var goaway = document.referrer.substring(0,25)if (goaway=="http://www.math.columbia." || goaway=="http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit") window.location = "http://lubos.motl.googlepages.com/crackpot-not-even-wrong.html";function showT(q){ document.getElementById('ima').setAttribute('src','http://lubos.motl.googlepages.com/'+q+'.jpg') } Luboš Motl: The Reference Frame #navbar-iframe { display:block } function setAttributeOnload(object, attribute, val) { if(window.addEventListener) { window.addEventListener("load", function(){ object[attribute] = val; }, false); } else { window.attachEvent('onload', function(){ object[attribute] = val; }); } } skip to main | skip to sidebarThe Reference FrameThe most important events in our and your superstringy Universe as seen from a conservative physicist's viewpointgoogle_ad_width = 728;google_ad_height = 90;google_ad_client="pub-8768832575723394";google_ad_host="pub-1556223355139109";google_ad_format = "728x90_as";google_ad_type = "image";google_ad_channel ="";google_color_border = "336699";google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";google_color_link = "0000FF";google_color_url = "008000";google_color_text = "000000";Eurosocialists insulted by common senseBy the way, a good news in the journalistic world. The Wall Street Journal becomes the first important newspaper that praises Czechia for A Prague Spring for Political Honesty. The European socialists have read the refreshing if not brilliant essay by the Czech president in the Financial Times,Do not tie the markets: free them.Václav Klaus explains that all moments could be called "exceptional" but this adjective is usually used in order to manipulate with the people. And he argues that Europe should weaken if not repeal various environmental, social, health, and other regulations and "standards".How did the socialists react? Well, you can guess! ;-) They went ballistic:Eurosocialists angrily rejected Klaus' calls.The article above is pretty entertaining, so let me respond to individual paragraphs:They urged the Czech Premier Mirek Topolánek to issue an immediate statement declaring that the president speaks for himself and not the government and that his views do not reflect the priorities of the EU Czech presidency.Very nice but before 1989, I have seen a lot of virtually identical stuff. For example, in 1977, everyone was supposed to sign Anti-Charter 77. The government should also denounce the witches, right? Why do they exactly think that Klaus' opinions do not reflect the priorities of the Czech EU presidency?You know, unlike Klaus, Czech people don't give a damn about climate change. It is not a topic that the ordinary people or the media would like to talk about. And they are friendlier to the EU than Klaus is, especially the voters of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) that he founded in 1991 (but that he recently left). But Klaus still enjoys approximately 70% approval rate and most people know very well why they like the person at the Prague Castle as their representative, why he is the right authority and the thinker-in-chief, and why he is likely to protect the Czech Republic and its citizens against some possible threats from abroad.Concerning the economic crisis, the official opinion of the Czech government is actually very close to Klaus's opinion. For example, Czech finance minister Mr Miroslav Kalousek, the finance minister of the year (according to the IMF and WB; he is a Christian Democrat)warns on EU fiscal plans (BBC)much like every responsible finance minister should do. The prime minister has similar opinions.While the government won't officially endorse Klaus's opinions on the global warming religion (although none of the important ministers is a true believer), there are many other things in which they openly agree. For example, Czech PM Topolánek agrees (see the first answer here) with Klaus (see here) that the Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute is primarily their bilateral problem that the EU shouldn't try to control from above, a fact that another author in the Financial Times is incapable to comprehend.(By the way, on Friday, rants by idiots have literally exploded in the Financial Times. Quack Calvin wants Klaus to read the IPCC report and blames Klaus's reasoning for the financial crisis: that's very funny because it is exactly the Czech Republic which, largely due to Klaus' sensible and cautious approach, avoided the financial crisis. An Uwe Bott also criticizes Klaus' climate heresies and recommends Europe to follow Danny the Red, the French commie. They joined Tony Barber who analyzed the shape of Klaus' head to determine that the Czech president is the good soldier Švejk: if I were Tony Barber, I would try to avoid discussions about the shape of the head, see his picture.)As one could have predicted, Klaus didn't attend the gala evening in the National Theater that launched the Czech EU presidency yesterday. His presence could have been viewed as his endorsement of various processes that occur in the EU these days, and it was likely he would choose not to be there. On the other hand, former president Havel attended. I watched the show on TV and it was pretty entertaining and culturally refined although I guess that foreign viewers could have failed to understand many points (e.g. that Mr Jiří Suchý is primarily a comedian and not an out-of-tune singer of anthems). Mr Topolánek's speech about the Czech eclecticism was somewhat novel, too.The Eurosocialists also said the following:"[Klaus] is trying to turn the clock back on 60 years of progress that has brought peace and prosperity for millions of people in Europe".The Czech government must urgently make clear that Václav Klaus speaks only for himself and that Europe's achievements will not be threatened under the Czech presidency.Wow: 60 years of progress that brought peace and prosperity to millions of (working) people are at stake when the reactionaries are allowed to speak. Trust me that the communists were writing identical texts in 1977 when they were celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Great October Revolution (their term for the pathetic November communist coup in Russia). It was also about the peace - the communists were those who should have been credited with bringing peace to the world - and the prosperity of the people was their achievement, too.Whether the social changes in the last 60 years were mostly positive - or whether the progress was due to technological and other advances by the free markets that worked despite the central regulation - is an extremely subtle question and it is very clear that people inevitably have different answers to it. Despite "global warming", Klaus found some snow in Bohemia a week ago. ;-) It's not so shocking: we have -13 °C in Pilsen right now and snow.The Eurosocialists also tell us that the Czech government must "urgently" denounce Václav Klaus. Oh really, do they have to denounce him? Is the Czech center-right government on the Eurosocialists' payroll? Believe me, they won't do so. In most of these issues, they simply agree with him, and even when it comes to the issues where they officially disagree with him, there won't be any doubt that they allow him to have his own opinion, much like everyone else in the Czech Republic which has been a free country for two decades (and for centuries until 1939). If they live in countries where it is no longer effectively legal to agree with Prof Klaus, that's already too bad - but someone should explain them that the freedom of speech hasn't been nuked in the Czech Republic yet. These politicians can be superficially respected in their countries because they are surrounded by simpletons and cowards. But believe me, if they insist that the governments should try to pretend that the opinions of a popular head of state don't even exist or must become illegal, they will be viewed as ludicrous childish puppets in much of the Czech Republic. Unlike Santa Claus, President Klaus is a real person and his opinions are real, too. They represent the values and attitudes of at least a significant fraction of the EU citizens. And it's much more likely that Klaus will convert Barroso to his side than that he will surrender. Everyone who knows Václav Klaus will confirm my words.Finally:Said Socialist Euro MP and president of the Committee for social Affairs and Employment, Jan Andersson: "the views expressed by Mr Klaus are against everything that European socialists stand for. Weakening social and environmental standards in Europe could never be a solution."Well, it is not too difficult (i.e. one doesn't have to be Klaus) to be against everything that a party stands for if everything that the party stands for is regulation, buseration, high taxation, intimidation, centralization, hypocrisy, dirigism, alarmism, multiculturalism, redistribution, feminism, and political correctness. ;-)Posted byLumoat8:27 PM | 0 slow comments | postCount('5082195534811228097'); | postCountTB('5082195534811228097'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:Czechoslovakia,Europe,politicsvar