[image source: parents.com]

For Berta’s mother, the first kick already made clear that her daughter was extraordinary: “This wasn’t just any odd kick, it was a p-wave cross-correlation seismogram.” But this pregnancy exceeded even the most enthusiastic mother’s expectations. Still three months shy of her due date, fetus Berta just published her first paper in the renown mathematics journal “Reviews in Topology.” And it isn’t just any odd cohomological invariance that she has taken on, but one of the thorniest problems known to mathematicians.

Like most of the big mathematical puzzles, this one is easy to understand, and yet even the greatest minds on the planet have so far been unsuccessful proving it. Consider you have a box of arbitrary dimension, filled with randomly spaced polyhedra that touch on exactly three surfaces each. Now you take them out of the box, remove one surface, turn the box by 90 degrees around Donald Trump’s belly button, and then put the polyhedral back into the box. Put in simple terms this immediately raises the question: “Who cares?”

Berta’s proof demonstrates that the proposition is correct. Her work, which has been lauded by colleagues as “masterwork of incomprehensibility” and “a lucid dream caught in equations,” draws upon recent research in fields ranging from differential geometry to category theory to volcanology. The complete proof adds up to 5000 pages. “It’s quite something,” says her mother who was nicknamed “next Einstein’s mom” on Berta’s reddit AMA last week. “We hope the paper will be peer reviewed by the time she makes her driver’s license.”

I didn't attend this year's FQXi conference, but most of the talks will be uploaded sooner or later to the FQXi YouTube channel. The FQXi conferences always feature a mock debate with a role switch. I've never seen one with an actual exchange of arguments, but the debates have some amusement value. This year we have Carlo Rovelli defending String Theory ("You Loop people... insist that you cannot get any prediction from your theory. But we can't either.") and Raffael Bousso defending Loop Quantum Gravity ("What happened next was the string landscape. You've all heard of the string landscape. It's also known as 'The End of Science.'"). Enjoy.

Hello from Canada and sorry for the silence, I'm here for the 2012 conference on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity, and the schedule is packed. As with the previous two installations of the conference, we have experimentalists and theorists mixed together, which has the valuable benefit that you actually get to speak to people who know what the data means.

I learned yesterday from Markus Risse for example that the Auger Collaboration has a paper in the making to fit the penetration depth data which has earlier been claimed could not be explained neither with protons nor heavier ions or compositions thereof. Turns out the data can be fitted with a composition of protons and ions after all, though we'll have to wait for the paper to learn how well this works.

Today I just want to pick up an amusing remark by Holger Müller from Berkeley, who gave the first talk on Monday, about his experiments in atom interferometry. He jokingly introduced the "Craziness Factor" of a model, arguing that the a preferred frame, and the thereby induced violations of Lorentz-invariance, have a small craziness factor.

Naturally, this lead me to wonder what terms contribute to the craziness factor. Here's what came to my mind:

+ additional assumptions not present in the Standard Model and General Relativity. Bonus: if these assumptions are unnecessary
+ principles and assumptions of the Standard Model and General Relativity dropped. Bonus: without noticing
+ problems ignored. Bonus: problems given a name
+ approach has previously been tried. Bonus: and abandoned, multiple times
+ additional parameters. Bonus: parameters with unnatural values, much larger or smaller than one, without any motivation
+ model does not describe the real world (Euclidean, 2 dimensions, without fermions, etc). Bonus: Failure to mention this.
+ each time the model is being referred to as "speculative," "radical" or "provocative". Bonus: By the person who proposed it.
+ model has been amended to agree with new data. Bonus: multiple times.

And here is what decreases the craziness factor:

- problems addressed. Bonus: Not only the author worries about these problems.
- relations learned, insights gained. Bonus: If these are new relations or insights, rather than reproductions of findings from other approaches.
- Simplifications over standard approach. Bonus: If it's an operational, not a formal simplification.
- Data matched. Bonus: Additional predictions made.

In practice, perceived craziness has a subjective factor. The more you hear about a crazy idea, the less crazy it seems. Or maybe your audience just gets tired objecting.

A group of computer scientists from Rutgers university have published a software intended for crowd-sourcing the ideal candidate. "We were asking ourselves: Why do we waste so much time with candidates who disagree with themselves, aren't able to recall their party's program, and whose intellectual output is inferior even to Shit Siri Says?" recalls Arthur McTrevor, who lead the project, "Today, we have software that can perform better."

McTrevor and his colleagues then started coding what they refer to as the "unopinionated artifical intelligence" of the virtual representative, the main information processing unit. The unopinionated intelligence is a virtual skeleton which comes alive by crowd-sourcing opinions from a selected group of people, for example party members. Members feed the software with opinions, which are then aggregated and reformulated to minimize objectionable statements. The result: The perfect candidate.

