics – its converse arguably works more often.

Gross interprets string theory as a part and parcel of quantum field theory and in his conventions, it's therefore another continuation of this evolutionary process, not a revolution. In later paragraphs, he makes it clear, however, that the whole portion of quantum field theory that wants to describe quantum gravity well does need string theory and not just the "old things" about quantum field theory.

He says that the landscape of googol-to-the-fifth vacua makes no sense to him. Although I agree with most things he says about the multiverse story, he seems a bit irrational to me when he assaults the very *landscape*. The landscape is just the set of solutions and it is as large as Nature and mathematics decide, not caring whether or not the set and its size "makes sense" to a Gross.

Laymen misinterpret any uncertainty as a "wild guess". In science, uncertainty may be put under control and its existence is actually essential for a proper scientific understanding of anything. In the absence of experiments directly settling questions, we must rely on other scientific methods and we may arguably get very far with them. Philosophy isn't one of them; if a philosopher can offer musings that contribute to physics, he or she is actually doing physics.

The interview ends by not so controversial statements that science describes objective laws and patterns because even the human mind is a physical object. Maybe the author of the question wanted Gross to talk about the interpretations of quantum mechanics but he didn't understand it that way.

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Asymmetric fates of rivers of Pilsen

There were only two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, in a defunct multicultural city surrounding Saddam Hussein's summer palace 50 miles South of Baghdad but the number "two" was apparently sufficient to earn a famous song by the German band Boney M.



Rivers of Babylon. The description "German band" is a bit subtle if not amusing not only because of the racial laws of the 1930s but also because of the simple fact that only the producer was German while the singers were Britons from three Caribbean islands.

The rivers of Pilsen, my hometown, haven't generated any famous song yet despite the fact that Pilsen was cleverly established in 1295 near the confluence of a whopping number of four rivers. (A confluence of five rivers, an even larger number, was outsourced somewhere to India.)




I don't want to make your life harder by forcing you to pronounce four Czech names of the rivers (Mže, Radbuza, Úhlava, Úslava) which English speakers often consider a hard job. And even the German names may be hard and incomplete (only their name "Angel" for Úhlava is acceptable in English) so let me call the rivers Drizzle, Lovefaggot, Byhead, and Byfame which are lumoesque ad hoc translations of the Czech names that were created for the convenience of readers like you.

All these four rivers flow for about 100 kilometers before they reach the confluences in Pilsen. Drizzle, Lovefaggot, Byhead, and Byfame arrive from West, Southwest, South, and Southeast, respectively. They merge to the Berounka River (named after the town of Beroun near Prague) which continues to Northeast where it contributes to the Moldau (Vltava) river in Prague, also after 100 kilometers or so. All the four springs are located in Bohemia except for Drizzle which originates in Germany but just a mile behind the border.




In the recent year or so, I reorganized my understanding of the local geography. I would previously use man-made structures, usually at elevated places, as the main points of reference. These days, I partly think about the locations relatively to very different benchmarks, the one-dimensional rivers, whose altitude is naturally rather low.

One of the great realizations ;-) that have led to this paradigm shift was the idea that if you ride your bike near a river, you don't have to pedal uphill too much – because the rivers themselves don't like to do such things due to the bureaucratic constraints imposed upon them by the force of gravity (it sounds like a triviality but I needed experiments to be forced to realize or "discover" such a thing). And because most suburbs and villages in the Greater Pilsen sit at one of the rivers, one gets quite a nice grid that may be exploited to estimate the distances and quantify the coordinates.

In recent days, the Czech Republic and parts of Austria and Bavaria have experienced some mild inundations – which you've probably seen on your TV screen under the trademark "Armageddon" (even though the very throughflow is just 3/5 of what it was e.g. in August 2002). Four days ago, they would begin on the Gossip River (Czech: Klabava), the first non-Pilsner river that will become the fifth Pilsner (Berounka) tributary sometime in the future and where I spent lots of time during trips in April and May. Today in the morning, the weather turned partly sunny so I simply couldn't resist and had to inspect about 30 places near rivers in Pilsen.

Some of the changes made me excited; others made me impressed by the absence of any effect.

By the latter, I mean the Drizzle River coming from the West. It doesn't seem flooded at all. This is particularly ironic because those of us who have studied the industrial and agricultural history of the Pilsner region must know that the Drizzle River has been by far the most flooding one. Large areas near the Drizzle used to be inundated quite often which may look like an annoyance but these events were actually helping to improve the quality of the soil. The village of Křimice, now an administrative part of Pilsen, is a major example of a place that became famous for some of its agricultural products – cabbage, fruits, and so on. Byfame is often considered the least important one among the rivers of Pilsen and you may also see that the towns and villages on Byfame had to rely on some industrial (and not agricultural) production for more than a century.

(Oops, only in the evening I realized that the calmness of the Drizzle River has a simple reason: they decided to accumulate all the water – and there probably has been excess precipitation above Drizzle as well – in the Pealegumes (Hracholusky) Dam.)