sb_post_date = "Thursday, January 08, 2009";var sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/eurosocialists-insulted-by-common-sense.html";var sb_rated_title = "Eurosocialists insulted by common sense";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "8:27 PM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } UAH MSU: month-on-month coolingUAH MSU satellite records have released the December 2008 data. The anomaly shows 0.074 °C of cooling since November which is pretty substantial (100 °C per century haha). Unfortunately, the newest numbers are not yet on the website I linked so we have to rely on private channels of Anthony Watts which are surely reliable because they are coming from the very center of UAH MSU. ;-)Of course, the data show 2008 as the coldest year of the century that began 8 years ago. So far because we may see colder years in the future.However, I just wanted to draw a few UAH graphs, anyway. So they don't contain December 2008 yet. First, here are the graphs that you rarely see: the temperature of the world's oceans and land: Click any graph to zoom in. You can see that the land was warming by about 50% faster rate than the ocean, 0.16 and 0.11 °C per decade, and you may hypothesize that some effects of the civilization have influenced this observation. It would probably be incorrect to talk about the "urban heat island" effects because the satellites are unlikely to be affected by the popular barbecue parties at the weather stations.Here are the two hemispheres: Shift/click the picture to open a bigger one in a new window. (That's an even more important keyboard shortcut than tabulator/enter that changes the color of a ball.)You see that the Southern Hemisphere is warming up more than 3 times slower than the Northern Hemisphere which is another reason to think that the observed changes are not really global in character. If you care, the Southern polar regions are cooling by 0.08 °C per decade. I am not going to post these graphs because that would be a more serious blasphemy than the pictures of Mohammed! :-)Moreover, the warming is in the mid troposphere is much slower while it should be faster according to the greenhouse-dominated models.Posted byLumoat5:18 PM | 0 slow comments | postCount('2778089070062457577'); | postCountTB('2778089070062457577'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:climate,weather recordsvar sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/uah-msu-month-on-month-cooling.html";var sb_rated_title = "UAH MSU: month-on-month cooling";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "5:18 PM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } Genes and memes, ideas and empty wordsBecause a large part of the Spanish online community seems to be infected with a meme of a ball that changes its color upon clicking (almost 1 visit to TRF per second, meneame.net is the reason for the propagation of this meme, or a nonsense of the day, if you wish to follow their terminology), let me write something about the memes.A few weeks ago, I had an e-mail exchange about memes with a reader of TRF whom I have also met in the real life - unlike many of you. Greetings, Tom.He argued that the concept of a "meme" is an amazing discovery because it allows us to understand the fascinating phenomenon of a "Mexican wave" that moves around the Earth every 24 hours and that affects a field that is defined as the density of the vibrations of five-inch sticks referred to as toothbrushes. How is it possible that these toothbrushes move in unison? It is surely a divine phenomenon proving that memes are jumping in between the brains of different people. And the extraterrestrial aliens would surely be talking about "memes" all the time when their attention would focus on the Mexican wave of toothbrushes on the Earth, Tom argued. ;-)As you may expect, I was skeptical about these big assertions about the importance of "memes" because the aliens would probably be thrilled by very different things than "memes" or "toothbrushing waves" and they could even use the toothbrushes themselves in ways that we couldn't have predicted. So let me defend my viewpoint.Memes: a few positive wordsI am personally using the word "meme", at least sometimes. What does it mean? It is a small idea, an elementary building block of an ideology, a partial method to look at a particular or general problem, or a myth, a joke, or a viral video or another computer file that people send to each other to have some fun, and what is important for every meme is that it can spread just like an infection. It is very stupid to click at the ball in the previous posting. But people are doing it nevertheless. And they lead other people to do the same thing.There exists a clear analogy of this behavior to the concept of the genes. Much like genes, memes are "selfish", if you allow me to use Dawkins' colorful adjective. They have their own identity - or at least it's the point of "memetics" to imagine that they do - and they want to become more powerful and to control a larger portion of the world. So they are using and abusing the environment in order to spread. Each of them may choose a different strategy.Genes spread by creating proteins and animals and by forcing the animals to reproduce so that they reproduce the genes (parts of the DNA code), too. Analogously, memes are able to rewire the brains of the people (and animals) and force them to impress (and infect) other people.To some extent, this analogy works very well. And I remember that as a teenager, I was impressed by the observation that many seemingly different portions of the real world (e.g. evolution of species and development of new graphics cards or anything else, for that matter) share the same qualitative aspects of dynamics such as the competition.Genes and memes: why we use the word "meme"This similarity between genes and memes is often helpful to express an idea. Why do I use the word "meme" rather than "idea" or "habit" or something else? It is exactly because of its vagueness. Much like a "gene", "meme" has no moral sign. We don't have to discuss whether the "meme" is correct or incorrect, profound or shallow, moral or immoral. Also, we don't have to discuss the precise methods how the idea is being propagated: the medium is not important.It is just a piece of "creative information" that we should look at without any emotions. The focus should be on its ability to mutate, propagate, and compete with other memes. That's why some other words such as "ideas", "myths", "habits", "heresies", "world views", "opinions", "beliefs", "slogans", "slanders" are often less appropriate than "memes" because all these words are too specific: they either involve an appraisal of the correctness, depth, or ethics, or they are associated with a very specific medium that carries them or an excessively specific purpose for their propagation. Memes are more general. It often happens that the old languages only offer words for rather specific things, and as we're getting wiser, we are inventing new words (or recycling the old words) to refer to more general or more abstract concepts. The reason why the old languages (and our languages in the past) were more specific was that they were mostly created by ordinary people who didn't want to think about too abstract and too general concepts. On the opposite extreme end, philosophers often coin words that are too general to be any useful (for people's practical lives or for genuine understanding of the real world).Memes: the vagueness is a problemOn the other hand, this vagueness is also the reason why "memes" are not terribly helpful to establish a detailed science. Besides the qualitative similarity with genes explained above, there is nothing deeper to investigate about "memes" unless we know some details about the situation. And once we know the details, we can use the very same methods that people have been using for centuries, long before they knew the word "meme". In other words, we're not learning anything new by the word "meme". People have known for quite some time that it is possible to educate or brainwash other people and to spread opinions, beliefs, or slogans.When we look at the Mexican wave of toothbrushes, there is really no mystery. This Mexican wave is one of the most mundane (and least important) processes in the world. It is a logical consequence of more elementary processes that we understand pretty well. For a couple of centuries, people were refining their habit to clean their teeth: see the history of toothbrushing. It made their breath fresher which made the people more attractive and it arguably lowered the probability of toothaches in the future, so they were rewarded. A reward is the main reason why habits propagate.And the parents realized this advantage (or hypothetical advantage) so they were leading their children to do the same thing, before the kids become able to decide for themselves. To educate them, parents give chocolates to the kids because they were brushing their teeth yesterday. There is also an explanation