The virtual candidate also has a sophisticated speech assembly program, a pleasant looking face, and a fabricated private life. Visual and audial appearance can be customized. The virtual candidate has a complete and infallible command of the constitution, all published statistical data, and can reproduce quotations from memorable speeches and influential books in the blink of an eye. "80 microseconds, actually," said McTrevor. The software moreover automatically creates and feeds its own Facebook account and twitter feed.

The group from Rutgers tested the virtual representative in a trial run whose success is reported in a recent issue of Nature. In their publication, the authors point out that the virtual representative is not a referendum that aggregates the opinions of the general electorate. Rather, it serves a selected group to find and focus their identity, which can then be presented for election.

In an email conversation, McTrevor was quick to point out that the virtual candidate is made in USA, and its patent dated 2012. The candidate will be thus be eligible to run for congress at the "age" of 25, in 2037.

I came across this short story “The Oscillating Universe” by Dennis E. Piper, published in The Observatory, Vol. 97, p. 10P-10P (1977), (PDF available here), and thought you might enjoy it:

One day the Professor called me in to his Laboratory. “At last I have solved the equation,” he said. “Time is a field. I have made this machine which reverses the field. Look! I press this switch and time will run backwards run will time and switch this press I. Field a is time.” Said he, “Equation the solved have I last at”. Laboratory his to in me called Professor the day one. “For heaven's sake, SWITCH IT BACK,” I shouted. Click! Shouted I, “BACK IT SWITCH, sake heaven's for.” One day the Professor called me in to his Laboratory...

Berlin, April 1st 2011: The Federal Intelligence Service discovered a Ponzi scheme of academic citations lead by an unemployed particle physicist. A house search conducted in Berlin last week revealed material documenting the planning and administration of a profitable business of trading citations for travel reimbursement.

According to the Federal Intelligence Service, the hint came from researchers at Michigan University, Ann Arbor, who were analyzing the structure of citation networks in the academic community. In late 2010, their analysis pointed towards an exponentially growing cluster originating from a previously unconnected researcher based in Germany's capital. A member of the Ann Arbor group, who wants to remain unnamed, inquired about the biography of the young genius, named Al Bert, sparking such amount of activity. The researcher was easily able to find Dr. Bert scheduled for an unusual amount of seminars in locations all over the world, sometimes more than 4 per week. However, upon contacting the respective institutions, nobody could remember the seminars, which according to Prof. Dr. Dr. Hubert at The Advanced Institute is "Not at all unusual." The network researcher from Ann Arbor suspected Dr. Bert to be a fictitious person and notified the university whose email address Dr. Bert was still using.

It turned out Dr. Bert is not a fictitious person. Dr. Bert's graduated in 2006, but his contract at the university run out in 2008. After this, colleagues lost sight of Dr. Bert. He applied for unemployment benefits in October 2008. As the Federal Intelligence Service reported this Wednesday, he later founded an agency called 'High Impact' (the website has since been taken down) that offered to boost a paper's citation count. A user registered with an almost finished, but not yet published, paper and agreed to pay EUR 10 to Dr. Bert's agency for each citation his paper received above the author's average citation count at the time of registration. The user also agreed to cite 5 papers the agency would name. A registered user would earn EUR 10 for each recruitment of a new paper, possibly their own.

This rapidly created a growing network of researchers citing each others papers, and encouraged the authors to produce new papers, certain they would become well cited. Within only a few months, the network had spread from physics to other research fields. With each citation, Dr. Bert made an income. The algorithm he used to assign citations also ensured his own works became top cites. Yet, with many researchers suddenly having papers with several hundred citations above their previously average citation count, their fee went into some thousand dollars. On several instances Dr. Bert would suggest they invite him for a seminar at their institution and locate it in a non-existent room. He would then receive reimbursement for a fraudulent self-printed boarding pass, illegible due to an alleged malfunctioning printer.

Names of researchers subscribed to Dr. Bert's agency were not accessible at the time of writing.

Geneva, April 1, 2010: In the first collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, a small universe has been created. Scientists discuss how to deal with it.

At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, also known as the Big Bang Machine or The Particle Smasher, the first collisions with a beam energy of 3.5 TeV each took place this week on Tuesday morning. But a small surprise remained unnoticed until yesterday. In a corner of the mighty ATLAS detector, cleaning personnel found a small universe: “I wasn't sure if it's organic waste, or if it goes in the grey bin,” says Jessica Nettoyer, first to make the discovery, “So I go and ask the student. And he's like, you know, like. Boah! And runs off with the thing. O tempora, o mores!”

The creation of a universe in a particle collision had been suggested by researchers, but was widely not taken seriously. More accepted by the physics community has been the possibility of creating a small black hole, which, according to some theories could harbor a universe by itself, a so-called “baby universe.” CERN scientists believe this is what happened on Tuesday, though they caution more analysis is necessary.

