## Saturday, September 29, 2012 ... /////

### Gore's investment firm: no green investments

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

WND.com just published a very interesting text with the title:

Al Gore bails from green energy investment
Bill Gunderson, the president of Gunderson Capital Management, has looked at the portfolio of Al Gore's investment management firm, Generation Investment Management. In fact, you can look at the list yourself; it's at the SEC website:
SEC about Gore's firm
What firms will you see there?

### Raphael Bousso is right about firewalls

Five days ago, I reviewed the discussions on black hole firewalls, started by AMPS in July 2012. Joe Polchinski wrote a guest blog for Cosmic Variance yesterday.

During the days, I had enough time to sort all these issues and I am confident that Raphael Bousso is right and Polchinski and others are wrong.

## Friday, September 28, 2012 ... /////

### President Klaus survives "assassination attempt"

There's a national holiday in the Czech Republic today. We call it the Day of Czech Statehood.

On September 28th, 935 – or perhaps 929 – Good King Wenceslaus (later St Wenceslas, the patron of the Czech nation) whom you know from a Christmas Carol was murdered by his brother Boleslav the Cruel.

It's probably unusual to celebrate anniversaries of the assassination but that's how it works here. No one knows the exact birthday of the king in 907, anyway.

Today it's also the name day of all people called Václav (=Wenceslaus) – a traditionally popular first Czech name that was also recycled by several Czech kings of a later era but one that began to disappear among the newborns, however. Despite the decline of the name, it's been an unwritten rule that the presidents of the Czech Republic have to be called Václav: Havel and Klaus both bore this name. To make things dramatic, the Bashar Assad lookalike on the picture above shot the current leader, Václav Klaus, today.

### Exotic branes, U-branes, and U-folds

TBBT: All American readers should notice that the first episode of the 6th season of The Big Bang Theory was aired by CBS yesterday. Howard was in space.

Holes: Joe Polchinski wrote a Cosmic Variance guest blog on black hole firewalls.

SUSY: Dave Goldberg at IO9 asks what's so super about it.
The first hep-th paper on the arXiv today is a wonderul 94-page-long article
Exotic Branes in String Theory
by Jan de Boer and Masaki Shigemori of Amsterdam. It is a kind of an excursion into the inner workings of string theory that I find extremely important, playful, and I think that similar papers are heavily undercited, underread, and understudied.

The Dutch and Japanese string theorists investigate a certain unusual type of objects whose existence depends on special properties of string theory and which don't exist in regular quantum field theories etc. That's why they are called "exotic". However, as the authors argue, within string theory, these objects are common, unavoidable (they arise, for example, during "polarization" of ordinary branes), and therefore omnipresent.

## Thursday, September 27, 2012 ... /////

### Fifty years after Silent Spring

Conservationism or environmentalism as an ideology has its roots in Nazi Germany and one could probably go even further.

But the Western environmentalism in the form we are familiar with today was born exactly 50 years when Rachel Carson began to release her book Silent Spring. It's such an inconvenient anniversary that most of the articles about the anniversary listed by Google News have been written by the critics of environmentalism.

### Experimenters, SUSY, frustrations, and anthropic ideas

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

Fashion for naturalness

So almost everyone who is building his or her interest in fundamental physics on accessible experiments seems to be frustrated these days. The discovery of the Higgs boson may have made those emotions even worse, see e.g. Jester at Resonaances, in agreement with the "nightmare scenario" people would talk about 5 years ago and we seem to be living through now, so far (the scenario is that the LHC only finds the Higgs boson and nothing else). Those of us who don't think that physics ends at $8\TeV$ or $14\TeV$ – and this includes most formal theorists, I would guess – are largely unaffected by this particular spleen, of course. ;-)

Note that patience is sometimes needed. Peter Higgs hasn't spent 50 years in depressions even though he had to wait for the discovery of "his" goddamn particle for 48 years – despite the fact that it's a very trivial quantum of a field that is more mundane than any other field we have found in Nature (it's spinless, stupid). That's a reason to think that the problem is with the people, not with the actual progress in physics. People just don't like physics as much as our predecessors did. They keep on whining, complaining, and I am annoyed by them because the current physics' image of the world is richer and more accurate than it has been at any moment in the past.