why people usually do this activity in the morning or the evening which, together with the known patterns of the Earth's rotation, explains the geometric structure of the Mexican wave in spacetime.The other side, Tom, argued that the discovery of the meme was as important as Mendel's discovery of genes or Darwin's discovery of natural selection which is the kind of statements that make me go ballistic. You know, Darwin's discovery was one of the deepest paradigm shifts ever. It introduced a new, obviously correct theory whose explanation of the world around - and the historical events - completely contradicted pretty much all the beliefs of intellectuals up to Darwin's times. And Darwin actually had to face some backlash, much like nearly all people who discover something important.On the other hand, the concept of a meme is just a recycled idea of a gene, so it is nothing new, and it offers no new explanation of the observed phenomena and their history (e.g. tooth brushing). It doesn't change the people's opinions about any particular events in the past or in the future. In this sense, it is a vacuous word. I view the difference between "knowing something" and "knowing the name of something" equally sharply as Richard Feynman did. Recall that in Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, a section called Is Electricity Fire?, he wrote about an interdisciplinary conference:There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read - something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means."So I stopped - at random - and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.Incidentally, in this interview, Feynman humiliates both the habit to brush the teeth (at the beginning of the video: Gell-Mann told me that Feynman's teeth were in a really bad shape because of his brave opposition to this habit!) as well as the desire of many people to learn the names of things instead of learning things (at 4:00).The concept of a "meme", if sold as deep science, is analogous to the "members of social communities who receive the information via visual, symbolic channels" in the quotation above. Why don't we just say that "people read"? And why don't we simply say that brushing the teeth is a "habit" rather than a "meme"? Sometimes I am not sure whether some people only want to look "smart" by using an unnecessarily sophisticated jargon, or whether they really believe that it is deep.Sequences of basesThere is one more scientific problem with the "meme" that makes it inferior to the concept of a "gene": the vagueness is guaranteed to be permanent. You know, genes have been known to be rather sharply defined from the very beginning. A gene may be responsible for the color of your eyes that can be brown or blue and the intermediate colors are encountered rather rarely, at least in some communities. It follows that there has to be a rather discrete piece of information that decides about your eye color. People have realized this fact for more than a century. The only major qualitative advance of the 20th century biology was the discovery of the molecular basis of genetics - the science of DNA. It showed us that the information is much more discrete and rigid than anyone has thought. We're genetically more similar to computer programs than to the mushed potatoes. But the DNA discoveries haven't really changed anything about our knowledge concerning the macroscopic working of the rules of genetics.While genes are described by sharp, binary information encoded in the base sequences - using letters "A C G T" for the DNA or "A C G U" for the RNA - memes are almost certainly guaranteed to be associated with no specific sharp information. In fact, it is likely that the details of every idea are stored differently in the brain of each of us. The idea, or a "meme", has to use the existing wiring of our brains, but because the latter depends on our genetics as well as the previous learning and experience, the rewiring necessary for us to accept the "meme" is different for every human being.When "memes" are propagated via computers, one can see that they are carried by pretty much universal sequences of bits and bytes: they're various computer programs, pictures, viruses, and trojan horses. In the computer world, the concept of a "meme" is perhaps closer to a "gene" than the "memes" in the purely human world. But in this computer context, we surprisingly like to use other, more specific terms, such as "viral videos".At any rate, the "meme" can be a useful term but we should never pretend that a new word to be used for an old, well-known object or phenomenon is a big discovery equivalent to Darwin's breakthrough. It's usually not. And if our predictions for all the future events and our guesses about the past events remain unchanged once the new concept is introduced, we should admit that the new concept is nothing else than a word, a piece of linguistics or culture without a scientific value. The word "meme" is just a meme, after all.And that's the memo.Posted byLumoat9:40 AM | 0 slow comments | postCount('6829011521497503708'); | postCountTB('6829011521497503708'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:biology,philosophy of science,science and societyvar sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/genes-and-memes-ideas-and-empty-words.html";var sb_rated_title = "Genes and memes, ideas and empty words";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "9:40 AM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } Nonsense of the day: click the ball to change its colorTontería del día: Pincha en la bola para cambiarla de colorFull screen here...Special bienvenido for Spanish visitors!Posted byLumoat11:28 AM | 6 slow comments | postCount('6296279910940523215'); | postCountTB('6296279910940523215'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:computers,gamesvar sb_post_date = "Wednesday, January 07, 2009";var sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/click-ball-to-change-its-color.html";var sb_rated_title = "Nonsense of the day: click the ball to change its color";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "11:28 AM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } NCDC: the U.S. cool down by 0.49 °F per decadeThe National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) became the first major source of temperature data that has published its December 2008 figures. As a reader of Anthony Watts' blog nicknamed "crosspatch" revealed, you can now draw graphs that include the whole year 2008. Here is one: Click to zoom in. The graph shows the average U.S. temperatures in the most recent 10 years - between 1999 and 2008 - in Fahrenheit degrees. Here is how I created it:go to an NCDC pagein the form, choose "Mean Temperature, Annual, United States, From 1999, To 2008, Base Period 1901-2000"Keep the output type for the sake of simplicity and click "Submit". If you want my colors, take a screenshot of the right size, negate its colors, and fill the outer region by the TRF background color #113322 (17, 51, 34 decimally). ;-)What you see if you do a linear regression is a cooling trend by 0.49 °F = 0.27 °C per decade. The cooling between 2006 and 2008 was more dramatic: from 55 °F to 53 °F, by a whopping two degrees Fahrenheit!Crosspatch was feeling badly because he originally chose the 1998-2008 period which actually contains eleven years rather than ten: in this sense, he used a nonperturbative, M-theoretical definition of a decade. :-) Moreover, the first year in this interval was the famously warm El Nino year, 1998. With this choice, crosspatch obtained a slightly faster cooling trend. He has paid a very high price: alarmist attack dogs immediately accused him of cherry-picking. ;-)But even if you begin with a cooler La Nina year 1999, as I did, you obtain a cooling trend in the average U.S. temperatures during the last 10 years. Because some infrequent readers may have problems to interpret these words, let me emphasize that this cooling means that there has been no warming in the U.S. for 10 years. I am (and the data are) not only questioning the heavenly huge, urgent, catastrophically accelerating, and global eco-socialism demanding rate of global warming but the very existence of global warming and the sanity of all people who believe this myth.In fact, there has been a cooling, and a rather fast one that would subtract 2.7 °C per century if it continued by the same rate (and it surely won't). Furthermore, this cooling cannot really be explained by ENSO dynamics (El Nino and La Nina episodes) because the ENSO episodes are distributed pretty much symmetrically in the last decade. This 10-year period began with a La Nina and it ended with a La Nina.Now, indeed, other continents would lead to different conclusions. But let me mention that these conclusions wouldn't be radically different and moreover, 90% of Americans don't care about the temperatures anywhere outside the U.S. There's been a cooling in the last 10 years which means that even if there exists an underlying warming trend, it will take many decades before this warming emerges