Percival Zhang: cheap hydrogen fuel from any plant

Joseph S. has sent me links to articles (e.g. UPI, Forbes) about an energy breakthrough claimed by Percival Zhang, a bio-engineer from Virginia Tech.



He claims to have completed a system of biotechnologies that produce a large enough amount of hydrogen out of plants.




He used the second most important sugar in plants (xylose, the simplest among abundant sugars that is named after wood [in Greek] from which it was first isolated) and some enzymes to prevent the microorganisms from practicing their main hobby – reproduction – which increases the amount of produced hydrogen three-fold or so.




If you have ever cared about rocket propellants (or even hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars), I don't have to explain to you how cutely clean hydrogen is as a fuel. Its oxidation produces something of order an electronvolt per atom, a huge amount of energy, especially if you realize how light a single hydrogen atom is.

Needless to say, it's nearly mandatory for the newspaper articles written about this topic to discuss how "environmentally friendly" this possibility is and how it would reduce the "dependence on fossil fuels". Sometimes, this type of propaganda leads to nearly comical inaccuracies and mistakes in the press releases and articles, for example:

This environmentally friendly method of producing hydrogen utilizes renewable natural resources, releases almost no zero greenhouse gases and doesn't require costly or heavy metals, a university release reported Wednesday.

Well, when you burn the hydrogen, you combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce water – which actually not only is a greenhouse gas but it is the most important greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, one that is raising the average temperature by something like 33 °C. What they wanted to write is that the process releases no greenhouse gases with long residence times (of order decades or longer) – and long residence times are needed for the greenhouse effect to be strong enough and "accumulating". Note that the residence time of water vapor in the atmosphere is estimated as 9 days while the same figure is 30-95 years for carbon dioxide.

At any rate, it would be cool if hydrogen were the stuff in which we store the useful energy. But because fossil fuels – and even biofuels, if we talk about "renewable" fossil fuels – only differ by their replacement of water vapor by another beneficial gas, carbon dioxide, the new technologies must really become cheaper for them to fairly prevail.

Imagine they will. The Forbes article in particular is full of interesting technical semi-details but it also unmasks the attitudes of U.S. secretaries of energy who are expected to wisely support similar research. Both Steven Chu and his successor Ernest Moniz have trash-talked (and in Chu's case, slashed 70% of the funding for) hydrogen fuel cell research because the solutions that existed at that time produced CO2 at the same moment. Their viewpoints seem foolish and unworthy of visionaries, right? It's one of the main points of a proper energy research (and research in general) to show that certain technical assumptions we are making today aren't really necessary.



TriHyBus, a triple hybrid bus from Pilsen.

This is just an example showing how utterly foolish it is for the not-quite-experts in the government to selectively throw large amounts of money to various kinds of fashionable research. Chances are huge that they will throw it to wrong places, hopeless research directions that will get uselessly overfunded, and those promising ones actually end up being overlooked and underfunded, anyway. The main obstacle in this energy research surely isn't the shortage of net funding. Extra funding that is decided by politicians because they have to decide in some way – instead of investors who invest because they were intrigued by a particular idea and are willing to put their own money at risk – is pretty much guaranteed to be nothing else than the waste of the taxpayers' money.

I am not saying that Chu or Moniz are stupid. But general expectations just like the particular evidence above suggests that they – and government bureaucrats in general – just can't see "all promising potential paths to the future" that emerge in an industry as large as the energy industry. When the funding decisions are effectively made by one person and his or her hierarchy, many promising directions inevitably remain underfunded and the bulk of the money is inevitably spent unwisely. The government is 1) narrow-minded, 2) not guaranteed to have some of the most qualified people who are responsible for various decisions (no genuine market competition or natural selection operates within the government to achieve this outcome), and 3) unmotivated to make the decisions really well – carefully yet creatively. These three disadvantages combine to make up the public spending inferior relatively to the spending by the private sector. When we talk about the applied research that is supposed to produce economically attractive results within years or a decade, we should simply leave it to the invisible hand of the free markets as purely as we can.

Obama, beauty, and sexism

I had to laugh when I learned that Barack Obama who has often benefited from political correctness has been caught to the PC trap himself. A very loud third of the Americans – the batshit crazy Americans – apparently think that the following comment about Kamala Harris is "sexist".

“You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you'd want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country — Kamala Harris is here.  (Applause.)  It's true.  Come on.  (Laughter.)  And she is a great friend and has just been a great supporter for many, many years.”

You can't make it up.




The most comical aspect of this "scandal" is that Barack Obama said these things because he wanted to be even nicer and even more politically correct than some people around him. But too much political correctness, much like too little political correctness and a medium amount of political correctness, may turn out to be politically incorrect.




Let me elaborate on my claim that he actually wanted to be more Catholic than the Pope. Including the things in between the lines, Obama meant the following:

“While your experience certainly suggests that there are fewer extraordinarily talented lawyers displaying a natural authority between women than between men and some extra trouble may arise when relatively young women face difficult tasks, you have to be careful in this case. First of all, she is brilliant. Second of all, she is dedicated and third of all, she is tough. And she is exactly what you'd want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. Although her ethnic background – she is an Asian Indian American – may look more crazy than mine, she also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country — Kamala Harris is here.  (Applause.)  It's true.  Come on.  (Laughter.)  And she is a great friend and has just been a great supporter for many, many years.”

Now, because Obama called her "best-looking AG", he is considered sexist. PC is tough and treacherous. It is – more precisely the people driving it are – so insane that you just can't ever know where and when it strikes.

In the competition of old men, it's not a shocking fact that Kamala Harris is the best-looking U.S. attorney general. We should still be careful because the adjective "best-looking" is subjective. In particular, there may be a bias because heterosexual male subjects are more likely to consider women good-looking while the ordering is reversed for homosexual subjects and it may be reverted for female subjects once again.

Despite this subjective nature of the "good-looking" adjective, I think that there could be some neutral, asexual, consensus-based evaluation of who is good-looking and Kamala Harris could still win in this particular race.

May a woman get offended in such a context? Well, the only woman who has at least some remote reasons to be offended by the comment above is Michelle Obama. But as long as a possible romance between Obama and Harris will remain invisible, even Michelle Obama should be doing fine. Otherwise women – whether they're attorney generals or not – care about their looks and Kamala Harris is demonstrably not an exception. So chances are high that she was flattered.

On the contrary, she could be – and she should be – insulted and hurt by the comments that Obama's appraisal was sexist. Why? Because the people who say that Obama's judgement was sexist implicitly claim that he only said that she was best-looking because she was a woman – i.e. because of her female organs – while the official reason behind Obama's statement is that she is a pretty woman – or, I could even say, because she is a pretty person.

The public/media reactions to these things is substantially different in my country. Thank God. Let me mention an example.



The official billboard of Public Affairs, a small Prague-based centrist party, now defunct. It said "Release the boys into the water: vote for our girls." Ms Karolína Peake is the second babe from the right. She survived the death of the Public Affairs and created an even smaller would-be party, LIDEM (Liberal Democracy; the acronym also means "to the people"), that helped to save the center-right government in one of the no-confidence votes.

A few months ago, PM Petr Nečas proposed her as the next defense minister. President Klaus made it clear that this would be a problem with him. He smiled and said that he really, but really couldn't "imagine how the sturdy soldiers would accept this little girl as their commander". Of course, there wasn't a sign of a genuine opposition to Klaus' remarks. Pretty much everyone thinks that he was right and/or made an important point. One can play various games but the soldiers still have some values, opinions, and priorities, and if their motivation to follow orders and fight for the country gets diminished by something, the safety of the country may be at risk. These are serious matters that should never be beaten by infantile politically correct speech codes. (That's also why I think it's unwise to insist on flooding the military by 4% of proud and loud gays – and similar things.) And it's much simpler – and more democratic! – to choose a minister who will be acceptable for the soldiers than to try to "reeducate" the soldiers.