## Wednesday, September 26, 2012 ... /////

### Albert Einstein 1911-12, 1922-23

Several events related to Albert Einstein's life occurred in recent days and months. If you consider yourself a sort of Einstein fan, you may let me mention some of them.

First, you may finally buy Einstein's brain for $9.99 (or$13.99 now?), no strings or hair attached. See Google News or go to the iTunes AppStore.

Second, Caltech and Princeton University Presses teamed up and released the 13th volume of Einstein papers. They cover January 1922-March 1923 and you may already buy the book for $125 at the PUP website: it has over 900 pages. Einstein is travelling a lot, is ahead of time and already (or still) speaks Hebrew in British Palestine ;-), and doesn't even mention his Nobel prize. Wired about the new book. ### Street View: Antarctica, deep ocean, Alps, Mars, etc. If you haven't played with Google Maps for some time, you may want to try some of the wonderful links below. Note that the Street View always allows you to "drag" and change your point of view – or press $\langle$ and $\rangle$ arrows on the photograph itself and walk a little bit further. You may think that Street View doesn't allow you to enter the living rooms but at least in some cases, this opinion is wrong. ### Witten's new trilogy on RNS diagrams Witten is such a big guy in physics that I will probably not attempt to write a single article attempting to cover all his important contributions to physics, something I did and I plan with other inaugural Milner Prize winners. Instead, we may talk about specific new papers. I have already mentioned Edward Witten's work on technical issues of RNS Feynman diagrams but because the full trilogy is now out, it may be appropriate to summarize the links and add a few comments. There are three papers Short (review of the long one), medium (background on manifolds), long (the bulk). This ordering is chronological, too. After we learned that the first two papers had 42 and 118 pages, respectively, we could guess what the length of the final paper would be. The answer is that the digit counting hundreds is linearly increasing, the digit counting tens is alternating between 1 and 2, and the last digit is describing coordinates of the point (2,8,5). I guess that no one had the right answer. ;-) ## Tuesday, September 25, 2012 ... ///// ### BBC: Who's afraid of a big black hole? Another episode about fundamental physics of the BBC 2 "Horizon" program, featuring people such as Andy Strominger (in a dark classroom of the Jefferson Lab and in his office), was aired in November 2009. ### Did EPA test toxins on humans? Steve Milloy of JunkScience.COM and pals have sued Lisa Jackson's EPA for having deliberately exposed unhealthy humans to harmful and lethal substances: EPA Human Testing.COM, a special website about the story The initial text over there Canada Free Press, WUWT, PR Web, Tucson Citizen, NLPC story (Paul Chesser) Milloy et al. claim to have gone through hundreds of pages obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. The documents imply, he says, that at least a dozen of citizens were treated by carcinogenics and other harmful pollutants, including diesel exhaust and fine particulate matter (PM2.5). ### Almost all particle physics papers will be free Journals will sign a deal with libraries In many other fields such as Earth sciences, people are dreaming about the free access for everyone. In high energy physics, this dream is becoming a reality. After all, most high energy physicists have relied on arXiv.org, a freely accessible preprint server (see a NYT story about it), as their main source of information for more than two decades. Nature tells us some details about the deal that will make the transition of journals to the free form possible. ## Monday, September 24, 2012 ... ///// ### BBC: How small is the universe? Off-topic: Czech police claims to have found the culprits behind the methanol scandal which killed 25 people in recent weeks (and led the government to impose temporary prohibition). The two men have fully confessed and face up to life sentences. A company legally using methanol to produce windshield washers was selling the methanol to the black market. The two criminals knew that they were producing a deadly mixtures of ethanol and methanol – to make profit, regardless of people's lives. I assure everyone that none of this business has ever compromised the safety of Czech exported beverages, especially not those produced near Pilsen, the opposite side of the country, so discrimination against Czech alcohol would be a sign of someone's misunderstanding of the details. If you haven't watched this BBC2 Horizon program named How small is the universe? four weeks ago, here is the 60-minute video: Is the narrator speaking in conventional British English? It's about Nature at very short distance scales and topics such as the string theory