out of the "noise" that we must assume to exist in order to avoid a direct falsification of the global warming hypothesis by the evidence above.RSS MSUSoon afterwords, RSS MSU joined NCDC and gave us the first figure for the December 2008 global temperature. Anomaly-wise, which was 0.174 °C, December was 0.04 °C cooler than November.The middle troposphere where global warming should be faster than on the surface offers us even more remarkable data. The December anomaly was -0.028 °C, cooler than the average in the last 30 years. In fact, 8 months out of 12 in 2008 were cooler than the average month with the same name in 1979-2008. Here is the 1979-2008 graph (360 months) for the middle troposphere. There's virtually no trend here (even though the calculated trend from the regression is about +0.9 °C per century) and the 1998 El Nino is the only eye-catching feature of this otherwise chaotic graph. The mid troposphere is now cooler than e.g. in January 1980 - do you remember that you were a bit younger than today? No global warming since that time. Click the graph to zoom in. The copyright year should say 2009 - sorry for this frequent January typo. ;-)Incidentally, it was the first time I imported text files from the web directly into Mathematica 7 (as a table) and after a few contacts with the helpful F1 key, the procedure was unbelievably straightforward; see a simple Mathematica notebook.By the way, during the final three months of 2008, the 12-month running mean (of the RSS mid troposphere anomaly) was at its lowest level since 1994.Nobel prize winners against AGW mythsIf you want to see another scientific Nobel prize winner who disagrees with the AGW quasi-religious myths, see the 2002 TED talk by Kary Mullis (chemistry prize, 1993; YouTube version). There's a lot of interesting stuff in the talk, e.g. about the vacuum and the church, whether the scientific method is obvious, and his funny childhood experiments, but if you're interested in the climate, go to 20:00.He tells you why the people in the IPCC do it for the money and travel and won't tell you the truth etc. He says that most warming seen by the surface stations has been due to the skyline effect and includes warming at night only. Via Tom Nelson.Commercial: Czech president in the Financial Times: Do not tie the markets - free themPosted byLumoat9:21 PM | 1 slow comments | postCount('1631038366703580726'); | postCountTB('1631038366703580726'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:climate,weather recordsvar sb_post_date = "Tuesday, January 06, 2009";var sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/ncdc-us-cool-down-by-049-deg-f-per.html";var sb_rated_title = "NCDC: the U.S. cool down by 0.49 °F per decade";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "9:21 PM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } Record cold temperatures in 2009 Current U.S. temperatures in °F.See Anthony Watts' blog for more comments.Record cold temperatures have arrived to the United Kingdom, Canada (24 consecutive days below -24 °C in a city). Cold Siberian air has also hit Central Europe, France, and Italy. London is colder than Antarctica. Literally. The cold snap is costly.The temperature in Pilsen and Czechia in general keeps on oscillating around -10 °C, too. The snow around is clean and pretty. The coldest official Czech weather station, Stráž pod Ralskem, has seen -25.1 °C.Journalists are also freezing in Colorado and Wyoming, among other places, while North Dakota continues to see record snow. Poor people in chilly India solve the situation by burning books; at least 55 people have died. I hope that they have enough copies of An Inconvenient Truth, like in Belgium (I invented the joke before them!). Sorry, the picture above are commies in a warm weather, not poor people in a chilly weather.Giraffes in a chilly Chinese zoo discovered fire as a way to get warmer.Cold weather and global warmingA frequent question is whether the repeated record low temperatures imply that global warming either doesn't exist or it is not serious. Of course that they do. Assume that the temperature in your city is a linearly increasing function of time, "Temp + Slope x Time", plus fluctuations that are randomly distributed with the standard deviation "SD".If you get the opportunity to prove that the linear trend in your city exists at the five-sigma confidence level, i.e. that the net warming since 1900 or so has exceeded five times the natural oscillation "SD", then it also means that the probability that you get a cold extreme for a certain day will be dropping faster than exponentially: like the Gaussian. Assuming that the "systematic" global warming accumulated by the linear trend exceeds five times the noise "SD", which is really necessary for proving that the linear trend in your city is more than noise according to the physics standards, the probability that you measure a new cold weather record should drop roughly one million times (!): check basic articles about the normal distribution and how large fraction of a Gaussian lies below minus five sigma. It is less than 1 part per million.Such a dramatic decrease of the frequency of record cold temperatures is clearly not happening because the record cold temperatures seem to be as frequent as they were in the past. More precisely, their frequency should be naturally decreasing with the growing temperature records (with time).If you study the global mean temperature rather than the local temperatures, you obviously increase the signal-to-noise ratio because a large part of the noise gets averaged out (but not all of it). However, at the same moment, the conclusions derived from the global mean temperature are also much less relevant for any particular city in the world. Every city should actually care about their own temperature, because they can only be affected through it. And for the local temperature, the accumulated warming from the linear trend is much smaller than the unavoidable interannual fluctuations which is why the underlying warming trend is completely irrelevant for every single rational human being in the world.On a positive note, CNN's Lou Dobbs identified global warming alarmism as a new religion and CNN even allowed Joe D'Aleo to speak. Via Marc Morano and Business and Media. The number of articles at Google News that mention global warming has dropped close to 20,000, a three-year low and much less than the record near 50,000 just a short time ago.Posted byLumoat4:37 PM | 1 slow comments | postCount('3567957440019778905'); | postCountTB('3567957440019778905'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:climate,weather recordsvar sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/record-cold-temperatures-in-2009.html";var sb_rated_title = "Record cold temperatures in 2009";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "4:37 PM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } Czech PM Topolánek is chatting with you today Czech prime minister Mr Mirek Topolánek, the current official figurehead of the EU presidency, will answer your questions today at 3:30 p.m. Prague time i.e. 9:30 a.m. Boston time. See HTML page announcing the chatHTML page with your questions and answersHTML pages of the Czech EU presidencyUpdate: Around 4 p.m. Prague time, the maximum number of questions has already been asked, so Mr Topolánek just has to answer those that are already there.On January 9th, 10:30 a.m. Prague time, a similar chat with Mr Alexander Vondra, the Czech minister for European affairs, will follow. Mr Topolánek is the current chairman of the right-wing Civic Democratic Party (ODS) that was founded by President Klaus in 1991 but recently divorced from him because of the recent centrist readjustments of the ODS. Topolánek is less likely to actively fight against the global warming hysteria or the Soviet style of the EU unification than President Klaus but he still opposes various socialist policies in current Europe, including massive bailouts.On Saturday, Topolánek's spokesman for EU presidency issues shocked and sweetened some people by explaining that Topolánek as the official EU figurehead considers Israeli operations to be defensive in character. Topolánek "saved" the spokesman, especially because there was no good reason to fire him. Topolánek is a staunch defender of the U.S. missile system, including the Czech radar, too.Mr Topolánek's own fists are also in good shape as some paparazzi could recently witness. ;-) Related YouTube videos entertain you with Mr Topolánek's colorful language and gestures, too, but non-Czech speakers will probably not appreciate them. :-)Other political topicsBy the way, on Thursday, EU foreign ministers will meet in Prague to discuss the Russian cut of the gas supply now, during one of the coldest recent winters in Europe. Meanwhile, The New York Times found out that in Fall 1997, Larry Summers was blocking the Kyoto protocol in the U.S. Let us wish the U.S., whose president's top economic adviser Summers is today, that my former überboss didn't become senile during the last 11.5 years.You can also