Lovefaggot near the American Avenue is approaching the confluence with Drizzle. In the middle of the background: the Western Bohemian museum and the (green) Pilsen tower, i.e. the St Bartholomew Cathedral. The changing names of the American Avenue, the largest commercial street in Pilsen, represent a nearly self-satirizing testimony to the frequent changes of the political arrangement and the Czech opportunism. The avenue began as the Imperial Avenue in the 19th century to celebrate the Austrian Empire. In the early 20th century, it would be called the Jungmann Avenue to celebrate a 100-year-old patriot and a leader of the national revival. It would quickly be renamed as the Joseph I Avenue after a (then) 200-year-old emperor. After Czechoslovakia was created in 1918, it would be renamed the Wilson Avenue for 20 years to thank Woodrow Wilson for his contributions to the birth of Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis took over, the avenue would become the Charles IV Avenue, after a non-problematic and beloved 14th century Czech king and Holy Roman Emperor. In 1943, the Nazis optimistically renamed it as the Victorious Avenue but after the true victory in 1945, it became the Stalin Avenue. In the early 1960s, the Soviet leader became a bit unpopular so it was renamed the Moscow Avenue, before it turned the General Ludvík Svoboda Avenue after a war hero and a moderate communist president. In 1970, it was again the Moscow Avenue. In 1991, two years after the fall of communism, we had the American Avenue, with a short-lived confusion because some people wanted to call it the Prešov Avenue after a rather small East Slovak town (but a smaller street near the city center was ultimately named after Prešov). ;-) Just try to count the number of names! I must say that we have lived in the age of an unusual stability since the early 1990s.

It's helpful to know that Lovefaggot devours the Byhead river in South Pilsen (the Slovany=Slavs suburb) before it (Lovefaggot) reaches the most important confluence in Pilsen which is just 100 meters from the stadium of the Victoria Pilsen soccer team, the fresh Czech champion (the buildings in the right half of the map belong to the brewery). At this point, Lovefaggot joins Drizzle. Drizzle is the larger tributary so by the usual conventions, the resulting river should be called Drizzle. In fact, some Pilsner historians wanted to ban the name "Berounka" for the river between Pilsen and Prague and rename it to Drizzle again, while quoting some vague historical documents indicating that someone was calling it the Drizzle River even in places between Pilsen and Prague. They would even claim that Berounka was a nearly communist construct because the name only began to be used in the 17th century. ;-) Needless to say, their efforts to rename 100 km of a well-known river used by canoeists etc. had no chance to succeed.

When the river is already called Berounka – the major tributary of the Moldau River in Prague – it is going to devour the Byfame River in the Oakforest (Czech: Doubravka) suburb where I currently live. 10 km later, out of Pilsen, Berounka also devours the Gossip River.

So the most impressive negative surprise was the complete lack of a flood on the traditional flooding river of Pilsen, the Drizzle River. In fact, the confluence of Drizzle and Lovefaggot offered an unusually asymmetric perspective. Lovefaggot was boasting lots of excess water from the South. The water level was elevated by more than a meter and weirs became nearly invisible. The speed of the water may have been 3 meters per second and it was about 5 meters per second when I saw it yesterday.

On the contrary, Drizzle was nearly static near the confluence. I believe it was moving at 10 centimeters per second – and slower than normally because I believe that the normal speed is half a meter per second or so. How is it possible? Well, the confluence guarantees that the water level in Drizzle is elevated as well, due to the extra water in Lovefaggot, which increases the average cross section of Drizzle. Because the throughflow (volume of water per second) isn't really changed, a greater cross section of Drizzle translates to a much lower speed.

However, as soon as the Berounka River is created at this confluence, one may observe something I was already impressed by as a kid during the floods in the early 1980s - the Super Berounka River. Just imagine that most of the fields in the middle of this map became a part of the Berounka River.

At the end of the field, there is a bridge named after the nearby butchery which was closed due to some stability concerns; I knew it from the media. I also knew that the St George Church and Cemetery (center, just meters from the Berounka-Byfame confluence) became an island. But it isn't just an island in a peaceful sea. The water is flowing several meters per second on both sides.

I was sort of surprised that this pedestrian bridge at the center of the map was "naturally closed": about 50 meters of a vigorous Berounka River prevents pedestrians and cyclists from crossing this footbridge.

These are some exciting experiences just from several – or a dozen – of miles on four rivers. The inundations have affected hundreds if not a thousand of kilometers on dozens of rivers or so which means that what I have seen should be multiplied by 100 or so to get a realistic idea about the "geographic changes" that the inundations have brought us.