landscape, tiny black holes, the Planck length, quasiparticles, MAGIC cosmic rays telescope, and many more things. ### Are black holes surrounded by firewalls? Dilaton has noticed a new, extremely provocative concept that was introduced among the quantum gravity researchers two months ago: the firewall. For decades, people teaching general relativity – including your humble correspondent (e.g. here) – have been explaining that nothing special happens to an infalling observer when she crosses a black hole event horizon. The curvature is usually pretty small there – the curvature radius is close to the black hole radius – and you only get torn apart once you approach the black hole singularity which may be much later. Advertisement of a future text: Read also Raphael Bousso is right about firewalls The event horizon is just a coordinate singularity; with a better choice of coordinates, the vicinity of the horizon (including a region below and a region above the horizon) looks like a nearly flat piece of the Minkowski spacetime. These coordinates may be "extremely distorted" functions of some other coordinates you may use for other purposes but they exist. Because the laws of general relativity are local, the (nearly) flat geometry of the region implies that there will be (nearly) the same phenomena there as in the flat space. Later, some quantum properties of black holes have been pretty much established, too. The picture has made sense to everyone who has ever been considered a top expert in quantum gravity. That was the case until July 2012. ### EU carbon market will be saved by a new boom of coal An hour ago, I saw a fascinating article on Patria.CZ, a Czech server for investors, which revealed a highly paradoxical, nearly comical plan. Analysts at UBS are predicting that by 2015, energy giants such as E.ON and RWE will build lots of new coal power plants – in fact, their capacity will be 6 times greater than the capacity of previously preferred gas-based alternatives. That may send the price of carbon permits up by 73% by 2013. Note that the U.N.-based carbon indulgences' price, CER, dropped by 80 percent in the most recent year. ## Sunday, September 23, 2012 ... ///// ### Klaus in Telegraph: on final stages of destruction of democracy in the EU The Telegraph is running a story on Czech President Klaus' view on the EU and promotes his new book to appear in the U.K. next week, Václav Klaus warns that the destruction of Europe's democracy may be in its final phase The book is called The Shattering of Illusions. It has 200 pages and costs £14.44. ## Saturday, September 22, 2012 ... ///// ### Australia: qubit as a single silicon atom Peter F. has pointed out the following intriguing experimental advance in quantum computing: Australians Create 1-Atom Silicon Quantum Computing Bit (quBit) (Daily Tech) How does it work? ## Friday, September 21, 2012 ... ///// ### Chu and CMS' Incandela's DOE Higgs talk Steve Chu is going to get some positive TRF publicity. ;-) A week ago, Joe Incandela, the boss of CMS, gave a talk for the Department of Energy. Nobel prize winner Steven Chu who happens to be a secretary at the department gave an introduction. In the U.S., you may become a secretary even if you're neither a hot blonde nor a hot brunette. ### German biogeochemistry postdoc proposes to extinguish the "unsustainable" Sun Nathaniel Virgo (SE) is a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Jena. His DPhil was about the effect of limited energy supply on organisms. You may see lots of similar "conventional physics" topics that are always "tainted by the environmentalist ideology" a little bit. Two hours ago, he asked a question at the Physics Stack Exchange that made me LOL. He has already made all the important general plans and only asks the physics users to help him with a technical detail. So his question is: What is the easiest way to stop a star? No kidding. You're going to learn something about the mainstream science at the mainstream scientific institutes that do research into Earth sciences. ;-) ### May the name legitimately influence the fate of an application? Yes. Cosmic Variance promotes something that feminists consider to be science, namely this paper in PNAS: Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students The paper claims that they wrote 127 applications for a lab manager position, attached a random name of the applicant which could be either male or female, and found out that the applications with the male name had better ratings. ## Thursday, September 20, 2012 ... ///// ### Insane reaction to the PBS interview with Anthony Watts Three days ago, PBS did a piece on the climate change debate and featured Richard Muller as an alarmist (self-described converted ex-skeptic) and Anthony Watts as a skeptic (and later others such as Judith Curry): Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message If you listen to those 9.5 minutes, you