check the automatic translation of a rather typical article about global warming in the Czech media, Mankind's influence on the climate may be small. Skepticism thrives in Czechia, unlike other places where censorship is the king.Posted byLumoat9:13 AM | 0 slow comments | postCount('4714195368183807337'); | postCountTB('4714195368183807337'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:Czechoslovakia,Europe,politicsvar sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/czech-pm-topolanek-will-chat-with-you.html";var sb_rated_title = "Czech PM Topolánek is chatting with you today";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "9:13 AM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } Surfer dude in a coffee machine may supersede the LHCWhile the LHC is going to be restarted in June after a "catastrophic malfunction", as the journalists call the routine, expected, and mundane breakdown of a few magnets following a quench, you may have wondered that it is too large and expensive a machine. USD 9 billion is not a negligible amount of money. Can't the physicists design a somewhat cheaper gadget, one that is similar e.g. to a coffee machine? Figure 1: A prototype of the new kind of an atom smasher. Image from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL).Nude Socialist, Softpedia, and others describe a new design that is pretty close to that goal. Building on a 1979 paper by John Dawson (UCLA) and Toshiki Tajima (Austin), Wim Leemans et al. (LBNL) are constructing much cheaper devices based on powerful lasers.A coffee machine heats up some water to get a plasma and a powerful laser creates mesoscopic waves that make electrons oscillate, or surf on the waves, and accelerate to potentially huge energies. Figure 2: The wave effect of a high-intensity pulse laser. The same credits. Click the images to zoom in.But don't expect any old-fashioned experimental particle physicists to be arrested for wasting the taxpayers' money any time soon. So far they only work on the acceleration to relatively small energies and dream about dozens of GeV in the electron beams. In the 2020s, they could get to hundreds of GeVs if the laser power gets really cheap and if they're lucky.If that becomes the case, surfer dudes could be useful for high-energy physics, after all.Posted byLumoat8:28 AM | 0 slow comments | postCount('5316173021231543849'); | postCountTB('5316173021231543849'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:experiments,LHCvar sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/surfer-dude-in-coffee-machine-may.html";var sb_rated_title = "Surfer dude in a coffee machine may supersede the LHC";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "8:28 AM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } Best European Blog: a contest Between now and January 12th (5 pm Boston time), click the image above every day and choose TRF (2nd column, 2nd row) or one of nine other attractive blogs that have been nominated as the best European blog. Boringly enough, I am not aware of any real "foes" in our European category.Encourage your friends to objectively choose between TRF and the other interesting blogs, too.Don't forget about the best science blog where Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts will compete against Bad Astronomy and Real Climate, among six others.Thanks to Eduardo for his nomination - and the same thanks for Rae Ann's and two more nominations in the science category where others have beaten us before the contest began. ;-)Bonus: New Year AddressBy the way, you may watch a peaceful Czech president Václav Klaus' New Year Address with a direct translation to (Cz)English by your humble correspondent.Posted byLumoat11:11 PM | 0 slow comments | postCount('3713301809452497668'); | postCountTB('3713301809452497668'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:computers,Europe,everyday lifevar sb_post_date = "Monday, January 05, 2009";var sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/best-european-blog-contest.html";var sb_rated_title = "Best European Blog: a contest";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "11:11 PM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } Types of elementary particlesOne of the main features of "progress" in theoretical physics is the unification of concepts and the emergence of tight links between previously unrelated concepts and assumptions. As this process continued (and continues), our theory were (and are) becoming more robust because they were (and are) built on a smaller number of independent assumptions.This process is often misunderstood by the laymen who would often prefer the "progress" that invents or discovers completely new things that are unrelated to everything we have ever seen. Well, don't get me wrong, new effects and objects have to be sometimes discovered and science has to cover an ever larger set of phenomena. On the other hand, this is the "zoological" part of the progress in which new species are being constantly added. As soon as they are added, they are understood at a superficial level only. The "philosophical" part of the progress that connects and unifies the old discoveries into an ever tighter network is more profound. This sort of development may be document by our perspective on the question what are the elementary particles in Nature. Modern quantum field theory describes pretty much all kinds of particles we know by the same formalism: the differences between types of particles that were previously viewed as "radically different" become either technicalities or different faces of the same underlying structure that inevitably follow as long as one understands this structure well.In this text, I will describe different "iron curtains" that seem to separate "completely different" categories of particles in the minds of many people and explain the relationships between the individual "blocs". These relationships could be found by "pure thought" of sufficiently intelligent observers, at least in principle.Particles vs wavesSince the early days of quantum mechanics, and even the old quantum theory, people knew that particles and waves were just two aspects of the same thing. Electromagnetic waves and similar objects that were historically identified as waves became a stream of particles such as photons. The energy carried by one quantum of energy always has to be proportional to "hf" where "h" is Planck's constant and "f" is the frequency. (It's easier to type "h" than "hbar" and "f" than "omega" here.)On the other hand, objects first identified as particles, for example electrons, were found to exhibit wave-like behavior, including interference. All of them are described by wave functions (probability waves) that became a prototype of a quantum field later, when multiparticle theories were studied by the methods of the second quantization.Why were the photons initially known as waves (and classical forces) while electrons were known as particles (that can be counted)? Well, it's because the photons are bosons which means that they like to be grouped with their identical friends in the same state. That's why there are usually many photons in the same state, "N", and this large number effectively becomes continuous which is why the collective probability wave describing the state becomes a classical wave, in this case an electromagnetic one.On the other hand, electrons are fermions that have to obey Pauli's exclusion principle. That's why they can never be found in the same state as another particle of the same type and they can never give rise to coherent fields and long-range forces. One always has to observe them individually, and because the waves in their typical wave functions were much shorter than the resolution of the 19th century physicists (roughly than the atomic radius), people initially didn't know about their quantum/wave properties.Bosons vs fermionsThis discussion leads us to bosons and fermions. It may look like they are completely different types of animals. Bosons prefer to look like classical waves while fermions prefer to look like classical particles. However, when you describe them in the language of quantum field theory, this seemingly qualitative difference boils down to a single sign in which they differ.Wave functions of bosons are symmetric under the exchange of the coordinates (and other quantum numbers) of pairs of identical particles, psi(x,y) = +psi(y,x), while wave functions of fermions are antisymmetric: they flip the sign: psi(x,y) = -psi(y,x).In terms of quantum fields, bosons are described by commuting quantum fields while fermions by the anticommuting ones. Anticommuting (Grassmannian) numbers are a bit counter-intuitive for the newbies but if you learn how to deal with all aspects of quantum theory properly, you will see that the Grassmannian numbers work as well as the ordinary, commuting numbers for all the purposes and all the differences arise from the single sign that differs.A realistic theory must be able to deal with bosons as well as fermions. Moreover, it makes no sense to imagine that a theory