I was in agreement with Klaus despite the fact that I consider her a sort of talented politician - a Western-style modern politician, not the kind of politicians I would enthusiastically vote for, but I think she would score well in some global competition. (Incidentally, her husband, Charles Peake, is an Australian manager of Czech-Chinese origin. Her maiden name, Kvačková, is as Czech as you can get.)



"Release us to the water here." A center-right ODS party's answer to the girls' billboard.

The current president, Miloš Zeman, was in somewhat hotter water for his witticism during the presidential campaign. He was suggesting that his competitor, Prince Schwarzenberg, came from a degenerated dynasty (Schwarzenberg reacted pleasantly: this comment made Schwarzenberg younger because it reminded him of the 1950s when the princes were labeled "degenerated" as well). But Zeman – which means a member of lower, countryside-based nobility, gentry – added a much more detailed explanation why Zeman was less degenerated than the Prince. Centuries ago, Princes enjoyed the "right of the first night" (it's probably a superstition, but let's ignore it) so they had the right to terminate the virginity of their serfs' maiden daughters. This made their sexual life simpler which is why (according to Zeman's modified genetics) they got degenerated. On the contrary, "Zemen" had to rape the girls they had crush on. They needed to spend energy and train for that etc. So with this training, they didn't degenerate.

Even I could guess that this was a potentially tough, marginally perverse joke and there were several feminists who tried to say it was bad. But these feminists are so totally marginal in our society that it would be silly to talk about any real scandal. There wasn't any. It's just a joke cleverly built on Schwarzenberg's aristocratic origin and Zeman's surname.

Even those of us in Czechia who sometimes consider ourselves "socially conservative" often view Americans as similarly puritanical, controlled by taboos and medieval speech codes as the people in the Muslim countries look to the Americans. In some situations, the difference between Americans and the fundamentalist Muslims is actually rather modest and the "liberals", despite their being left-wing, tend to make this proximity even more self-evident.

If America can't protect people like Obama from blackmailing, libels, and intimidation by insane folks such as those who think that he was "sexist", i.e. from pressure that forbids to say certain things in practice, then its constitution along with the amendments are de facto just pieces of a dirty toilet paper.

Dyson: Climatologists are no Einsteins

The New Jersey Star Ledger printed a nice interview with Freeman Dyson:

Climatologists are no Einsteins, says his successor (Star Ledger)

---

Beginning in the GWPF (Benny Peiser et al.)

They mention that when Einstein was still around, Dyson was hired by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton after the search for the planet's most brilliant physicist. He has done quite some work to justify these labels although I wouldn't say that it has put him at the #1 spot. He's still one of the giants of the old times who keep on walking on the globe.

At any rate, he is saying some things that should be important for everyone, especially every layman, who wants to understand the climate debate. The climatologists don't really understand the climate; they just blindly follow computer models that are full of ad hoc fudge factors to account for clouds and other aspects.




Freeman Dyson also mentioned that increased CO2 is probably making the environment better and he estimated that about 15% of the crop yields are due to the extra CO2 added by the human activity. I agree with this estimate wholeheartedly. The CO2 is elevated by a factor of K = 396/280 = 1.41 and my approximate rule is that the crop yields scale like the square root of K which is currently between 1.15 and 1.20.




Dyson – and the sensible journalist – also mention that the journalists are doing a lousy job, probably because they're lazy and just love to copy things from others. The hatred against the "dissenters" is similar to what it used to be in the Soviet Union; I must confirm that.

The article also contains some older videos in which Dyson was interviewed.



This 13-year-old Gentleman, Alex, who is doing speeches has understood many things about the climate panic that many adults have not. He got an iPad as a reward for that. ;-)

But let me return to the "no Einsteins" claim. It's a very important one because the climate scientists were sometimes painted nearly as the ultimate superior discipline above all of sciences. In reality, the climate scientists are – and even before the climate hysteria took off were – the worst among the worst physical scientists. I am sure that everyone who has studied at a physics department with many possible subfields must know that. My conclusions primarily come from Prague but I feel more or less certain that they hold almost everywhere.

When you're a college freshman in a similar maths-and-physics department, you start to be exposed to various types of scientific results very soon. Some people find the maths too complicated and they give up. Some students survive. Those who survive pretty quickly find out whether they're better in the theory or the experimental approach to physics. Clearly, if they're into experiments, they will drift towards atomic physics, optics, vacuum physics, and perhaps condensed matter physics, aside from several disciplines.

If they feel comfortable in advanced theory, they will lean towards theoretical physics, nuclear physics, and partly theoretical condensed matter physics. But all the statements so far were "politically correct" – implicitly assuming that everyone is equally good and he only has different interests. But that ain't the case.

Some people aren't too good at anything. In Prague, it's been a pretty much official wisdom that those folks are most likely to pick atmospheric physics or geophysics and – if they care about stars – astrophysics. In some sense, these fields are conceptually stuck in the 19th century or perhaps 18th century. They're simple enough. The laymen's common sense is often enough to do them. Quantum mechanics may be viewed as the most characteristic litmus test. If a student finds it impenetrable, he or she must give up ideas about going to particle physics but also condensed matter physics, optics, and some other characteristic "20th century" disciplines.

The people who are sort of good at maths but they really find out they are slower with quantum mechanics tend to go to (general) relativistic physics which is a powerful field in Prague. To some extent, the detachment from quantum mechanics is correlated with the detachment from statistical methods in physics and from experimenter's thinking. So among the smart enough folks, the relativists who have avoided quantum mechanics from their early years are probably the "least experimentally oriented" ones.

But meteorology is the ultimate refugee camp. A stereotypical idea of the job waiting for the meteorology alumni are the "tree frogs" [a Czech synonym for "weather girls"] who forecast the weather on TV screens. Their makeup is usually more important than their knowledge and understanding and yes, meteorology also has the highest percentage of female students (not counting teaching of maths, physics, and IT) which, whether you like it or not, is also correlated with the significantly lower mathematical IQ in that subfield.

I am totally confident that every sufficiently large and representative university with a physics department could reconstruct a correlation between e.g. the grades and the specialization that the students choose that would confirm most of the general patterns above. But at many places, these things are just a taboo. This is extremely unfortunate because the public should know where the smartest people may be looked for – and atmospheric physics or climatology certainly can't be listed in the answer to this question. It's important because when such things are taboo, certain people may play games and pretend that they're something that they're not.

Dyson also touched another interesting topic, the difference between "understanding" and "sitting in front of a computer model that is assumed to understand". I have discussed this difference many times. But let me repeat that they're totally different things. While I would agree it's a waste of time – and a silly sport – to force students to do mechanical operations that may be done by a computer or learn lots of simple rules that may be summarized in a book (because the students are downgraded to a dull memory chip or a simple CPU chip), it's necessary for a student to go through all the key steps and methods at least once so that he or she knows how they work inside. Or at least they may feel confident that if they wanted to improve their understanding what's going on, they could penetrate into all the details within hours of extra study or earlier.

The climate forecasts have so large error margins that it makes no sense to pretend that you need to make a high-precision calculation. But if a high-precision calculation isn't needed, an approximate calculation is enough. And for an approximate calculation, you shouldn't need a terribly complicated algorithm that runs for a very long time. In fact, you should be able to construct a simplified picture and a calculation that may be reconstructed pretty much without a computer. In particular, if you can't derive the order-of-magnitude estimate for a quantity describing the behavior of a physical system, then you just don't understand the behavior! A computer may spit out a magic answer but you are not the computer. If you don't know what the computer is exactly doing, assuming etc., then you can't independently "endorse" the results by the computer, you can't know what they depend upon and how robust the actual outcome of the program is.