Let me mention that I described some factoids about the inundations in the box at the top of an article I wrote yesterday. The precipitation is pretty much over and places like Pilsen are already well after the peak; even Prague peaked around 6 am today. The excess water is moving to the lower portions of major rivers, especially Elbe (which has the Moldau as the most important tributary) and Danube. I don't expect any additional catastrophes. The damages are just a few billion crowns - multiples of $50 million. Six casualties – not necessarily people who were behaving safely. Lots of black humor about sharks and swimming races in the subway stations, a drunk president Zeman rafting near the Sri Chinmoy's statue to save the country, and many other things.



Mountain climbing in Antarctica etc.

Tonight, I attended a presentation by Mr Rudolf Švaříček (51), an adventurer, mountaineer, writer and publisher of travelogues, and owner of a travel agency called Livingstone that sells vacations in highly exotic destinations. It was an evening similar to one with Jakub Vágner more than a year ago.

He was a member of a small group – I didn't quite catch who did it and who didn't – of men who managed to walk from a sea shelf right to the highest peak of the Antarctica, Vinson Massif. (He has also been to most other countries in the world, especially those with high mountains.) Lots of amazing stories where they almost sacrificed their lives, extreme frostbite, lost toes, teeth, and so on.

I am not really following the world of the best alpinists and mountaineers so I don't know the names well. But of course I knew some of the people whom Mr Švaříček is really close to – the legendary old Czech traveler Mr Zikmund (his companion Mr Hanzelka died a decade ago), some top Czech mountaineers I don't remember, Dalai Lama who opened some exhibitions by Mr Švaříček, Karel Schwarzenberg, the unsuccessful #2 presidential candidate from the first elections a few months ago, and especially Dr Pavel Bém, the ex-mayor of Prague.

You may want to hear your humble correspondent as he boasts that he answered the highest number of quiz questions during the talk although it's not really my field. ;-) First, we were asked about the primacies of Antarctica. It's the coldest one. He wanted to hear it was the driest one, but I also added it was the most Southern one, and had to get some mysterious holy stone with some sacred scripture of some African tribes or whatever it is.

More seriously, we were asked how many Czechs have climbed Mount Everest from the Southern side. He previously mentioned many names of Czechs to confuse the audience. So for a minute, I was listening as the 100 folks in the audience were saying or screaming all kinds of integers you may think of. Six. Ten. Seventeen. Three. Eleven. Two. Twenty. I was thinking: Ladies and Gentlemen, please keep on talking all your gibberish, you have no chance. When the noise subsided a little bit, I loudly and authoritatively said: ONE. :-) So I won a plastic bag of Konyagi, a Tanzanian alcoholic beverage that Mr Švaříček was holding in his hands on a picture from the Antarctica's highest mountain (at least he claimed it was the same one) in order for the beverage to save his life whenever needed.

Of course, this ONE man is Dr Pavel Bém himself, the ex-mayor of Prague (now he is the ex-ex-mayor because his successor was made resigned a week ago, too, after a coalition in Prague broke down). In fact, it's plausible that this answer may be found somewhere on this blog. When he asked how many Czech people have conquered both Mt Everest and K2, I was listening to a very similar minute filled with random numbers. But I was already feeling painful to shout the right answer which is again ONE, of course, namely Pavel Bém again.

There was a different quiz how to find "six other months" in a calendar that apparently only shows 6 months out of 12. Ten people on the left side from me have been playing with the calendar for about 5 minutes, nearly destroying it. Of course I knew what to do. You may open it on both sides, including the edge where it seems to be bound. It's hard to say why one knows most of these things. I had to see a wallet using the same trick some decades ago or whatever it was. I am sure that some readers know what mechanism of the magic (flip) wallet I am talking about.

But back to more important things. The adventures that these people undergo are amazing and relatively speaking, I would say that these things aren't really too publicized, either. Although it's not exactly my cup of tea, I think that these extraordinary achievements or examples of courage don't get enough attention from the mainstream media and other resources most directly communicating with the public. It's a pity.

Mr Švaříček also talked about the importance of friendship in these trips and his love for the native tribes who can sometimes achieve more amazing things than the white tourists, without all the fanfare. We were also told that a mafia of gangster millionaires and mountaineers who de facto own the Antarctica and want to have a monopoly over flights going there was working hard to make the tourist achievement – walking from the sea to the highest peak – impossible by fudging the schedule of the flights. They failed, anyway.

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LARES: a discoball for eurocents that supersedes Gravity Probe B

Fred Singer was intrigued by a new object shot by ESA to outer space, a shiny disco ball that verifies Einstein's general relativity.



See the following preprint and other sources:

LARES succesfully launched in orbit: satellite and mission description by Antonio Paolozzi, Ignazio Ciufolini (arXiv)

---

The Extraordinary “Disco Ball” Now Orbiting Earth (Physics arXiv Blog)

---

Wikipedia, A LARES website (ASI, Italy), Lares-mission.COM

It's literally a disco ball, a completely passive object reflecting LASER lights sent from the Earth to its 92 retroreflectors, an 850-pound gorilla wolfram alloy ball that may be exploited to accurately measure the position and orientation of the disco ball and verify the Lense-Thirring effect i.e. rotational frame-dragging predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity.