The baby universe is now 2cm in diameter and has been sealed away under vacuum. Scientists from various disciplines all over the world have been asked for advice. “It's a universe. We should put it into a nice landscape,” says Brian Blue, a leading American string theorist. “It carries the possibility of developing intelligent live,” says Anne-Marie Dogrublaskinfizwysky-Grubowskiwitz, Proffesor for Universal Ethics at the University of Zwinkerliqrskywinsk, “It is unethical to keep it in a laboratory.” The pope has been consulted to develop an action plan in case mankind will raise to the level of god-like creatures.

“It's mind boggling!” Carola Seanning said in a hastily organized meeting yesterday evening. “It means that our universe too could sit in a jar in some lab!” Meanwhile, plans are being made to use the universe's rapidly increasing complexity to develop a super-computer that could solve the halting-problem and even do your tax-return. A CERN spokesperson said: “We are searching for ways to communicate with intelligent creatures that might develop and try to establish means of information exchange. Every input is highly welcome.” For now CERN is looking for a name for the baby universe. You can submit your suggestion in the comment section.

Elementary logic is arguably the most basic ingredient to fruitful argumentation. Nevertheless, you don't have to look far in the world wide web to figure most people have one or the other problem with it. I blame English grammar for it.

For example, in classical logic a double negation of a statement is equivalent to the statement itself. Ergo, "We can visit my parents," means the same as "We can not not visit my parents," which however means we have to visit them. Thus, we have to visit my parents whenever we can. But what's even better is that "I could care less" actually means "I couldn't care less." According to that logic "Yes, we can!" means the same as "Yes, we can't!" This clearly has extraordinary explanatory power when it comes to American politics. And let's not even get started on issues like boxing rings that are actually square, and that one fills in a form by filling it out, and so on.

Another logic relation that people often stumble over is that "From A follows B" is equivalent to "From not B follows not A" and not to "From not A follows not B," which would be equivalent to "From B follows A." Consequently, if you hypothesize that "All of reality is mathematics" it does not follow "All of mathematics is real." Neither does "All of mathematics is real" mean that "All what's real is mathematics."

Then, let's have a look at what it means for an argument to be circular. A circular argument is not necessarily wrong, it just doesn't have explanatory power. Consider you ask an alcoholic why he drinks: "I drink to forget," he tells you. "Well, what do you want to forget?" you ask. "That I drink." We laugh about that exactly because it doesn't explain anything. You could just as well not drink and not forget that you don't drink. However, there is nothing logically wrong with his explanation. Circular arguments are very common mistakes in proofs, when you accidentally make an assumption that already implies the outcome. For example, if you want to show free will exists, you better not use free will as an assumption in your argument.

Finally, let me expand on one of the few enlightened comments to our recent post, made by Neil B on what it means for something to be tautologically true: "if we thought everything that could be logically inferred directly was superfluous to state, then the entire body of what is analytically derivable from given evidence should just remain unsaid." In fact the value of logical conclusion is subjective. If it follows from the assumptions (or axioms) the question whether or not you find something "tautologially true" depends on how difficult it is for you to understand the conclusion. Given the standard model lagrangian, next-to-next-to-next-to leading order contributions to the top quark pair production are at least to me not obvious. Given the Maxwell equations, the continuity equation is "tautologically true." But that might not be obvious to everybody. Or maybe it might not not be not obvious. Now I'm confused. No, I'm not. Wait....

I'm currently reading Sean Carroll's book "From Eternity to Here" and stumbled over this remark

In Newtonian mechanics, the space of states is called "phase space" for reasons that are pretty mysterious.

A mystery that hadn't occurred to me before, probably because the German word "Zustandsraum" means literally "state space," so no mystery there. Stefan and I were guessing Gibbs, who introduced the word, might have generalized the terminology from the harmonic oscillator where the location in phase space does indeed tell you the phase of the oscillation. (You find a nice applet depicting the phase-space diagram of the damped and undamped oscillator here).

In any case, this caused me to ponder what other words with funny origin physicists like to use. (Both funny ha-ha, and funny peculiar.) Why, for example, is the recombination in the early universe called recombination if there was no prior combination? Not that I was the first to ask that question. Sean offered the explanation that the word is borrowed from nuclear physics. But then why don't nuclear physicists call the fragmentation refragmentation?

There are more interesting nomenclatures though than presence or absence of prefixes.

A particularly well known oddity is the name "quarks" introduced by Gell-Mann, who couldn't decide how to spell the sound ducks make:

In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark", as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork".

Had Gell-Mann read a German dictionary instead of Joyce, he'd have noticed "Quark" is the German word for a milk product (often mistakenly translated as "cottage cheese" which is something entirely different). Besides this, "Quark" is a frequently used colloquial expression for nonsense.