Mechanical arithmetic calculations may be boring and of course that it's not what mathematicians and physicists are supposed to be best at or do most of their time (a physicist or a mathematician is something else than an idiot savant, a simple fact that most of my close relatives are completely unaware of). On the other hand, much of the logic behind sciences and behind individual arguments in science is about solid technical thinking that may be sped up with the help of a computer but this thinking is still completely essential because science and mathematics are ultimately composed of these things! If you don't know them, you don't know science and mathematics.

An extra topic in the context of atmospheric physics is the difference between the knowledge and "character of knowledge" of meteorologists and climatologists. I would say that meteorologists are in a much better shape when it comes to their "mental training" because they deal with lots of real-world data that affect their thinking. They have some experience. In comparison, climatologists work with a much smaller amount of data – they talk about 30-year averages but our record isn't too much longer than 30 years so there are just "several numbers". The predictions only face the real-world data after many decades when the climatologist is already retired or dead and this confrontation between real-world data and scientists' opinions is what drives the "natural selection" of ideas in empirically based disciplines – and atmospheric physics disciplines are surely textbook examples of them.

The most extreme form of the intellectual degradation is the idea that the only important quantity to be predicted is the rate of [global] temperature increase (or, almost equivalently in the climate believers' opinion, the climate sensitivity). If someone believes it's the only number to be derived and one can fudge hundreds of parameters to do so, it's too bad! Clearly, such a predictive framework is totally worthless. A predictive framework must be able to predict a larger number of numbers than the number of parameters that have to be inserted. Needless to say, my description of the situation of the "hardcore alarmed climatology" was way too kind because they don't even verify the single only "calculated" result – the climate sensitivity. When it differs by a factor of 3 from the observations, they just don't care. So they don't predict anything. They have absolutely no data – no "threats" for their pet ideas – that could direct their construction and improvement of the theories.

AMS: the steep drop is very likely there

Reconstructing the dark matter particle from sloppily censored data

On Wednesday, Sam Ting gave the talk about AMS-02 at CERN. If you missed the talk, you may watch the 85-minute recorded video here:

Recent results from the AMS experiment (CERN web, thanks to Joseph S.)

What I want to focus on are the slides 82-85, and especially 85, around 0:48:00-0:49:00. They show some particular events they have seen. The first three slides show a \(1\GeV\) electron and a positron with the same energy; a \(10\GeV\) electron and a positron of the same energy; a \(100\GeV\) electron and a positron of the same energy.

It could be a foolish IQ test – checking whether you know the geometric series – to ask you what is the next slide. Well, it could be a \(1\TeV\) electron and a positron of the same energy. Except that it's not. ;-)




Instead, the slide shows a \(982\GeV\) electron and a \(636\GeV\) positron; the latter figure is significantly lower than \(1\TeV\). Clearly, the number of electrons and positrons with similarly high energies that they could see was already pretty low. It seems extraordinarily natural to me to assume that \(982\GeV\) and \(636\GeV\) are the highest-energy electron and the highest-energy positron they have recorded so far: why wouldn't they boast about their biggest fish?

The text below is based on this assumption.




Sam Ting only showed the bins and the numbers of electron and positron events up to the highest \(260-350\GeV\) bin but we were not told the key information what was seen above this cutoff. Ting justified this silence by the data's not having a high enough confidence level, and so on. Still, there must exist some particular electron and positron events and it must be possible to count them.

We could have been told this raw data. We were not. I am convinced that he is trying to save some gunpowder for the AMS briefings in the following years – the spectrometer should operate for decades. At the same time, I have many reasons to think that if we were told something about the events above \(350\GeV\), we would see that their case for dark matter is much stronger than it looks from the officially published data.

Now, you should look at Figure 2a of the Cholis, Finkbeiner, Goodenough, Weiner 2008 paper. It shows how the positron fraction should behave for various neutralino masses in the most convincing models of WIMP, those based on neutralinos in supersymmetric theories.

The graph shows that if the known backgrounds were the only thing that contributes, the positron fraction should steadily decrease from \(0.05\) to \(0.01\) as you go from energies \(10\GeV\) to \(1,000\GeV\) on the log scale. Instead, AMS (and previously PAMELA and Fermi) saw the positron fraction increasing from \(0.05\) to \(0.15\) as you go from \(10\GeV\), a local minimum of the positron fraction, to \(350\GeV\).

This observed positron fraction is already much higher than the background – it's the "positron excess" that suggests new physics. However, pulsars could still be the mundane explanation of this excess. If the origin of this excess is truly new particle physics such as WIMPs, the drop of the positron fraction above \(350\GeV\) that we haven't seen should be steep.

The only new information I will use are the energies of the highest-energy events. The number of events of these high energies is pretty low. I was thinking how to approach the problem: Monte Carlo tests of various adjusted background-only and background-plus-signal distributions etc. Well, I would have to define lots of contrived fitting functions and do lots of complicated operations with them which would be a lot of work, especially given the fact that the final conclusions are very fuzzy and have an unimpressive statistical significance. At the end, I decided for a very simple strategy: to reasonably extend Table 1 of the AMS paper to the higher energies.

In the table below, I took the number of positrons in various bins and the positron fraction from Table 1 of the AMS paper. The total number of positrons+electrons in the first data column was calculated by a simple division. Now, the extra bins above \(350\GeV\) were added and the last bin in the electron+positron and positron columns that contained the highest-energy events of the two types was marked as \(1\). It could have been higher but both numbers have a comparable chance to be higher and the conclusions wouldn't dramatically change.

With the bins I chose, I interpolated the numbers in both columns (electron+positron, positron) by geometric series. And then I could calculate the positron fractions in the missing columns. The result looks like this:

Energy/\({\rm GeV}\)	\(N(e^\pm)\)	\(N(e^+)\)	fraction
100-115	2719	304	0.11
116-132	1953	223	0.11
133-151	1284	156	0.11
152-173	1056	144	0.12
174-206	902	134	0.14
207-260	660	101	0.15
261-350	465	72	0.15
351-450	194	17	0.09
451-550	81	4	0.05
551-650	34	1	0.03
651-750	14	0	0
751-850	6	0	0
851-950	2-3	0	0
951+	1	0	0

To make the story even shorter, my point is that the positron fraction must decrease to a very small value such as \(0.03\) in the bin around \(636\GeV\), the highest observed energy of a positron, because the number of electrons+positrons in that bin is still very high over there. It has to drop from the known value \(465\) in the \(260-350\GeV\) bin to \(1\) in the bin above \(950\GeV\). Because the number of electrons is behaving rather smoothly, I interpolated by some kind of geometric series to get \(34\) electrons+positrons in the \(551-650\GeV\) bin. I surely don't claim this number to be precise but I do think it is a good estimate and the number of positrons must be significantly larger than \(10\) in that bin, otherwise the graph of the number of electrons would be too bumpy which is unlikely.

The decrease from \(0.15\) below \(350\GeV\) to less than \(0.03\) above \(650\GeV\) may surely be classified as abrupt and it does suggest a WIMP (neutralino) mass of order \(350-650\GeV\). In fact, I think that there is a reason why AMS hasn't added another column above \(350\GeV\): the number of positron events was already very low over there, producing a positron fraction significantly smaller than \(0.15\). If the positron fraction were still close to \(0.15\) e.g. in \(350-500\GeV\), I am inclined to believe that they would still have added this extra bin.