Recall that Gravity Probe B was very expensive and it was a disappointment, too. If LARES is going to measure these things and perhaps much more accurately, and for a tiny fraction of the price of Gravity Probe B, it will be another piece of evidence that substantial technological improvements are often possible and may allow us to measure things that were once thought to be inaccessible.




Well, the success of LARES will be a bit embarrassing for the people around the design of Gravity Probe B, too, including George Pugh (MIT) and Kip Thorne (Caltech), but their contributions may have been necessary for the progress, too. Things aren't usually invented in the optimal and maximally cheap form at the very beginning.

Because we talk about clever gadgets, let me also mention that the Bell Labs developed a lensless camera (preprint).

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Most questions are no good

Off-topic, floods in Central Europe:

It all started in the Pilsner Region (3 days ago, the Klabava River I know from many recent trips was the flood superstar) but the elevated water has spread to Czechia and Austria and beyond as the excess water molecules are rolling down to lower altitudes.

Note that Czechia's Western and Northern borders are composed of mountains. Because our country is in the very center of Europe, we sit at the intersection of major river basins: North Sea (Elbe mostly via Moldau, green), Baltic Sea (Odra, yellow), Black Sea (Danube via Morava River, blue). The rain should stop tonight or tomorrow and the excess water should disappear from the higher altitudes and move to lower Elbe and Danube sometime tomorrow.



Eastern spiritual nut Sri Chinmoy's statue in a not-so-waterproof central Prague museum became a helpful benchmark to measure the water level while his prayer-like gesture involving his hands captures some of the atmosphere.

There's lots of water at places where we're not used to water, closed schools, a part of the Prague subway near the historical city center, flooded museum at the traditionally flooded "Kampa" suburb of central Prague etc. Six casualties in Czechia (including a canoeist in Greater Pilsen, a 69-year-old man who got sucked by a pipe of the sewerage system, and an energy utility employee: I know, this is not supposed to be a comedy show but I do think it would be wrong to hide that not all the casualties were behaving safely and shared no responsibility for their end) so far.

Look at this place in Pilsen I inspected 30 minutes ago. Now, the pedestrian underpass may only be followed if you swim in the dirty water which moves over 5 meters per second and goes from the wall on the left side to the underpass on the right side, up to the height reached right beneath the rim of the bridge. My guess is that the water level is just 1 meter higher than usually. However, an old St George church (it was on that place since 992 AD) one mile from my home was surrounded by water and placed on a temporary island. ;-)

Elsewhere, the situation has greater – mostly logistical and economic – consequences. Everyone who has flood-sensitive assets or responsibilities is surely forced at least to think (and sometimes act) about all the usual flood-related topics. However, I would still say that the floods are far from being comparable to the August 2002 floods [videos from Pilsen] I remember rather well.

See also a gallery of 100+ Czech fresh flood pictures. See 200+ more pictures. Almost 200 pictures from Greater Pilsen. Prague – with the Moldau River above 3,000 cubic meters per second (well below 5,000+ in 2002) – is experiencing a "20-year flood" with contributions both from Berounka (the river we send here from Pilsen: Berounka is the union of 4 tributaries, the rivers of Pilsen: Mže/Mies, Radbuza/Radbusa, Úhlava/Angel, Úslava) as well as from the Moldau Cascade of Dams that had to be released a bit; North Bohemian City of Ústí Upon Elbe expects a "100-year flood". See a video of North of Prague.

In Prague, the water will peak sometime on Tuesday (tomorrow) around 6 am.

There has been quite some discussion on TRF and elsewhere whether the question

What is the feeling between the two magnets? There's something there.

that an interviewer asked Richard Feynman during the Fun To Imagine program was a good or well-defined one. I am in the camp of the "resounding No" and in this text, I want to enumerate a few dozens of things that are often (or usually) wrong with the questions that are being addressed to scientists or that are even marketed as building blocks of the scientific process. Some of the observations apply outside science, too.




I believe that it's a part of the intellectually degenerated "postmodern" education promoting the humanities and the political correctness that people are led to believe (i.e. they are being brainwashed by the meme) that it's never painful to ask a question. In fact, we often hear that a question is always important, one should always be applauded if he asks a question, there are no bad questions, and it's always the fault of the person who is answering the question if a question leads to no constructive exchange.

Well, I beg to differ. Every single statement in the list above is wrong; questions may be bad and a large percentage of questions actually are bad; if questions are treated as contributions to the research, it's necessary to judge their quality just like we quantify the validity of hypotheses and the value of the answers; asking a stupid question may be a sign that someone hasn't learned something important that she should have already learned; quite generally, if we ask a question to someone, we should have some respect for his or her time and work a little bit to increase the odds that the question-and-answer exchange will lead to something useful (for us or perhaps also for others).