should only treat bosons as fundamental particles or it should only treat fermions as fundamental particles. Why? If you have fermions, it is always possible to construct their bound states with an even number of fermions. These bound states inevitably behave as bosons and their properties are pretty much identical to the properties of elementary bosons: elementary and composite bosons (and other particles) should really be studied together, as we will argue. Moreover, real bosonic particles in an interacting theory (for example glueballs in QCD) also contain a mixture of fermionic particle-antiparticle pairs (for example quarks and antiquarks): one can never "remove all traces of fermions" from the real particles.On the other hand, fermionic excitations can also emerge from a purely bosonic starting point but one needs more sophisticated methods than ordinary bound states, namely solitonic solutions and their excitations. However, a more important fact is that fermions are observed to exist and a remotely realistic theory simply has to agree with their existence.To summarize, you should get used to the fact that a good enough theory has to contain both bosons and fermions, pretty much on equal footing, even though their physical manifestations in real-world, complex situations may look very different.Particles of different spins in generalBosons that like to be grouped with others can be shown to have an integer intrinsic angular momentum i.e. spin while the spin of fermions is half-integral such as 1/2 or 3/2. Particles, especially the nuclei, can have very high spins comparable to 10 or more.However, the particles that you would ever consider "elementary" tend to have spins that never exceed 2. In fact, gravitons are the only elementary particles whose spin is 2: their polarizations with mixed signature (one time-like coordinate) would behave as "bad ghosts" that lead to negative probabilities. This potential catastrophe is prevented by gauge invariance, and the only possible gauge invariance for spin-2 fields is general covariance (diffeomorphism symmetry) of GR. In this setup, the tensor field (the metric tensor) has to couple to the conserved stress-energy tensor. There can only be one such tensor in a sensible interacting theory of one Universe, which is why there can only be one kind of a graviton. However, the graviton may be higher-dimensional and its Fourier decomposition into four-dimensional particles can lead to new types of particles (Kaluza-Klein modes of the graviton; graviphotons; new scalar fields).Analogously, the removal of unphysical, ghostly modes of spin 3/2 particles requires a conserved spin-3/2 current, corresponding to a spin-1/2 conserved quantity. That's inevitably a "supercharge". Such a supercharge is inevitably fermionic, by the spin-statistics relationships, and the anticommutator of two copies of it inevitably includes translations. That's why we inevitably end up with diffeomorphisms as a part of the gauge invariance whenever there are spin-3/2 fields: we have a theory of general relativity with local supercharges, also known as supergravity, and the spin-3/2 fields are the gravitino fields. There can be a couple of them but not too many because the interactions become increasingly constrained as you add new supercharges.The only elementary spin-1 fields are gauge fields such as the electromagnetic fields creating photons or their Yang-Mills counterpart connected with gluons or W bosons or Z bosons. The unphysical, ghostly, time-like component must be removed by a standard gauge invariance, Abelian or non-Abelian one. This gauge invariance can be unconfined and unbroken (like in electromagnetism), confined (like in the strong force) or spontaneously broken (like in the electroweak force) but it is still a gauge invariance, despite the very different behavior of these three types of gauge fields. The underlying mathematics is virtually identical in the three cases and all the qualitative differences in the everyday life are "emergent".Spin-1/2 and spin-0 fields have no modes with negative probabilities. That's why they require no additional gauge invariances. These ordinary fields are often called "matter fields" (in the narrow sense) in particle physics. It is natural for the elementary spin-0 fields not to be easily observed because they can easily become very massive. On the other hand, the masses of spin-1/2 particles are often protected to be low.As you can see, elementary fields can only have spin up to 2, and as you approach 2, they require an increasingly specific structure underlying them. That doesn't mean that particles with spins above 2 don't exist: the nuclei or highly excited closed strings surely do exist. But there's no way to write a sensible Lagrangian with a finite number of fields where they would be treated as elementary fields. Such a Lagrangian would need new, high-spin gauge symmetries to get rid of the negative probabilities (from the creation of timelike modes) and such complicated symmetries would require the interactions to essentially vanish for the corresponding Noether charges to be conserved.Elementary vs composite particlesIn the previous paragraphs, I discussed elementary particles as something very different from the composite ones. However, such a difference is only "qualitative" if one intends to describe physics by a particular classical Lagrangian (that can later be quantized). That means that certain fields are chosen to be fundamental - and the particles that they create are usually close to some real particles we can observe - while all interactions are added as small corrections.In general, interactions are not that weak and the actual observed particles are not identical to the quanta of the fields in a Lagrangian. That also means you can't "qualitatively" distinguish which particles are fundamental and which particles are composite. In this sense, the difference is only useful for the people who write Lagrangians on a sheet of paper, not for people who only want to observe the reality.If you go to the opposite extreme limit where the interactions become "infinitely strong", the question which fields are elementary and which fields are composites (or solitons, to be explained below) gets mixed up dramatically - in some sense, the answer is turned upside down. We will discuss this issue later.Stable vs unstable particlesSome particles such as electrons and photons (and maybe even protons?) are stable, others such as the W boson decay after some time. Quite generally, particles are stable if there doesn't exist anything lighter with the same value of conserved charges that they can decay into. By the rules of quantum mechanics, the mass of unstable particles is complex, with the imaginary part being dictated by the width (essentially the inverse lifetime).Stable particles have real masses, i.e. their width equals to zero.You could think that this difference between stable and unstable particles is qualitative. But it is only as qualitative as the difference between 0 and another real number. Whether a particle is stable or not depends on dynamics, not on some predetermined categorization of the particles. If you learn the mathematics, it naturally treats stable and unstable particles in the same way - just the width is zero in the stable case. There's no "real" iron curtain between the two groups. More concretely, if a particle is unstable, it doesn't mean that it must be composite. The neutron is unstable and composite but it is not really "made out of" the decay products, i.e. of a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino (such a bound state would be more similar to a much larger Hydrogen atom). Instead, it is made out of three quarks (and some QCD mushed potatoes in it).The W boson and the Higgs boson are also unstable but they are completely elementary fields of the Standard Model - a statement that is really uncontroversial in the case of the W boson and the controversy in the Higgs case is largely speculative in character. How can they decay if they are elementary? Well, they can. Particles in quantum field theory can be destroyed and created as long as the conservation laws are obeyed. If no law prevents a process from occurring, it will always occur with a nonzero probability or rate.Real vs virtual particles, particles vs resonancesThere is a related way to look at the same question. Unstable particles appear as resonances. For example, if you collide an electron and a positron, they can annihilate into "pure energy" and a Z boson may be born from this energy (because it doesn't carry any charges, anyway). If the total energy of the two initial particles is close to the Z boson mass, you will produce the Z boson quite often. But because the Z boson mass is complex - the Z boson has a nonzero width because it is unstable - you will produce it even if the total initial energy is slightly off. You will observe the Z boson as a resonance in the scattering of your electron and your positron.The concept of a resonance is a method to see an unstable particle. It is really another aspect of the very