If this extra reasoning is on the right track, the neutralino mass could be closer to the lower value, \(m_{\tilde \chi}\sim 350\GeV\). In fact, because all values between \(260\) and \(350\GeV\) were clumped together by AMS, it's equally plausible that the neutralino mass could be between \(260-350\GeV\) but closer to \(350\GeV\) because it seems that this "whole" bin is still behaving in the way that maximizes the positron fraction. Well, because the maximum of the positron fraction could actually be a bit higher than \(0.15\), perhaps close to \(0.20\), the \(260-350\GeV\) bin could be close to \(0.15\) because of the average of \(0.20\) in the lower half and \(0.10\) in the upper half. By these fuzzy ideas, I want to suggest that \(300\GeV\) is still plausible.

Again, I totally agree that even if AMS has the data sketched above, the data only support the conclusions I am trying to make at a rather low confidence level and it is very correct that AMS aren't trying to make bombshell announcements yet because they can't have the sufficient certainty.

On the other hand, it seems extraordinarily likely to me that Sam Ting must feel a bit strange because the picture he is presenting is significantly different from – weaker than – the picture he actually believes to be most likely based on the complete data he hasn't shown to us. I've tried to fill the gap above. The numbers above should make it a bit more explicit why I think that all the bloggers who say that AMS doesn't possess any hints are wrong: Katie Mack, Matthew Francis, Matthew Strassler, and probably many others.

If you look at the 2008 paper by Hooper, Blasi, Serpico, Table 1 shows you some positron fractions predicted by the pulsars, too. The decrease of the positron fraction is also rather steep, although not as steep as for WIMPs (a drop of the positron fraction to 1/5 of the maximum value just by doubling energy above the value producing the maximum seems unlikely with pulsars), but note that the positron fraction seems to be maximized for \(E\sim 100\GeV\), well below the apparent maximum near \(350\GeV\) suggested by the AMS data (with some extra reading in between the lines). That could be the real reasons why the pulsar explanation may suck although some people tried to argue that the models of pulsars could be adjusted and put on steroids to increase the maximum energy, too.

Note that in my "average" estimate of the high-energy particles, there were about \(310-311\) electrons and \(22\) positrons censored, producing \(0.07\) for the fraction above \(350\GeV\). The actual number of positrons and the fraction could be higher or lower. If the drop is truly steep, then the actual number of censored positrons is much lower than \(22\).

Holy week with the EU: an insane EU propaganda video

The iDNES.cz news server and other Czech media have brought us a trailer of a new movie funded by the national branches of the top EU institutions. The movie is called "Holy Week With The EU" and it describes the EU from the viewpoint of high school students preparing for the GCSE (final) exam.

The trailer is just stunningly repulsive. Fortunately, over 90% of the Czech citizens seem to agree with me. The hugely negative reaction has led the film director to demand that the trailer shouldn't be aired anywhere because it was created by amateurish cherry-picking by some jerks among the EU officials.

However, whether cherry-picking took place or not, these 6+ minutes surely appear in the movie and probably show the spirit of the film. And it's bad enough.




If you don't understand Czech, I must tell you how they speak. They speak in perfect, official, standardized Czech and their articulation is very clear. At the same moment, they try to be cool by extremely cheap, suggestive, sexually oriented remarks. This combination sounds horrible.

But what seems most disgusting to me is the careerist approach by the main "hero" of the movie. One could perhaps argue that the EU differs from the Third Reich and from the USSR in certain subtle and not only subtle respects. However, this guy doesn't differ from the functionaries of Hitler Jugend or Komsomol. A self-centric, shallow, sleazy bootlicker who instantly buys anything from the sources that may help him in his career.

At the same moment, the movie seems to paint a gloomy picture about the contemporary high school curriculum which arguably seems more tendentious than what I remember from my times as a (dissident) teenager during communism.




Here is the video:



Fast translation:

Girl I: We're lacking a commander here a bit. Can't you give us an advice? If you have already accumulated those experiences...

Boy: About what?

Girl II: Probably beverages...

Girl I: With the GCSE!

Boy: What is on the ticket?

Girl I: Institutions of the EU.

Boy: This is my cup of tea! Madam will surely lend me her notes. Yes, my head is pretty large but I can't store everything in it! So... We will show it visually. ... Ann will be the European Council. She will take the highest place. Hop. What isn't in the head must be in the hands.

Imagine a simple scheme, a male figurine. A head, heart, and two legs. We will omit the other organs today [he is saying it towards Girl II who has crush on him]. Ann will be one who is thinking. She will stand at the highest place. She will represent the head and the brain of the whole European Union, the European Council. It determines the priorities of the EU as a whole. For example, it stands behind the authorship of important documents such as the Treaty of Lisbon.

[Girl III arrives, also horny.] And you will be the European Commission. The heart not only of mine but of the whole European Union. Its motor, if you will. The Commission is the driver of integration and it proposes new regulations to be debated by the Council of the EU and the European Parliament.

[1:29 Stop this. Another scenery.]

Maverick boy: Do you want to make a career in bureaucracy?

Boy: Why not? I surely want to work abroad, at least for a while. And the work for the EU is a good opportunity.

Maverick boy: You want to build the EU by a spade, right?

Boy: Why?

Maverick boy: Do you think that they're waiting for you with open arms?

Boy: If you can speak languages, you may try to get a job in the institutions of the European Union. People are sending applications to the EU in all the official languages and they have to receive an answer in the same language. And that's where native speakers are needed.

Maverick boy: And it's a child's play for those who have studied languages, isn't it?

Boy: Not only that. Look at eures.cz where you find lots of jobs across the EU. And not all of them are for students and alumni.

Maverick boy: Everyone would be looking down his nose at me.

Boy: I don't know why. For example, Germany has a clear shortage of native workers in certain sectors. And they're happy to get some foreigners.

Maverick boy: Because they don't have to pay them equally much.

Boy: No, they have to pay the same.

Maverick boy: Maybe using the same currency.

Boy: Where did you get so much negativism?

Maverick boy: I am not negativist. I am just not used to okay anything just because they bring it right under my nose. I am using my brain. I want to know what are the benefits of our membership. For example, I am interested in the history, e.g. about the Second World War.

[Long break. Kids memorizing and dating.]

[3:25, staircase] Girls: Relationships. They are complicated in general.

Boy with beard: On the contrary, they're the simplest things. The European Union is the largest trade block in the world. It has the second most important currency. And it has signed trade and partner treaties with most countries in the world.

Another boy: For example, the EU is promoting its interests within the World Trade Organization or inside G20 which includes the most developed countries of the world.

Boy with beard: And the EU is also organizing summits. EU-Russia, EU-USA, EU-China...

Girl I: And Russia is an important partner due to its resources.

Girl II: And the U.S. are the largest trade partner of the EU while China is the largest importer into the EU.

Boy with beard: But the union is also focusing on less developed countries and within its development policies, it spends more than EUR 7 billion.

Female teacher: Radek [boy with beard], come here.

Classmates: Good luck.

Committee boss: So you drew the process of integration and expansion of the European Union. So what will you tell us about it?

Boy with beard: The European Union was created with the intent to prevent new wars between neighbors that would culminate in the Second World War.

Narrator: In 1951, the economic and political integration of the European countries began. It was supposed to bring permanent peace. There were 6 founding members of the initial community, the European Coal and Steel Community. The Cold War between the West and the East was the dominant factor determining the atmosphere of the 1950s. In the late 1950s, the integration was getting deeper. New communities were founded which, in 1967, were merged to the single European Community according to the merger treaty.

[Credits.]

Reframing string theory in terms of observer horizons

Yasunori Nomura and Jaime Varela – sometimes with Sean Weinberg – wrote several papers that explain a reason why the argument by AMPS that black hole firewalls have to exist isn't warranted.



If I try to summarize the error by AMPS as phrased by these authors, I must say that AMPS assume that the equivalence principle holds for the "entire state vector" and they impose a "one size fits all" classical background geometry for all possible quantum states. In reality, the equivalence principle only holds for states that respect a classical background and different classical backgrounds are mutually excluding – and in practice, soon decohered – alternatives whose mutual coherence, not analyzable by classical GR, is needed to restore the unitarity of the black hole evaporation process. So depending on Alice's fate (does she fall into the black hole?), she may reinterpret the same "qubits" differently. I've been saying the same thing in different words.