This culture of worshiping the questions for their own sake leads to the habit of ignoring the answers, ignoring the truth, and reducing the conversations and question answering to mindless exercises in which someone replies by a statement to a question and no one really cares what the reply is. But there are many other things that should be said about this topic. Let me start to enumerate the frequent flaws of questions.




Here is a partial list. Questions are often ill-defined, worthless, or demagogic for the following overlapping reasons, among others:

1. The words used in the question are ill-defined.
2. The words used in the question are ambiguous.
3. There are no settled rigorous enough definitions of the words or phrases in the question although the answer depends on them; only the formulation in terms of rigorous enough mathematical concepts would make the question meaningful.
4. The question wants to reduce one of the most fundamental concepts to even more fundamental ones, not realizing that the efforts are counterproductive verbal exercises if we're not guaranteed that this process stops at some point.
5. The question implicitly makes some invalid assumptions about the insights that are already known.
6. The question implicitly makes some probably invalid assumptions about the format of a future explanation of something.
7. The axiomatic system i.e. the set of possible true propositions that may be used in an answer is completely unclear – the context or target audience for the answer isn't specified. Even the author of the question has no idea how a satisfactory answer could look like; he must know that the question won't lead to anything sensible.
8. The question doesn't have a sensible level of difficulty that could produce a meaningful answer: it's either too primitive (something that the author of the question should have known) or too ambitious and it's asking about a point that shouldn't need an explanation at all or, on the contrary, a topic that needs hundreds of pages to be properly covered (which seems to expose the disrespectful assumption that the person who is answering may be "demanded" to spend much more time than the author of the question).
9. The question isn't meant to be a real question – a sentence designed to find some information – but rather as a rhetorical question to spread a certain way of thinking or emotion, usually a misconception.
10. The question is just an attempt of its author to pretend that he or she is smart but he or she isn't really interested in the answer.

Quite generally, the idea that the "author of the question is allowed to do everything" while the "person who answers only has duties and should suffer" is a part of the political correctness and mediocracy of the postmodern age. The authors of the questions are "us", the losers who know nothing and who have no duties and responsibilities and who have the right to demand anything, everything, and any entitlement they can think of; the people who are expected to answer are "they", the evil powerful people, the old white men or the Jews or the Big Oil interests (fascism, environmentalism, or feminism may use different words but in all cases, it's still the hated "they" and the logic behind all these pernicious ideologies is structurally the same), those who should be tortured.

Of course that the world doesn't work like that at the end (those hated "they" are either eliminated or they remain in the positions of power and become able to control what questions are allowed to be asked by "us" etc.) and it couldn't work like that but the totally distorted view that it "should" work like that is a testimony of the insanity of the left-wing, postmodern populist ideologues that have contaminated the intellectual atmosphere in the Western society in the recent 80 or 50 years or so (80 if I count the fascists).

The list above is in no way complete. Indeed, questions suffer from many diseases. It shouldn't be shocking that most questions that are being asked are garbage; if we live in a culture without any "natural selection" for questions – if the authors of questions are never "punished", regardless of the questions' very bad quality – it's sort of inevitable that bad, worthless, sick, stupid, and demagogic questions are guaranteed to "flourish" and contaminate the intellectual landscape. In principle, every single illness of a question in the list above could be understood as a lethal one – but you find many people whose questions suffer from every single disease in the list.

A few extra words about the illnesses and some examples follow.

Physics vs philosophy: ill-defined words

First, "ill-defined words". This is a frequent problem with the ancient philosophers' and armchair philosophers' questions and their approach to questions. This problem is really the primary reason why physics and philosophy had to divorce. Philosophy was no good because it was stuck in the "research" of tons of meaningless questions that could perhaps satisfy the rules of syntax but whose content was vacuous.

For example, philosophers may be obsessed with repeating enchantments involving the "free will", "background independence", "reality", and so on, and so on, and they ask whether these concepts are true or whether they exist. It depends on what these words actually represent. And there's no reason why Nature should associate a well-defined meaning with any sequence of words or letters such as these ones and thousands of others.

An essential fact for a scientist to realize is that there's no reason why a syntactically or grammatically legitimate sentence should be valuable or should deserve a well-defined answer or truth value (if it is a Yes/No answer). The language is a tool by which humans (or others) exchange some information. But if one uses it incorrectly, no information is being communicated, the sentences are meaningless, and it makes no sense to spend hours by trying to find answers. Some hard work and "assurances" are needed for a language or a more general framework of communication to be useful. If these conditions aren't met, the sentences won't be useful – they won't be useful for practical lives of the people; but they will be useless in the plan to learn the truth about Nature, too.

Philosophers – including philosophers who pretend to be interested in science but they are still just philosophers because of the unscientific character of their thinking – often misunderstand these basic facts. So they keep on solving questions that are ill-defined because the very words and phrases used in these questions have nothing to do with the fundamental concepts that the state-of-the-art scientific description of the given topics uses. They implicitly use an obsolete "theory" to talk about various things in the Universe.