may agree with me that Anthony Watts was speaking as a lukewarmer. It doesn't mean that I sharply disagreed with something; I didn't. (Well, I found Anthony's focus on the urban heat islands excessive and at one point, he almost denied that there exist any natural climate drivers – but I must have overinterpreted a sentence.) But he was surely not speaking as a partisan. But the very fact that PBS dared to interview the man behind the world's most visited climate website caused an explosion of anger among the climate activists and, unfortunately, not only the climate activists. ## Wednesday, September 19, 2012 ... ///// ### Thomson Reuters bets on teleported higgsless Nobel Breaking news: Dr Joseph Conlon, a string theorist at Oxford cooperating with the Royal Society as well, just sent me a link to their new cute website called: WhyStringTheory.COM. Recommended! The physics Nobel prize winners for 2012 will be announced on Tuesday, October 9th. As the Montreal Gazette and others mention, Thomson Reuters that often publishes its guesses – with mixed results – has made a somewhat strange prediction for this year's award. David Pendlebury of Thomson Reuters uses his alchemist Al Gore Rhythm based on the Web of Knowledge to guess the winners. Who are they? ### Astronomical unit (AU) redefined We visited an old astronomer yesterday: I could see the sunspots exactly as you can see them on the web, except that the image was left-right-reflected and somewhat rotated. By the way, if you click at the link, there's a tiny sunspot between 1569 and 1571, 2 times closer to 1569, that I could see as well. But I want to mention another astronomical report. A few days ago, Nature told us that the astronomical unit has been redefined after a vote in Peking (yes, because it's Peking, it was an unanimous vote): The astronomical unit gets fixed Similar people who gathered in Prague 6 years ago and decided that Pluto no longer belonged to the elite club of planets met in Beijing and reformed the definition of 1 AU. What was it before? ## Tuesday, September 18, 2012 ... ///// ### The West is nearly apologizing to hordes of bloodthirsty Islamists Related news: A Coptic Christian has shot a movie revealing that Mohammed was a homosexual child molester, womanizer, and a naive fool. This group of Christians in Egypt is pretty influential. The New York Times and The Boston Globe just wrote about a Coptic papyrus studied at Harvard (apparently authentic one) that talks about Jesus' wife. ;-) As far as the U.S. politics goes, I am close to the G.O.P. in many respects although it may be more accurate to classify me as a libertarian in the U.S. context (except that I am flabbergasted by the fact that this key political direction almost represents an irrelevant fringe group in the U.S.). But I could see that the typical G.O.P. members don't really respect the same value during the Summers wars at Harvard. Most Harvard people who were nominally right-wing Americans didn't do anything whatsoever to stop the insane witch hunts started by the feminists and similar highly obnoxious groups of activists. In fact, some people who considered themselves Christian have always been radical guardians of the political correctness who were really scaring me – and bullying me personally. I won't name the guys here. ## Monday, September 17, 2012 ... ///// ### Smileys: 30 years On Wednesday, it will have been 30 years since the birth of the smiley emoticons. You probably don't know who invented them. ### Stringy boundary conditions and D-branes In general, strings in string theory may be open or closed. Open strings are topologically line intervals with two endpoints; closed strings are topologically circles. The fields defined on the strings may be periodic as a function of $\sigma$, the spatial coordinate along the string, or they may obey various other boundary conditions. Let's look at them. ## Saturday, September 15, 2012 ... ///// ### Michio Kaku: physicists invented everything This 42-minute Big Think video by the string field theory pioneer called "The Universe in the Nutshell" (yes, Stephen Hawking should feel plagiarized) is exactly one month old right now and while it is of a somewhat lighter genre, I found its slightly over-the-edge claims amusing: Physicists invented microwave ovens and everything else. Schoolkid Kaku. Physicists will invent everything. ## Friday, September 14, 2012 ... ///// ### Innocence of Muslims: watch HD here Off-topic: Czech government imposed a full prohibition of beverages with 20 or more percent of alcohol, after 19 people died by methanol poisoning in recent days. Well, I think the prohibition is counterproductive. Millions of Muslims – including the Iranian mullah-in-chief and the official Fars News agency – seem to be super-upset about a$50,000 movie by a Coptic guy who lives in South California (and who has made some illegal financial transactions in the past).