same thing. Whenever you observe a resonance, you can never be certain that the resonance is connected with an elementary or a composite particle. It can be both: except for extremely weakly coupled theories (where all the interactions are weak), there is no God-given qualitative difference between elementary and composite particles.Color neutral vs confined particlesQuantum Chromodynamics, QCD, offers us lots of new classes of particles. Generally, all particles that interact via the strong force and that can actually be observed in isolation (in reality) are called hadrons. The most important subclasses of hadrons are baryons (with 3 quarks plus mushed potatoes: e.g. protons and neutrons) and mesons (with a quark and an antiquark plus mushed potatoes: e.g. pions and kaons).But there can exist other types of similar particles such as tetraquarks and pentaquarks (with four or five quarks, plus potatoes) or glueballs (with several gluons only, plus potatoes). These increasingly composite particles become increasingly less fundamental although one must often be careful about such statements because in a different description, with a different Lagrangian, they can be differently composite. For example, glueballs may be dual to some gravitons according to the AdS/CFT correspondence.These hadrons are very different from the particles that are inserted as elementary fields to the QCD Lagrangian: gluons and quarks. We never observe gluons and quarks in isolation because they carry color and the color (strong charge) is so strongly interacting that it always forces all colorful particles to get neutralized and form color-neutral combinations. In reality, we only observe these elementary colorful particles as "jets": the elementary particle with color tries to escape but because of the strong interaction, other particles are being glued to it and as a result, you will create a stream of color-neutral particles going in the same direction as the original quark or gluon.But at some deeper level, partons (quarks and gluons) are particles in the very same sense as hadrons. If you study particle physics at distances much shorter than the proton radius, the confinement won't influence you and you will see many colorful particles running inside a hadron. They will be described by the same kind of quantum fields that you can also effectively use at very long distances to describe hadrons. The description in terms of quarks and gluons will be more accurate and well-defined (the theory with these fields is renormalizable) but it will be further from the observational reality because it is the hadrons, and not the quarks and gluons, that we directly observe.Elementary excitations vs solitonsI have explained that the difference between elementary and composite particles depends on a particular Lagrangian. In fact, more dramatic effects of this kind often occur. There exist particles that are more composite than the normal composite particles, the so-called solitons. Solitons may be identified with classical solutions of some classical field equations: the magnetic monopoles are among the most famous examples. They usually exist because they carry some topologically nontrivial subtlety, a topological charge, or a similarly qualitative feature.When you quantize your field theory, you will find out that the classical solution behaves as an object that becomes just another species of a particle. It interferes with itself and it does all the things that you expect from other types of particles. If your original field theory was weakly coupled, the solitons usually end up being very heavy, with masses going like "1/g^2" where "g" is the coupling constant. Note that "g" goes to zero so "1/g^2" goes to infinity.In string theory, there are several possible counterparts of the gauge coupling constant "g". It can be the closed-string coupling constant "g_{closed}" which is why string theory contains ordinary solitons (like NS5-branes and magnetic monopoles) whose mass goes like "1/g_{closed}^2". However, you may also identify "g", the gauge coupling from field theory, with "g_{open}", the interaction strength of the open strings that goes like "sqrt(g_{closed}). That's why string theory also contains a new, lighter kind of solitons, the D-branes, whose mass (or tension, if they have additional spatial dimensions) goes like "1/g_{open}^2 = 1/g_{closed}". If "g_{closed}" is small, this tension goes to infinity but it is smaller than "1/g_{closed}^2", the parametric dependence of the tension of the ordinary solitons such as NS5-branes.However, when you send any of these "g" constants to infinity, these particles naturally become light. That's why you shouldn't be shocked that there often exists an equivalent, "S-dual" description of your theory where the role of "g" and "1/g" gets interchanged, much like the elementary particles and solitons. What used to be light small waves on some quantum fields become complicated extended solitons, and vice versa. This S-dual description in terms of the initially heavy objects is more likely to exist in supersymmetric theories where supersymmetry guarantees that the "1/g^2" or "1/g" formula for the mass (or tension) is correct even for large "g", and the object indeed becomes light when "g" is large.Besides S-duality, modern quantum field theory and string theory offers other examples showing that whether or not a particle is elementary or whether it has an internal structure depends on the description - or the Lagrangian - you choose. Whenever possible, you should naturally choose a description in which all coupling constants are small (interactions are weak). However, such a choice doesn't exist in general. You must live with the fact that quantum field theories have to describe elementary and composite particles together which sometimes makes it very difficult to determine their properties. When you know your starting point, the elementary particles and their interactions, the problem may look straightforward. In general, such a choice either doesn't exist or it is not unique. There may exist quantum field theories that have no classical Lagrangians, i.e. no allowed choice of elementary fields, but they still predict everything about the particle species and forces that should exist in the world described by this theory. The (2,0) theory in 6 dimensions is believed to be an example. However, there may be a fivebrane minirevolution in the future that will show that this exotic theory actually has a universal Lagrangian, much like it recently happened with the 3-dimensional M2-brane theories.Elementary particles vs black holesThe comments above should have convinced you that many (overlapping) types of particles belong to the "core" of the standard quantum field theory or they are linked by insights that have been well understood and "logically" follow from a purely theoretical analysis of quantum field theories: bosons, fermions, leptons, quarks, gauge bosons, gravitons, gravitinos, superpartners, atoms, molecules, animals, planets, stars, other complicated & composite bound states of known particles, solitons, hadrons, mesons, baryons, tetraquarks, pentaquarks, glueballs, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, magnetic monopoles, other solitons, wrapped D-branes, and many others. All of them may carry an energy/momentum vector, all of them may be associated with some fields, all of them interfere with themselves etc.However, there exists an additional type of objects that seem different: black holes. Are they composed out of electrons or other known particles? It doesn't seem to be the case. In general relativity, black holes seem to be solitons, classical solutions of some classical field equations. However, quantum theory guarantees that black holes must come as well-defined species, the black hole microstates. They are macroscopically indistinguishable and their number is huge, comparable to "exp(S)", where "S" is the black hole entropy which is very huge because it is the event horizon area in Planck units, and the maximum entropy you can ever squeeze to the same volume.Despite their very different origin, black hole microstates behave just like other types of particles. They will appear as resonances in a scattering. If you could isolate them in a situation where they are stable, they would interfere with themselves, and so on. Previously, we have seen that the number of possible particles can clearly be infinite because you can create many types of composite objects (such as stars) and they can be excited in very many ways.But the black holes take this set of possibilities into the extreme because the number of black hole microstates exceeds any number we have previously discussed. They should have a well-defined spectrum with well-defined widths but because they are not really made out of electrons or other known elementary particles, it seems that we don't know any straightforward method to precisely calculate the spectrum of the black hole microstates. Nevertheless, string theory shows that the answer to this question is completely unique even if you can't say