Fine. Unless something unusual happens, this was the last paragraph on this blog explaining why there is no black hole firewall; the question has been settled for me for quite some time. But the newest paper goes beyond this controversy.




Its title reads

Low Energy Description of Quantum Gravity and Complementarity

and the paper makes some first steps – very close to the thinking I've been pursuing as well – towards a reformulation of a quantum gravitational theory (i.e. string theory) in a way that makes the Planck-scale physics origin of subtleties associated with the black hole information puzzle manifest.

And this way of thinking can tell us much more than that. What do I mean?




In general relativity and any theory building upon its principles, the spacetime geometry is dynamical. Not only it can get curved but there are no preferred coordinates that we should use to describe a particular situation with particular quantum information stored in the matter. This principle, general covariance or diffeomorphism symmetry, is a starting point that allows us to "derive" general relativity. At the same moment, it's the "gauge invariance" of general relativity that is responsible for the neutralization of potentially dangerous unphysical modes of the metric tensor, a spin-two field. The diffeomorphism symmetry is what allows us to formulate general relativity in a manifestly Lorentz-covariant way.

When we deal with a deeper theory, namely string theory, the metric tensor degrees of freedom are derived from something else, along with many other degrees of freedom and/or symmetries. It doesn't mean that general covariance becomes approximate. Indeed, in all meaningful effective field theories – and perhaps even in all hypothetical versions of "closed string field theory" – the diffeomorphism symmetry would be an exact symmetry. But it would be just a part of a grander structure, a stringy symmetry with infinitely many higher harmonics etc. The non-perturbative counterpart of these statements is more mysterious and only partly understood today.

However, we often want and need to reinterpret some quantum information as the states of matter on a nearly fixed spacetime background. String theory produces all the states or excitations on all possible classical backgrounds "simultaneously". It doesn't organize these states into collections that are helpful to a particular observer. An observer must do so herself. And these authors sketch what such an observer has to do.

She wants to approximate the vicinity of her world line by the best possible approximation of a region of the Minkowski space. So she may go to the freely falling frame and deduce the right coordinates for the spacetime she finds herself immersed in. This reparameterization of her spacetime must be done separately for states above different classical backgrounds. So one-by-one, sort of, we deduce the classical geometry of the state and apply the relevant coordinate transformation to convert the spacetime into a form that is natural from her freely falling vantage point.

If we consider her current location to be the point \(p_0\) in the spacetime, the full Hilbert space of string theory may be rewritten as\[

\HH_{\rm QG} = \HH\oplus \HH_{\rm sing}.

\] The Hilbert space \(\HH\) contains all possible states in the past light cone of \(p_0\) that we assume to be reorganized according to the local Lorentz frame. The second, "singular" term is cool, sort of amusing, and related to the authors' criticism of a mistake by AMPS: it is the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of all the states in string theory that don't agree with the existence of the point \(p_0\) and its smooth vicinity.

You see a nice and creative "spin" over here. The non-existence of some regions according to the geometry extracted from some quantum states is rephrased as the regions' looking "singular" in the coordinates deduced from these quantum states. And if you ask what the "singularity" is all about, it may be reinterpreted as having too high curvatures or accelerations. AMPS effectively forgot about the existence of \(\HH_{\rm sing}\), i.e. the existence of other states that contradict a pre-determined form of the classical background, and about all the information that is effectively stored in the specification of the classical background.

Nomura, Varela, and Weinberg then instruct the observer to build her own Hilbert space of states that may exist in her past light cone, that of \(p_0\). Decompose the state vector into states that seem to have a pretty well-defined geometry near \(p_0\) and evolve them backwards. Soon or later, you will experience a problem.

She may use coordinates \(\tau,\theta,\phi\) along with the affine parameter of a light ray \(\lambda\) to describe the neighborhood of \(p_0\). As she tries to extend \(\lambda\) too far, she will either hit\[

\lambda = \lambda_{\rm obs}:\quad A \equiv \sqrt{a_\mu a^\mu}\approx M_*

\] where the local proper acceleration \(a^\mu\) approaches the fundamental (Planck or string) scale. She knows that at least in these coordinates, the low-energy description of the degrees of freedom must break down. The points with \(\lambda=\lambda_{\rm obs}\) define the "[gravitational] observer horizon". Because of the Planckian or stringy acceleration, the degrees of freedom distinct from those in the low-energy limit become important.

There may be different coordinates in which it ain't the case because these points may be just coordinate singularities but it doesn't matter. We're rephrasing the Hilbert space from the viewpoint of a particular reference frame and this operation gets singular, sensitive to the Planckian or stringy physics, so string theory in this formulation deviates from a simple low-energy effective field theory.

At points of the observer horizon, \(\lambda=\lambda_{\rm obs}\), we postulate the existence of degrees of freedom with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy \(S=A/4G\) or so where \(A\) is the area of the relevant horizon I will discuss soon. In this reorganization of the Hilbert space, all the degrees of freedom responsible for this entropy are viewed as the Planckian or stringy mess. It doesn't matter that in other coordinate systems – in the reorganization of the Hilbert space that is useful for other observers – the degrees of freedom may look like excitations on a nearly flat piece of space.

Alternatively, the spacetime may stop at "conjugate points"\[

\lambda = \lambda_{\rm conj}

\] where the expansion of light rays \(\Theta=-\infty\) or in "singularities",\[

\lambda = \lambda_{\rm sing},

\] which have a pretty ordinary general relativistic interpretation. In these two latter cases, there are no extra degrees of freedom attached to the end of the spacetime. Well, when I mentioned the area \(A\) determining the entropy a moment ago, it should really be the area of the apparent horizon – points with \(\lambda=\lambda_{\rm app}\) where \(\Theta=0\). These rules are probably meant to emulate Bousso's holographic entropy bounds although they may be derivable out of something deeper. I don't know the derivation if it exists at all.

There are various directions in which this sequence of thoughts may lead. Quite generally, I think it's an interesting task to try to understand how the Hilbert space is reorganized when we switch from one local Lorentz frame given by the point \(p_0\) to another one – whether it is infinitesimally close or very far. For the infinitesimal separation, there must be a procedure that tells us that "some degrees of freedom are lost" or, on the contrary, "they reappear" in a way morally similar to integrating out the degrees of freedom in the Wilsonian renormalization group. However, here the disappearance is not just due to a modified scale; it's due to a coordinate transformation that maps some well-defined "small perturbation of a background" state to others; but that maps some of these well-defined states into an ill-defined, non-geometric Planckian or stringy mess.

I've been thinking in a similar way for quite some time, e.g. in the context of Raju-Papadodimas and before them: in string theory, we want to reorganize the spacetime according to some background geometry and extrapolate this geometry as far as we can. But the new paper by Nomura, Varela, and Weinberg will probably encourage me to think about these matters a bit more self-confidently.

The light-cone-like coordinates probably simplify many things but they also suggest possible strategies to use the space-like slices. In this context, I can't forget to mention a cute "derivation" of holography I've been promoting for more than a decade. The volume \(V\) of a region of spacetime may look large and the entropy that the region carries, \(A/4G\), seems much smaller. However, we may also foliate the spacetime into slices that look like hyperbolic space-like planes of Planckian curvature (a regulated past light cone of a sort).