Khamenei is crazy enough to demand the U.S. will execute the filmmaker for blasphemy. Savages in Libya have murdered the U.S. ambassador. U.S. flags are burning everywhere. All the top 12 stories at Fars News right now are dedicated to the movie: no kidding.

### Japanese guy may have proved the $abc$ conjecture

Up to a few exceptions to be proved separately, a strengthening of Fermat's Last Theorem

Four days ago, Nature described a potentially exciting development in mathematics, namely number theory:

Proof claimed for deep connection between primes
Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto divided the steps needed to prove the 1985 conjecture by Oesterlé and Masser into four papers listed at the bottom of the Nature article above.

The newly revealed proof works with mathematical structures such as the Hodge theaters (a theater with Patricia Hodge is above, I hope it's close enough) and with canonical splittings of the log-theta lattice (yes, the word "splitting" is appropriate above, too).

What is the conjecture about and why it's important, perhaps more important than Fermat's Last Theorem itself?

## Thursday, September 13, 2012 ... /////

### Vafa's new 4D string theory

First, another new paper.

Those people who conjectured that Edward Witten may stop doing physics after having won the $3 million Milner Prize may face a problem with their belief system today. Witten just revealed his new Notes On Super Riemann Surfaces And Their Moduli which has – sit down now, please – 118 pages. And it's just the second part in a trilogy; the first part appeared yesterday and it has 42 pages. He announced his intense work on these issues at Strings 2012. Supermanifolds and super Riemann surfaces in general are objects that locally look like a superspace, e.g. $\CC^{1|1}$. The number "1" after the vertical line refers to the number of Grassmann dimensions. ### Barroso wants a European Federation The chieftain of the self-described European Commission, José Manuel Barroso (PT), gave a speech in Strasbourg in which he declared his intent to transform the European Union to a federation. Barroso, claiming that "Europe needs a new sinking" (haven't we seen enough sinking of our continent already?), wants a federal Europe built on the existing institutions; in other words, this head of the so-far irrelevant European Commission, a politician who started his career in the Portuguese Communist Workers' Party, wants to become a European dictator. See the whole speech with a satirical name, State of the Union address (43 minutes). This guy and many others have clearly lost their contact with reality. After several years in which we've been shown every day how counterproductive and dangerous the unification of the ununifiable may be – for Europe and for the whole world economy – Barroso tells us we must repeat the same mistakes and do so even more vigorously than ever before. ## Wednesday, September 12, 2012 ... ///// ### Official Iranian media promote truthism One of the conspiracy theories studied in the Stephan Lewandowsky's fraudulent paper claiming to establish that the climate skepticism is correlated with the belief in conspiracy theories was the so-called truthism, i.e. the belief system that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks. On the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, the official state-owned Iranian media corporation, Press TV, offered us a rather bizarre piece of anecdotal evidence that the correlation goes the other way around. ### PLB publishes Higgs discovery papers Thanks for all the kind words and advices. On July 4th, 2012, CERN announced the discovery of a new particle whose properties universally indicated it was the Higgs boson. (Those of us who rationally followed the published results knew that there was a new particle and what its mass was since mid December 2011.) They also promised to send the paper to a classical paper journal at the end of July. That's exactly what happened: ATLAS and CMS submitted their texts to Physics Letters B around July 31st. Within two weeks, the two papers were accepted and they will appear in the September 17th, 2012 issue of PLB (Volume 716 Issue 1). A cute fact is that this "commercial" (although funded primarily by taxpayers' mandatory contributions to research and education) journal made the papers freely available and they're already out. ## Tuesday, September 11, 2012 ... ///// ### I probably suffer serious illness Candida overgrowth You may have noticed that the blogging frequency decreased during the last week or so. So did my life expectancy: with the right definition, it dropped nearly 100% over the same week. While I was feeling unusually healthy just 5 weeks ago or so, experiencing no more-than-cosmetic problems and having had no flu or cold for a year