Do we have a "free will"? I don't know what the question means. The fact that the Universe obeys some laws of physics (even though their character is probabilistic) could be interpreted as the answer that any "free will" is an illusion. But one may define the free will more specifically as some properties of spacetime regions and their ability to produce their own data and in quantum mechanics, the "free will theorem" may be proven to argue that these spacetime regions really "invent the answers" to the quantum mechanical measurements themselves. Clearly, the amount of sophistication in the "free will theorem" goes well beyond the naive mode of thinking that a typical author of the question "Do we have a free will" have in mind. So if you offer the free will theorem as an answer to a typical person's question about the free will, it's destined to be an example of throwing the pearls to the swines.

Philosophy – in the modern sense, i.e. the discipline of the humanities that has already lost its beef (natural sciences) – is largely based on the mindless worshiping of some human "authorities".

Sometimes their patently wrong answers are being preserved many centuries after their invalidity has been demonstrated; the very obsession with Aristotle's teachings has made a greater disservice to the emerging science, one that decelerated the birth of science more dramatically than the obsession with the life story of Jesus Christ. But even when the philosophers only worship the questions as something they should spend years of thinking with, it's often worthless questions. They don't want to admit that e.g. most of the would-be deep things that Aristotle said and asked about Nature were just naive stupidities at the level of an average educated teenager in 2013, artifacts of the stunning primitiveness of the description of Nature that was available when he was alive. This very simple observation is treated by some people – the "philosophers" – as a heresy you shouldn't even consider so you can't be surprised that such people haven't really made any progress in their understanding of Nature during the last 2,000 years. It's their very own, fundamental decision not to make any substantial progress. At least, the value of the questions asked centuries or millennia ago can't be questioned. In this respect, the philosophers are as dogmatic and incompatible with the process of learning as deeply, fundamentalistically religious folks.

The second item in the list above talks about ambiguous words. The situation is even worse when one meaning of the word may meaningfully appear in a question but the question is actually asking about another meaning of the word. It's sometimes very important for the well-definedness of the answer to decide which exact meaning of a word is meant in the question. Such a fine dependence of the answer on the detailed adjustments of the question automatically makes the question "less rigid" and therefore "less important" (it's obviously not the only aspect that can make a question less important, however). In some cases, only a rigorous enough reformulation in terms of nearly mathematically, rigorously defined concepts becomes the only way to make the question meaningful. Needless to say, the "philosophers" and other humanities-worshiping invaders into science often hate mathematics and they just don't like the self-evident fact that the language of mathematics is the only language that can turn many vague sequences of words into well-defined questions.

Some foundations or true propositions are always needed

Several items in the list above are talking about this widespread problem. When we want to understand a certain topic, e.g. the reason behind a phenomenon such as magnets' attractions (and it doesn't matter at all whether we start the question by the words "why", "how", or "what is the feeling"), we should always have some knowledge i.e. some propositions that we consider true and that the person who is answering the question is allowed to assume.

If we don't have any propositions that we accept to be true or concepts that can be used without further questioning, it simply means that we have no knowledge and there can't possibly exist a legitimate way to answer our question, whatever the question is! This utterly simple and logically self-evident point is clearly misunderstood or underestimated by many authors of various "why" questions who seem to believe that one may answer questions so that the answer depends on no assumptions whatsoever. If we respect the validity of no facts, we may always ask "why" after any sentence that the person who is answering adds. We may "question" every statement he makes, whatever the statement is. In such a situation, it is totally clear that such a conversation can't possibly lead to any meaningful outcome. We're caught in an infinite loop (a smart enough girl from the kindergarten should be able to see the proof why the loop is infinite!) and we're clearly wasting our time (and sometimes also the time of another person who is not as stupid as we are and who really didn't want to waste his time!).

So one must always have some axiomatic system, a collection of propositions that we can verify to be true or a whole methodology (e.g. one based on observations or rigorous mathematical derivations) that allows us to verify the validity or invalidity of whole classes of propositions we haven't previously encountered. We may often be more certain or less certain about various propositions in which case the confidence level (subjective probability of a sort) between 0 and 1 replaces the binary truth value that may only be 0 or 1. But there must be something like statements with a truth value or with a confidence level, otherwise it makes no sense to discuss the validity of any other statements or explanations. More strongly, we should also have some idea about which statements are more fundamental as components of an explanation than others; this idea is needed to decide whether some answers and explanations are actually representing progress in our understanding why certain things are the way they are.

Needless to say, the humanities-oriented education encourages people to know no hard facts like that (they prefer the superficial form, they prefer to train folks to master the tools to pretend that they're smart even if they are completely uneducated imbeciles) – and, which is even worse, to be proud about this complete ignorance of theirs. Their brains' being an example of the vacuum still doesn't prevent them from writing their "opinions" about many things. That's, for example, why most science journalists are writing about topics they don't know anything about, except for two or three (usually invalid) slogans and clichés.