that the objects are made out of specific elementary building blocks. Quantum field theory vs string theory: what remains to be answeredString theory may be thought of as the most conservative extension of quantum field theory that adds gravity - with spin-2 gravitons - to the other forces and matter fields. It is a theory of quantum gravity and the black holes become the newest, most original type of particles that such an upgraded quantum field theory predicts.On the other hand, string theory may also be viewed to be exactly as complicated an animal as a quantum field theory, due to the AdS/CFT correspondence. A string theory on a curved AdS-like space - which seems to be equally complicated as a quantum gravitational theory on a flat space - is exactly equivalent to a lower-dimensional non-gravitational quantum field theory on a flat space. So if you don't care about the spacetime dimensionality, gravitational and non-gravitational theories (QFTs or string theory vacua) seem to be equally complex.Quantum field theory and string theory have been understood well enough for the people to qualitatively follow the nature of interference, interactions, scattering, poles in the interactions, confinement, spin, the role of gauge symmetries, and all other features of physics that were mentioned in the text above, besides other features that have not been mentioned.However, these methods still don't exactly tell you what is the spectrum of particles and their masses. There are many options - there are many string-theoretical vacua and there are even more quantum field theories. Despite the AdS/CFT-like equivalences, we usually want to talk about a differently filtered set of vacua when we talk about string theory vacua, and a differently filtered set of quantum field theories when we talk about quantum field theories. So the two sets are not really equally large.In quantum field theory with a Lagrangian - that you can put on a lattice, among other approaches - you can completely calculate all physical phenomena, at least in principle. You will find out that if the theory is well-defined at very short distances, it must be completely specified by its qualitative spectrum at long distances and a few parameters (masses and coupling constants: the marginal and relevant deformations). So QFTs with a Lagrangian seem to form a set that is more or less understood.QFTs without a Lagrangian are slightly more difficult. This class must include exotic theories such as the (2,0) theory in six dimensions. Nevertheless, it is natural to assume that this broader class, where the Lagrangian can be absent but where the other features of quantum field theory exactly hold, is comparably large to the class of QFTs with a Lagrangian.In some sense, this class is similarly understood or misunderstood as the set of the string-theoretical vacua, also referred to as the landscape. It is important to note that even though we can't fully construct particles in a generic stringy vacuum out of a specific finite selection of elementary particles, the properties of all particles and interactions (including arbitrarily heavy black hole microstates) seems to be completely determined by the dynamics. For example, the black hole microstates in 11-dimensional M-theory can be calculated from the BFSS matrix model, at least in principle.In some sense, this returns us to the framework of "bootstrap" - the idea that quantum field theories (and their extensions) are able to determine themselves, by obeying the basic consistency criteria, but without having any explicit methodology based on some preferred starting points (such as a set of elementary particles). This meme, originally promoted by Werner Heisenberg and heavily followed by the S-matrix theorists in the late 1960s, was largely unsuccessful (except for two-dimensional CFTs where it can be almost fully followed).The history of physics has chosen a different path: all truly successful theories in the 20th century have always been constructed out of some specific starting points and elementary particles, such as quarks & gluons or relativistic strings. However, the recent duality revolution has shown that the choice of the elementary particles is not unique: in fact, there are many equivalent ways to approach a particular strongly-coupled quantum theory. In some sense, the number of classical Lagrangians is even higher than the number we need, i.e. than the number of physically distinct quantum theories.On the other hand, the duality revolution also suggests that some theories or points on the landscape should exist even if we have no weakly-coupled description or a Lagrangian method based on elementary particles to approach the point. It is very tempting to ask what are the principles that can determine all properties of such theories without constructing them out of some specific elementary building blocks. However, we must realize that such a program is not guaranteed to be on the right path. It is a research project and its success may be a matter of a wishful thinking only.While question marks remain, physics has already achieved an amazing degree of unification of its basic concepts that are enough to understand the observable world around us.And that's the memo.Posted byLumoat5:57 PM | 0 slow comments | postCount('2164587177586102102'); | postCountTB('2164587177586102102'); | Links to this post Other texts on similar topics:philosophy of science,string vacua and phenomenologyvar sb_url_to_rate = "http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/01/types-of-elementary-particles.html";var sb_rated_title = "Types of elementary particles";try { var sb_dp = Date.parse(sb_post_date + ' ' + "5:57 PM"); var sb_rated_creation = isNaN(sb_dp)? new Date() : new Date(sb_dp); } catch (e) { sb_rated_creation = new Date(); } Older PostsSubscribe to:Posts (Atom)View blog reactions found by TechnoratiWatch the latest videos on YouTube.com    About Me Luboš MotlPilsen, Czech RepublicView my complete profileSearchHighlight();if (navigator.appName == 'Netscape') var language = navigator.language;else var language = navigator.browserLanguage;var code = language.substring(0,2);if (code == 'fr') document.write(" Click and buy at fnac.com");if (code == 'pt') document.write(" Click and buy in Portugal");Blog Archive▼ 2009(12)▼ January(12)Eurosocialists insulted by common senseUAH MSU: month-on-month coolingGenes and memes, ideas and empty wordsNonsense of the day: click the ball to change its ...NCDC: the U.S. cool down by 0.49 °F per decadeRecord cold temperatures in 2009Czech PM Topolánek is chatting with you todaySurfer dude in a coffee machine may supersede the ...Best European Blog: a contestTypes of elementary particlesCzech EU presidency: Israel is defending itselfMyths about thermodynamics and gravity ► 2008(597) ► December(42)Happy New Year 2009Feynman: The reason for antiparticlesKlaus: Treaty of Lisbon: a tutorial for beginnersRichard Feynman, Mr X, and the arrow of timeLa Niña conditions are backBob McElrath, gravitons are not made out of dustWindows Movie Maker: unspecified errorCzech EU presidency: January 2009 programMerry ChristmasEmergent spacetime from modular motivesJoe Polchinski: String Theory: problem solutionsPeak oilers' mental meltdownCzech American keyboardHarebrained theorist John Holdren will become Obam...Dow Jones similarity graphA giant breach in Earth's magnetic fieldMafia II: Holiday confession trailerKlaus the knightSnorkeling in NebraskaThe Bath Item Gift HypothesisCKM matrix from F-theorySteven Chu vs a sane homeownerThe roots of environmentalismMathematica WeatherData: 17,168 stationsObama is flooding NASA with annoying & incompetent...Klaus: Climate issues are silly luxury goodCyclic cosmology: motivation still unknownHippies want another IPCC to control the world's e...Steven Chu, a new energy secretaryEichler et al.: Half of recent warming was solarFast comment transition: HaloScan to JS-KitThe Vartabedian ConundrumZuzana Norisová: Š Š Š Šepotám (I Whisper)Relativistic and particle-physics culturesVáclav Klaus resigns as the ODS honorary chairmanBlack hole singularities in AdS/CFTCCNet: Eight articles about the climate socialismDyson spheres and Fermi paradox ► November(38) ► October(47) ► September(69) ► August(41) ► July(56) ► June(45) ► May(59) ► April(61) ► March(49) ► February(39) ► January(51) ► 2007(791) ► December(46) ► November(78) ► October(66) ► September(77) ► August(83) ► July(36) ► June(66) ► May(52) ► April(79) ► March(74) ► February(61) ► January(73) ► 2006(670) ► December(52) ► November(62) ► October(55) ► September(55) ► August(46) ► July(34) ► June(62) ► May(55) ► April(63) ► March(68) ► February(57) ► January(61) ► 2005(413) ► December(47) ► November(51) ► October(48) ► September(37) ► August(41) ► July(12) ► June(22) ► May(30) ► April(25) ► March(33) ► February(30) ► January(37) ► 2004(115) ► December(26) ► November(30) ► October(50) ► September(8) ► August(1) Click the logo above and choose your favorite European blog once a day between now and Jan 12th, 2009.Your calendar... 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