etc., everything is different now. Whether I will be around in a month is yet to be seen... ## Monday, September 10, 2012 ... ///// ### Stephan Lewandowsky's incredible blog Joanne Nova is dedicating a lot of space to a radical crackpot named Stephan Lewandowsky whom you may remember from his fresh paper proving the climate skeptics believe in moonlanding conspiracies because he asked visitors of alarmist blogs. Steve McIntyre and others have offered their opinions about the Lewandowsky scam, too. ## Saturday, September 08, 2012 ... ///// ### Pseudoscience hiding behind "weak measurements" Jason Rush sent me a link to a new insane anti-quantum article spread by the BBC: Quantum test pricks uncertainty Subtitle: Pioneering experiments have cast doubt on a founding idea of the branch of physics called quantum mechanics. The subtitle is particularly "cool". In recent months, we "learned" from some would-be scientific journals and the mainstream media that the wave function is "surely" not interpreted statistically. Now we're told that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle has been wrong from the beginning, too. In fact, the subtitle finally makes the "paradigm shift" that all the anti-quantum zealots have been expecting at least from 1925 as simple and clear as possible: quantum mechanics itself has been put in doubt. What happens when a few assholes acquire access to cool lasers? Fine. What concepts are these hardcore cranks relying upon? ## Friday, September 07, 2012 ... ///// ### Klaus: West is, disappointingly, returning to socialism and etatism The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in 1947 by free-market luminaries Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman, among others. Its 2012 General Meeting took place at the Prague Castle between last Sunday and today. Czech president Václav Klaus gave the following speech: ## Thursday, September 06, 2012 ... ///// ### Science debate, 14 questions: Romney beats Obama Some people wanted American politicians to explicitly address scientific questions. Whether it's important or not, the project has become a reality. Your humble correspondent and Slate are among those (see Google News for media reactions) who think that judging by the answers, Romney defeated Obama, despite all the talk about the Left's being pro-science. ## Tuesday, September 04, 2012 ... ///// ### Pascual Jordan and foundations of QM Among the fathers of quantum mechanics, Pascual Jordan is the least well-known one. Needless to say, politics is the single most important reason behind his invisibility although it is not necessarily the only one. While he genuinely believed in the ideals of the NSDAP that he joined at some moment (not to speak about Luftwaffe and the Peenemünde rocket center where he worked as a climate scientist), he was pretty much suppressed already in the 1930s. After all, he was also unreliable for the regime due to his past collaboration with Jews such as Max Born and Wolfgang Pauli. Mostly for political reasons, he became isolated from the research community already around 1930. But after the war, some fellow physicists declared him "rehabilitated", he became a tenured professor again, and he was also elected as a lawmaker for the most mainstream among German parties, CDU. Nevertheless, he had done pretty much all the important original technical contributions to physics before 1930 or so. ### WISE finds millions of black holes, thousands of hot DOGs As lots of media outlets such as HJ News point out, the WISE satellite assembled in Logan, Utah (Mitt Romney's mother's hometown) has observed millions of galaxies. WISE, or Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, is looking at the sky in the infrared. ## Sunday, September 02, 2012 ... ///// ### Sunlight or neutrinos affect the radon gamma decay rate Seasonal and daytime variations in the gamma decay rate Several readers have directed my attention to a recent, May 2012 Stanford-Purdue-Israel preprint on the seasonal variations of the gamma decay: Analysis of Gamma Radiation from a Radon Source: Indications of a Solar Influence They look at gamma (and alpha) radiation emitted by radium-222, an isotope arising from a decay of uranium-238 through radium-226. What they found was a more striking and accurate confirmation of a 2008 preprint (see TRF 2008) by similar authors. ## Saturday, September 01, 2012 ... ///// ### Stratospheric geoengineering: undoing global warming costs below$8 bn/year

Bits of Science, Revmodo, and Fars News talk about a new Aurora-Harvard-Carnegie paper in Environmental Research Letters

Cost analysis of stratospheric albedo modification delivery systems (fulltext PDF) by Justin McClellan, David W Keith, and Jay Apt
They quantify the aircraft- or rocket-related expenses needed to undo the global warming.