The proper volume of these hyperbolic slices, restricted to the given region, does scale like \(A\) in the Planck units and not \(V\): the hyperbolic slice is the Euclidean AdS and we know that the scaling holds for the AdS space! This could be an explanation why the number of degrees of freedom is so much smaller than \(V\) and I feel the paper by Nomura, Varela, and Weinberg is de facto trying to explain various holographic and information-preservation miracles in a similar way. The recipe is to try to use all transformations allowed at low energies up to the point where curvatures and accelerations become stringy or Planckian (the maximum value where we simply have to give up), and that's the point where the holographic coding of the information becomes particularly natural.

AMS-02 seems to overcautiously censor solid evidence for dark matter

The case for a \(350\GeV\) neutralino strong but probably made look weaker

Quick links: the new AMS-02 paper (open access); liveblog from the CERN talk (US LHC blogs); a remarkably accurate popular overview of the situation and the implications of SUSY models (The Economist!)

At 5 pm CERN Summer Time, I was watching a CERN talk by Sam Ting of MIT, a Nobel prize winner for J/ψ and the boss of the AMS Collaboration, via webcast.cern.ch. I was impressed by the complexity of the problem to do such an experiment in space, by the professional attitude by Ting and lots and lots of collaborators, and by the number of subtleties and tests they had to be careful about.

The AMS Collaboration released a press release. Just to be sure you know what we're talking about, the 7.5-ton gadget on the board of the International Space Station measured the number of electrons, positrons, and protons at various energies between \(1\) and \(350\GeV\) coming from various directions of the heavenly sphere.




Ting hasn't shown the absolute numbers yet – they will appear in a paper that will be out within days – but we've seen the positron fraction. The graph is incomparably more accurate than the corresponding graphs by PAMELA and Fermi. The positron fraction (of the positron+electron "whole") starts at about \(0.10\) near \(E=1\GeV\) on a plateau that smoothly begins to drop, reaching a minimum of \(0.05\) near \(9\GeV\) or so, another plateau.



Then it begins to increase again, reaching something that looks as another local extremum (well, a global maximum) near \(200-350\GeV\) where the positron fraction is close to \(0.15\).




The number of detected particles becomes too low – the error margin is pretty high – for these very high energies although it's still comparable to the "normal" number of particles that PAMELA built their claims upon. In the last "unclassified" bin, \(260-350\GeV\), they see just \(72\) positrons and they decided not to show the data above \(350\GeV\), something that a female physicist with common sense aptly asked about (well, so did one young man before her but Ting vehemently pretended he didn't understand the question; incidentally, despite his clear East Asian accent, I understood his English perfectly).

Ting has explained that he is an A* experimenter who would never publish anything wrong so all of us had to wait. It took 18 years for AMS to get to this point so be ready for a few more decades. However, your humble correspondent has performed a thorough analysis of Ting's words and facial expressions. I have determined, with the statistical significance of 4.5 sigma, that the facial expressions are the same as those of Sheldon Cooper who is trying to keep a very exciting secret (example video). For example, he had more nervous ticks than a lime disease research facility.

So I think that the number of positrons above \(350\GeV\) is very, very low. Ting admitted that the number of electrons is still very high but he didn't say anything explicit about positrons. ;-) My quantification of Ting's facial expressions indicate that there are \(O(100)\) electrons above \(350\GeV\) but only \(O(1)\) positrons, perhaps one positron (an event we were shown). The fraction probably drops well below 0.15 – perhaps to 0.01 etc. – very sharply. Ting is afraid to tell us because he would run the risk of claiming a bogus discovery.

Let me mention that if there are 100 electrons and 1 positron above 350 GeV, the probability is really small that the fraction is above 0.05, for example. And this drop – a drop that was totally hidden in Ting's official words and encoded in his facial expressions only – is the smoking gun for dark matter. Note that dark matter particles such as neutralinos may just annihilate \(\chi\chi\to e^+e^-\) but this decay rather abruptly stops above a certain energy related to \(m_\chi\).

Without this crucial censored information, theorists are obliged to wait. The fluxes of the electrons and positrons may be parameterized by simple smooth functions as they're lacking any discontinuities or other sharp structures. In this form, ignoring the information conveyed via facial expressions, it's plausible that the positrons and some electrons are emitted by pulsars (the astrophysical sources of choice here), too. Pulsars are spinning neutron stars. Those in the galactic plane would have to be the key here. I personally think that the pulsar theory is in bad shape due to the angular distribution etc.

To summarize, the data he has shown are compatible with some theories of WIMP particles of dark matter – perhaps some new force with force messengers \(1\GeV\) heavy in the dark sector could be handy to explain the drop of the fraction above \(1\GeV\) which would be very interesting if proven more reliably. This compatibility is encouraging by itself but I feel that the AMS folks actually have much stronger a piece of evidence supporting the dark matter interpretation than what they showed us – and it has something to do with the (missing) very high-energy positrons.

That's what I wrote after the CERN lecture. The rest of the blog entry is older.

Watch the AMS dark matter webcast now!

---

A press release is out now: positron excess, the slope does decrease later (but the fraction itself stabilizes: but the drop could be above the cutoff they imposed due to a growing error), consistent with WIMP annihilations in somewhat natural enough models (!) that probably require a new DM-specific \(1\GeV\) force messenger, other explanations (in particular, pulsars) not yet ruled out. Sadly, even a model with \(e^+e^-\) fluxes, each composed of diffuse and power law components.

Older text written on April 2nd

Wednesday, April 3rd, is the day when the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will announce its first, potentially interesting results that will have some implications for our knowledge about dark matter.

First, at 5 pm Prague Summer Time (11 am Boston Daylight Time), you will be recommended to listen to Samuel Ting at webcast.cern.ch...

At 1:30 pm Washington DC Daylight Saving Time i.e. 7:30 pm Prague Summer Time i.e. 2.5 hours later i.e. 90 minutes after the talk above is over, you may open NASA TV at www.nasa.gov/ntv which will air a briefing from NASA headquarters.

I am a bit confused about the tomorrow's location of Samuel Ting. Will he be present at CERN, in Washington DC, will he be communicating as an otherwise located person, or will he be teleported from the Old World to the New World within 90 minutes? Oops, yup, the question is actually answered in the press release about the NASA briefing: Ting will be present in DC only via a video link while 3 extra people from DOE and NASA will talk from DC.

This blog entry will be updated once the information becomes available.

Ernst Chladni: an anniversary

Ernst Chladni, the father of acoustics and the father of meteoritics, passed away in Wrocław (German: Breslau, Czech: Vratislav) on April 3rd, 1827.

He was born 70 years earlier, in 1756, in Lutherstadt Edward Wittenberg. However, his family came from Kremnica, a mining/minting town in Central Slovakia (a part of the Kingdom of Hungary). The name "Chladni" plus minus small variations means "cold" in Slavic languages.




Because Wittenberg is a Lutheran town, it shouldn't be shocking that his paternal ancestors and uncles were achieved Lutherans – deans, clergymen, historians, theologians, law professors, and so on. Ernst was supposed to become a lawyer, too. Science wasn't tolerated. So he had to get a law degree in Leipzig in 1782 and wait for his father's death which came on the same year. That's when Ernst could begin to study physics.

It sounds cruel but when a smart kid's father is a control freak, it's often the only solution. This particular kid was 36 years old when he was finally allowed to study what he always wanted to study.




What we associate with Chladni's name today are the Chladni figures, observed in detail in 1787. Here you have some cool enough examples:



When the guitar or a plate vibrates because of the sound waves going through/around it, a generic point moves up and down (transversely to the plate) which encourages the sand particles to drift. However, for well-defined frequencies, you also find "nodal lines" – co-dimension one loci where the vertical vibrations disappear. The sand particles may sit near these places and they don't move. That's why you see them: the sand gets concentrated over there.

An exercise for you: Are there nodal lines for every frequency or just for a discrete subset of eigenfrequencies?