When the situation of the author of the question isn't that hopeless, she or he has some axiomatic system to build upon. But even in that case, it should be made sufficiently clear what the system is. The guy who asked about the magnets didn't specify what he knew if he knew something at all. So of course that the appropriate explanation of magnets is different when the target audience are typical 6-year-old kids, curious 15-year-old teenagers, college students, graduate students, or peers of the theoretical physics Nobel prize winners.

This dependence of the appropriate explanation on the target audience is something that is hard to swallow for many people, too. They would love universal answers. But only the most advanced answer may be really superior, in comparison with the more primitive and less accurate ones. But a vast percentage of the people simply doesn't have the background to understand these most advanced and accurate explanations.

In this context, I must also defend the schools. At basic schools or high schools – and perhaps in the colleges – kids are taught some simplified answers to questions that use a somewhat more primitive system (e.g. classical mechanics with forces or something even simpler), oversimplified methods to reason, approximate and obsolete models of the physical world, and not the most accurate mathematical tools to calculate the answers. But this is really inevitable. If a 6-year-old girl can't understand a more accurate explanation (e.g. because she hasn't mastered quantum field theory or string theory yet), it would simply be a waste of time to provide her with an advanced (e.g. quantum-field-theory-based) explanation of a certain effect. It would be a case of torturing kids if she had to memorize an explanation based on M-theory. This is true not only for 6-year-old girls but also for 50-year-old men who just don't know certain prerequisites (and for everyone else, too). The very fact that their background knowledge has some limitations – i.e. that they're qualitatively analogous to the 6-year-old girls – is something incompatible with the pride of many adults (and teenagers). But their pride can't change anything about the fact that they may only understand certain answers and explanations that are optimized for the background they have already mastered.

The interviewer asking about the magnets hasn't explained what his background was. His talking about "feelings" indicated that he knew nothing about physics at all, not even the things he should have learned at the basic school. In such a situation, it's hard to answer a question that sounds like if he wanted to understand the deepest reasons behind magnetism. One simply can't understand the deepest answers about the Universe with the shallowest possible knowledge and the most modest skills he can possibly have. These are incompatible things. The interviewer's attempt to suggest that he's thirsty for the deepest explanations even though his knowledge seems to be the shallowest is a hint that he's one of the pompous fools that Feynman couldn't stand – and I can't stand them, either.

There are no feelings between magnets. Magnets are manifestations of the magnetic field constructed from the aligned magnetic fields of the electrons' spins (in the case of the bar magnets i.e. ferromagnets; diamagnets, paramagnets, and electromagnets would require three other explanations) and the magnetic field (which appears in all these situations) is one of the most fundamental things that exist in Nature. One may reduce the electromagnetic field to things that are "somewhat more fundamental" than just the postulated electromagnetic field but one must first learn physics to understand the electroweak theory, the grand unified theory, and/or string theory. Except for the string theory case, one "reduces" the electromagnetic field to things that are generalizations of the electromagnetic field, anyway, so one doesn't really discover any genuine simplification.

But if one doesn't know the tools to follow the electroweak theory or the harder things, he should just accept that the electromagnetic field is one of the most fundamental things in the Universe and it is, on the contrary, all the everyday processes (like all of chemistry, biology, electrical engineering, or the pressure exerted by a finger, among others) that should be explained in terms of electromagnetism, not the other way around! Physics isn't trying to reduce the magnetic forces to "feelings"; on the contrary, physics and biology are reducing feelings to electromagnetic forces. And I think that this fundamental importance of electromagnetism is such a basic, game-changing part of the natural science that a person who doesn't know that electromagnetism is this important and "unquestionable pillar of science" simply failed to learn physics at the basic school level. We're not talking about any state-of-the-art physics research. We're not even talking about the college-level physics. We're talking about the question whether one listened to and understood some basic physical facts that were said to him when he was 10 years old – and for the interviewer, the answer is almost certainly No. That's why it's immensely annoying if such a child who was left behind is trying to look smart by asking similar would-be deep questions about the "feelings causing magnetism".

Demagogy, rhetorical questions that should be real questions, hidden wrong assumptions

Several items in my list are dedicated to the questions which aren't asked in order to find any useful information at all. Some of them may be designed for the author of the question to look smart (or deep) and/or curious even though he self-evidently is neither smart (or deep) nor curious.

Other questions are designed to promote invalid assumptions about physics that is already known. For example, when Lee Smolin asks "How to get a background-independent theory of quantum gravity", he wants to promote his lies about string-theoretical dynamics' not being background-independent. He has been repeatedly caught as admitting that he realizes why these propositions are lies (David Gross gave a detailed monologue about this fact to other folks at a conference) but he still finds it useful if the brainwashed laymen who are actually ready to pay for Smolin's garbage books – the children who were left behind – are being indoctrinated in this way. So his questions aren't really questions. They are references to some lies he has made at other places. These would-be questions are encouraging the brainwashed readers and listeners to repeat the lies they have been exposed to in their heads. It's a part of his Goebbelsian effort to sustain the lies that are convenient for him.

He is a dishonest jerk and a demagogue and of course that most demagogues are using various loaded questions as very effective weapons in their propaganda wars. A whole category of these "sick questions" are rhetorical questions that shouldn't be rhetorical at all. Many people often ask a question and they don't really expect an answer – even though there actually often exists a very solid, satisfying answer to the question (in this sense, the situation is the opposite one than the situations described in the early portions of this essay). They just mean their questions as attacks.

There are lots of diseases that questions may suffer from and they often do and I could talk for hundreds of hours. But I want to emphasize the basic point: if we want to count questions as intellectual contributions, we must care about their quality, too. As soon as we start to think about questions a bit less uncritically and to compare their quality, we're already on the right way to avoid some of the traps (or all of them).

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Richard Feynman: Fun To Imagine

You must have seen many excerpts from the following video featuring Richard Feynman:



But maybe you have never watched the whole 66-minute-long video. Here it's waiting for you.

He covers lots of things – need for imagination in physics; heat is wiggling; surface tension is the attempts of molecules to get in...




In a similar way, he explains using the atomic language why gases cool down when they expand. And thousands of other fun things...




Various atoms like each other to various degrees. Wood and oxygen. They get caught and create lots of jiggling which is spread elsewhere and what you get a catastrophe. The catastrophe is called fire. ;-)

Where the did carbon get there from? It came from the air. The wood is from the air: it grew by absorbing carbon dioxide. Just a little bit from the ground. These anthromorphic stories about the life of the atoms sound funny.

He also traces the energy – it ultimate comes from the Sun. Where did the Sun find the jiggling (energy)? He has to stop somewhere...

How do rubber bands work? There are chains of molecules but other molecules are jiggling and hitting the chains, trying to shorten them. It only works when the rubber is warm – heat is necessary. Rubber bands' temperature goes up when you stretch them and vice versa. The jiggling is inside everything.

Around 14:40, the scene about "what the magnets feel" starts. You must have already seen this exchange. An irritated Feynman repeats the claim of the author of the question that it's an excellent question but makes it very clear that the question was utterly idiotic, too. When we ask "why", we must have some facts that we're allowed to use as more fundamental facts, parts of the answer. Magnetism is more fundamental than the macroscopic events we know from the everyday life.

At 22:07, we switch to a dentist and a water dam. Turning wheels in the dam make all the wheels in the city turn. It's all about iron and copper, a natural thing. Again, he points out that there are long-range forces that are more fundamental than the "direct touch" forces we know. Gravity is much weaker; but it may matter when the electric forces etc. get neutralized.

31:40, fraternity at MIT gives questions like: Why you get left-right but not upside-down reflected in the mirror? ;-) A fellow Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows (humanities) was impressed by this question and didn't want to believe that I could solve such a problem. ;-) The actual mirror only reflects the front-rear direction. We just psychologically imagine that the image is rotated around the horizontal axis – this rotation is a symmetry unbroken by the gravitational field – which makes the image left-right reflected.

34:50, what keeps the train on the tracks? The planes of contact are tilted, regulating the direction back if the train is destabilized much like the differential – something that the trains don't need.

37:20, seeing things. A not too pretty woman sitting in the swimming pool allows one to watch the waves instead. Sensitive spots in the eye. Mess of waves in the space (electromagnetic fields with all the frequency modes) and complicated mechanisms in the eyes and radios. As a kid, I was also stunned when I realized the idea that all the information about all the radio and TV stations is flying around me in the room at the same moment.

At 43:20, he talks about scales. Big numbers. You scale yourself to imagine them. Why Earth is round. Nuclear fuel. Neutron star matter – balancing gravity and pressure. Pulsars – they're the same thing. Immense densities, confirmation of predictions. Black holes.

54:30, ordinary people like Feynman can master these things. There are no miracle people. With some investment of time, he becomes a scientist. A bit too idealistic. 55:20, his research is a nutty mixture of equations, ideas, and vague pictures of equations. In every man's head, the imagery is probably very different from others. Translation engines work hard. He thinks so because different people solve problems differently. Feynman couldn't do counting multitasking; someone else uses an optical system for counting.

1:00:55, I have already linked to this many times. We're used to understand very different phenomena than the fundamental ones. Quantum mechanics is wonderfully different than the macroscopic world. People who try to reduce QM to some mundane or classical mechanism will be defeated.

Incidentally, when I talk about quantum mechanics, let me modestly mention that the first tag in the history has earned a gold badge on the Physics Stack Exchange. Which tag was that? Yup, it was quantum mechanics. Congratulations to Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, Pauli, and a few others, too! ;-)

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