It's sort of strange how much time it took for someone to draw the actual shape of the nodal lines – the sand was helpful – because Robert Hooke first observed that there were some nodal lines more than one century earlier, in 1680, but he didn't manage to do any detailed measurements and no one after him cared about it for 100+ years, either. Just to be sure, Chladni not only drew some sandy lines on the guitar and other plates. He also derived Chladni's law,\[

f = C (m+2n)^p

\] for some constants \(C,p\) where \(f\) is the frequency and \(m,n\) are the numbers of diametric (linear) and radial (circular) nodes. Cymbals, handbells, and church bells care about this law. Chladni also estimated the speed of sound in various gases: he pumped these gases into organ pipes and listened to the results (and did some calculations).

Chladni also created some instruments, e.g. those with glass rods of different lengths. He traveled across Europe with his concert show – well, a physics demonstration.

Finally, in 1794, Chladni proposed that meteorites were of extraterrestrial origin – despite the prevailing belief that they were of volcanic origin. You may imagine the humiliation etc. Other people who later convinced everyone that Chladni was right all along mostly contributed their P.R. techniques and brainwashing.

Italy seizes $1.7 billion from Sicilian counterpart of Al Gore

Fox News and all the other media are full of the breaking news that the Italian police have seized €1.3 billion from Vito Nicastri.



This guy with unsurprisingly close ties to the Mafia (including Matteo Messina Denaro, the widely believed Sicilian Mafia godfather) – which has an intertwined history with "renewable energy" – is accused of being the "Lord of the Wind" and the "King of Alternative Energy". The confiscated assets include 43 wind and solar companies, 98 real estate properties, and 66 banking accounts (it must be handy to have this many).




The assets were originally frozen in 2010; they were seized now. Nicastri was placed under surveillance and must remain in Alcamo for three years. Meanwhile, Al Gore remains at large.




In the past, the Mafia has operated in various businesses – I (Mr Vito Scaletta) was just playing Mafia II, a great PC game, so I am in the right spirit to read similar stories – but in recent years, the "renewable energy" has become a much more characteristic industry for the Mafia than prostitution, gambling, and other activities.

The amount $1.7 billion is the largest seizure of Mafia assets ever. I don't need to explain to you how large the seized wealth is. $1.7 billion is pretty much exactly equal to the net worth of the 2nd richest Czech citizen, Zdeněk Bakala (who is still running as a coal baron and I don't suggest any Mafia ties in his case). For the sake of completeness, the richest Czech Mr Petr Kellner has over $9 billion and works in the financial sector.

Let's hope that Nicastri won't be the last man working in this giant "renewable" scam who will be led to justice. If you know someone who works in this "renewable" business or promotes the climate hysteria, you may call your local police or 911 because the chances that he or she is not a criminal are close to zero.

Czechia formally surrenders to the EU

Today, we saw many unfortunate events that we knew were guaranteed to happen once we learned about the list of serious presidential candidates to succeed Prof Václav Klaus. The new president Miloš Zeman signed the monstrous permanent EU bailout fund, the "Eurowall" (at least, he was the last one among the EU heads of state), and welcomed José Manuel Barroso to the Prague Castle.

Barroso is a trained Maoist which has probably helped him a lot to become a part of an obnoxious group of European would-be dictators. As you should know, according to the laws, the European Union has no flag or anthem – they were refused along with the European Constitution and they didn't appear in the Treaty of Lisbon again (the absence of symbols is the only major difference between the constitution and the treaty!), so the blue clothes with 12 communist stars recoated yellow that they hanged above the Prague Castle are just a personal symbol of Mr Barroso and his accomplices. They don't care and use the clothes as if they were an actual flag – they're spitting on the laws, including their own laws.

The politically conscious and patriotic part of the Czech nation (well, it's equivalent to the Party of Free Citizens SSO in this case) was shouting "shame" and "we don't want the EU flag" and whistling throughout the ceremony – see the videos here or here. They protested that the Czech anthem was played while Barroso's personal flag was raised – a degradation of the Czech anthem that not even commies dared to commit. It didn't help.

Of course that it is not the ultimate catastrophe but I would lie if I claimed that I don't see any similarity between today's events and those in 1939. On March 15th, Bohemia and Moravia became a protectorate of the Third Reich. Hitler spent just 24 hours in Prague but did all the paperwork. A silent majority of Czechs was doing fine on that day, was even welcoming German soldiers (and communicating in German), and the Czech journalists would even admire the tall and slender physiques of the German soldiers. While Czechs liked to talk about their courage, the approach of the majority was so painful that even Die Zeit had complained about too many bootlickers in the Czech lands.

Thank God it is Zeman who was raising the EU "flag" and not e.g. Schwarzenberg whose broken Czech and other aspects would add an extra flavor to the event. Zeman, a self-declared "soft eurofederalist", thinks that many ideas invented in the EU are silly. He sort of favors common defense and foreign policy – and not too much unification in other respects – which is cute because when it comes to defense and foreign policy, he diverges from the EU politically correct speech codes more than Klaus did. He favors a hard line approach against Islam and Israel's membership in NATO, among other things.

Jágr goes to Boston

I have never attended a match in the NHL (or cared about the league, for that matter). But I am almost sure that if Jaromír Jágr had joined the Boston Bruins a decade earlier, it could have been very different! ;-)

Dwindling AGW and retired Hansen

Post-retirement Hansen has no reasons for self-glorification

Juliet Eilperin, an alarmist hired gun at the Washington Post, is among the reporters who took notice of some results from a new U.S. Pew Research Center survey.



Two thirds of Americans favor the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline which is sensible because the project will make the transfer of oil more efficient and will politically improve the composition of energy sources that America relies upon.

The number of folks infected by the AGW hysteria dropped by 6 percentage points since October 2012 but 60% of the respondents still say that AGW is either somewhat or very serious. Only 42% of the people say that warming "exists" and is mostly due to humans (number hasn't changed). See that page for more numbers like that. Eilperin is combining this news with a reminder that James Hansen decided to retire as we heard yesterday.




Now, I have two basic comments about these issues. If you're too busy, look for the bold face fonts in the text below.

The number of people concerned by "global warming" dropped since October mostly because we experienced winter – a normal, pretty cold winter. (In Germany and probably some places around it, like my hometown, you know, we've experienced the coldest March since 1883.)

How does the explanation work? It's simple. When it comes to the dynamics of their population and their reproduction, global warming fearmongers are isomorphic to mosquitos. (They are equally annoying, too.) When the weather gets a bit warmer, e.g. above the average, suddenly there's a lot of them, they're biting lots of innocent people, and they're stinging them and injecting the toxic propagandist garbage abusing the momentarily elevated temperatures into these human victims (some of them become fearmongers themselves; in this respect, the fearmongers are structurally more similar to vampires than mosquitos).

But the warm weather never lasts indefinitely. Usually well before the next winter, the temperatures cool down and the global warming hysterics begin to die off again. They love to megalomaniacally talk about the far future and the year 2100 or 2200 but their actual ideas and the evidence allegedly supporting these ideas are as ephemeral as a warm afternoon.




Now, James Hansen said he wanted to retire in order to become a 100% activist. When I read about this story on Anthony Watts' blog on April 1st, I really had no clue whether the story was legitimate or an April fool's joke (the odds were 50% for each scenario). I decided to wait for another day, especially because the story was relatively unremarkable, regardless of its April fool's joke status.

Today, one day later, it seems that the information was meant to be super duper cereal and excelsior. So we can comment on it with the knowledge of its status in mind.

James Hansen says that he wants to take a "more active role" e.g. in lawsuits against public officials who don't behave according to the recipes that the most out-of-control global warming fearmongering lunatics such as James Hansen himself would love to impose. I can't resist to mention that this self-congratulatory explanation of the retirement only highlights what kind of a pompous, arrogant, from reality detached jerk James Hansen is.

Let me tell you what's actually going on. A crazy hippie is just retiring from NASA so he will become much less important because most of his importance did boil down to his position in NASA and, more generally, his links to the world's most prominent arm of the space program. There's absolutely no reason to think that anything will get "bigger". Why?

In most respects, James Hansen is just another rank-and-file environmentalist pinko commie watermelon who climbs chimneys, gets arrested during rallies, sleeps in front of power stations, and eats rootlets, acorns, and earthworms. Most importantly, they are ready to eagerly endorse an arbitrarily preposterous proclamation as long as it has the "right" ideological color or flavor. There are at least tens of thousands of such folks in the world (maybe millions?) – they are usually young individuals but Hansen's example shows that they don't have to be young – who have adopted this belief system.



The only respect in which James Hansen has been an above-the-average if not exceptional member of this set of hippies – and the reason why he was a Greenpeace hero who collected millions of dollars from fellow fans of these radical green NGOs – is that he was pretty much the only person in the world who combined these Luddite, insane, totally unscientific, irrational attitudes to the human civilization with an influential position in an organization that is one of the symbols of the contemporary scientific and technological establishment (and yes, NASA deserves to be called "a center of the world's technological establishment" more than any universities do).

This combination is so weird that you can't be surprised that Hansen's fellow green hippies were just stunned how deeply into the "establishment" their pathological far left movement managed to penetrate and they were sending him millions of dollars just for this "deep infection" that he was able to achieve.

But this is mostly over now. James Hansen has retired. The retirement is a completely ordinary event in the life that most people experience on one day or another (without emitting big words about their expectations of a post-retirement skyrocketing career) and he has become a near-average hippie who eats earthworms and gets arrested during rallies against pipelines that pretty much everyone endorses. He may indeed freely participate in frivolous lawsuits attempting to punish fossil fuel executives (and perhaps even ordinary climate skeptics – hundreds of millions of Americans) as if they were masterminds behind the German extermination camps. On one hand, no one will complain that a NASA official paid as a scientist shouldn't join similar anti-civilization political happenings anymore – but on the other hand, without his NASA chair, the fringe status of such lawsuits and similar activities will become increasingly self-evident to his fellow activists, to the politicians, to the general public, and to the courts.

So please, stop with this self-congratulatory garbage that you will become more important in the anti-fossil-fuels movement, Mr Hansen. The retirement means that you will become professionally less important. Because in the last 25 years, your main "job" was to undermine the scientific and technological establishment from within and to contaminate it with fringe theories and political projects, and because you will no longer be an insider, it's clear that your relevance will drop, regardless of attempts by some folks to mask this obvious fact. (Hansen's contributions to our understanding of Venus represent a different, positive story but one that has nothing to do with James Hansen who exists today.)

Some well-known people are (or have been) self-made men who elevate (or elevated) the status, power, and fame of the companies or institutions they are associated with (and some of them established these companies or institutions in the first place). Other well-known people derive their fame and influence from these companies or institutions; they're parasiting or capitalizing on their links with them and they're sucking blood out of the companies or institutions which is particularly effective if people realize that their presence in these companies or institutions is a strange anomaly. Guess which description is more appropriate for James Hansen and NASA.

UCSC study: sea lions like Backstreet Boys

...but the metronome is pretty good, too...

The University of California in Santa Cruz – where I spent the first half of the year 2000 – has done research into the question which mammals aside from humans like Backstreet Boys. And I must emphasize that this is not an April fool's joke.



The winner is Ronan, a sea lion.




You might conjecture – and people have conjectured – that pinnipeds and similar mammals are way too primitive. Unlike humans and parrots – the latter are role models for many humans while they see other humans as their role models, sea lions don't display vocal mimicry.




But vocal mimicry is apparently not necessary to keep the rhythm just like silicon isn't necessary to follow an Al Gore Rhythm. Apparently, even without vocal mimicry, everybody can rock his body. Rock your body right.

The university has also employed a ton of acorns to train squirrels to write papers on loop quantum gravity.

AMS-02: dark matter is composed of a cosmic string

...and its shape seems very "wiggly"...

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer finally decided to expose its first batch of data at Princeton, two days before the talk at CERN. And it's pretty interesting. They detected a clear peak at the positron spectrum located at \(E=m_p/2\). Why would positrons carry the same energy as the proton mass?




As Fox News, The New York Times, and others mention, the explanation wasn't hard to realize. The device carried by the International Space Station is observing decays of protons via\[

p\to e^+ + \gamma

\] and the two final products approximately divide the initial energy of the proton. Why would protons decay in this way if we know from terrestrial experiments that the proton lifetime is at least \(10^{34}\,{\rm years}\) or so? Nobel prize winner Samuel Ting of MIT offered the consensual explanation by his collaboration, AMS-02, but I would dare to say that it may still be questioned.




They say that the proton decay is being catalyzed by a particular extra cosmic object that is only visible through the X-ray "eyes" of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. To verify this expectation, they had to find the detailed directions from which the \(468\MeV\) line originates. The observations made it clear that it's coming from a cosmic string, a dimension-one locus in the outer space.

At this moment, I must warn you against premature conclusions that various cranks could jump to in order to resuscitate their hopeless theories. What I am going to show you is the location of the cosmic string, as determined by AMS-02, and if you look very carefully, it is a completely random curve in space that can't possibly produce any excuse for supernatural interpretations such as the interpretation that it's actually a "text written by the creator". No comments.

The totally random curve looks like this:



Figure 1: the shape of the cosmic string as reconstructed from the \(468\MeV\) spectral line of AMS-02 depicted in light green and superimposed by the collaboration on the WMAP diagram of the sky. Image (C) MIT. Click to zoom in.

While the shape of the curve – depicted in light green – is very far from a straight curve, one that would minimize the energy, you may clearly see that the Fourier components encoding the shape are nothing else than noise so there's no reason to speculate. AMS-02 also added the helpful orange graphics representing the Fermi bubbles. Most of the cosmic string seems to be located inside our galaxy. It's apparently generating some extra curvature that has been assigned to "dark matter" for decades. But now the matter seems as clear as the sky.

You should also note that the equation of state of this matter \(p=-\rho/3\) in average (from the stress-energy tensor inside the cosmic world sheet) is somewhat different from what the cosmologists have believed for decades, \(p=0\). However, there is no real contradiction.

But I am sure that various crackpots and religious nuts will find something that isn't in the curve at all and use it to defend their preposterous theories. They will undoubtedly develop a whole would-be theoretical framework about the role of our galaxy in the scheme of things and perhaps connect this framework with some superstitions that people have been spreading roughly for 1980 years that have elapsed from the day when a Jewish guy was crucified by his countrymates through the day we call today.

The preprint will be released tomorrow in the morning, before the officially scheduled moment when other preprints are out, so during the following 15 hours, you may return to this web page several times an hour and try to click at the link in this paragraph.

Some U.S. science politics

I don't like to write about similar issues. But in mid February, TRF readers learned that Ernest Moniz of MIT would be nominated as the successor of Steven Chu, a new secretary of energy. Indeed, he was nominated two weeks later.



Today, the media are full of reports about the new Fermilab director and an illegitimate child of Dr Chu, namely Dr Hu, who will take the job after Pier Oddone who is retiring. I learned this breaking news from Joseph S.



Finally, Google has done it again, revolutionizing the communication technologies just like it has done so many times in the past. The corporation is introducing Gmail Blue (see gmail.com/blue) which brings the e-mail experience to brand new level and may possibly absorb Microsoft Live Mail, cell phones, and sex in the bedroom.

You may also try Google Nose Beta because smelling is believing. I particularly liked the Lady Racine Marrakech perfume (a shortcut code to get the smell is #FF99AA88BB00 but don't forget the final 00, otherwise you will get the post-cabbage excrement).