It started when I was an undergraduate. In his email he explained he had found a theory for the indeterminism in quantum mechanics. I spent 2 weeks trying to explain that dividing both sides of an equation by zero does not create a non-deterministic measurement outcome, but simply nonsense. He insisted I misunderstand his idea and accused me of being narrow-minded.

This was 15 years ago when the internet was young. Since then, I've received hundreds of emails from self-declared geniuses who urgently want me to read their attached paper or visit their website. Some are trying to politely convince (with your qualifications... I would be honored...), some are outright offensive (intellectual elitism!), some are asking for pity (I have nobody to talk to.) Most of them write emails, some write letters, others send their self-printed books. I guess everybody with a PhD in physics has received one or the other such "theory." Baez' crackpot index tells this tale. Writing a blog makes you a preferred target. And during the last week, my inbox has seen a sharp increase in unsolicited mailings which I totally blame on winning a 2nd price in the FQXi essay contest.

I realize that some fraction of this blog's readership very likely consists of people who have themselves written such emails and who are hoping that I recognize their ingenuity. Not despite but exactly because of this I want to offer you some open words. I will not read your paper. I will not visit your website. And, no, I am not interested in your "theory." That's for several reasons. First, I generally will not open any attachments or click on links in emails from people I don't know, period. Second, I have no lack on interesting things to read and don't need your inspiration either. If I add your paper to the pile, I might get around to reading it sometime in the next century, so forget about it. Third, it is entirely obvious from your email that you have never read any of my papers, and have no clue who I am or what I am working on. Why should I waste a single second of my day reading what you wrote?

Let me be clear on this. I totally acknowledge the possibility that your theory is indeed groundbreaking and will fundamentally change our understanding of Nature. Not having read what you wrote, I am not judging your work whatsoever. But I am crucially aware my time on this planet is finite and I select the information that I pipe into my brain carefully. And yes, this means I use the most common crap-filters, peer review and personal connections. It is not impossible your work is groundbreaking. But it's unlikely. More likely, it's just a waste of my time. You can call that ignorant if you like, but it's effective. Tell me a better filter and I'll use it. You can go and complain about the arrogance of PhD holders. But I hope you realize that you and your spiritual brothers (if you have sisters, they are rare) have to blame yourself for this protective wall. If you wouldn't constantly bother us with immature ideas, we'd maybe take you more seriously.

The point is you have to know the rules before you break them. That's true in politics, in the arts, and it's also true in the sciences. No, you don't need a PhD to contribute to research in theoretical physics. But whether you have a title or not, you need the equivalent knowledge. You're not getting there by reading blogs, or posting in a forum. It takes time, it takes effort. And it is abundantly clear if your educational background is insufficient. You're not fooling anyone. You wouldn't go tell your doctor you have a great new idea for how he's supposed to do your bypass, would you? And why not? Because you know he has more education and experience than you. Time to realize that it also takes education and experience to write a paper in theoretical physics.


Having said that, let's look at the lighter side of things. I frequently scribble notes on papers. Most often used are "?" and "!," closely followed by "Check this!" and "nice." Inspired by this site with funny rubber stamps, you'll see in this post a few stamps I'd sometimes like to use ;-) Click to enlarge. And here's for the sisters:

---

It is my pleasure to write this letter,
He is not just good, he is simply better,
A promising researcher, young yet mature,
He will be an asset, of that I am sure.

Hard-working, clever, and enthusiastic,
His papers, you see, are clearly fantastic,
Truly original, careful and bold,
Few are around of the same mold.

Great intuition, resourceful and skilled,
Self-motivated and also strong-willed,
With large potential and independent,
Well-organized and extremely talented.

Exceptional, brilliant, a rising star,
His first Nobelprize cannot be far!
(He further has a solid training,
He'll do your numerics without complaining.)

An example of passion and determination,
I recommend him without hesitation,

Yours sincerely.

[Seen on Robert Spekkens' door]

“In [high energy] quantum physics, to observe something, you have to create it. Now this sounds scarily close to bullshit. But if it is bullshit, then at least it's bullshit with equations.”

via Sundance Bilson-Thompson, thanks :-)

IIB supergravity axion-dilaton coset, SL(2,R)/SO(2), 7-branes in the conjugacy classes of the Q7-branes. In order to realize a gauge fields of the Q7-branes in the brane to the Q7-branes that belong to different conjugacy classes are determined by an SL(2,R) naturally couple to IIB supergravity with appropriate source terms characterize the conjugacy classes are determinant of Q. The 7-branes with conjugacy class det Q = 0. We construct the Q7-branes. We construct the matrix Q and it will be called by three numbers (p, q, r) which parameterize the matrix Q and will be called Q7-brane world-volume labelled by three numbers (p, q, r) which parameterize the full bosonic Wess-Zumino term for the gauge invariant coupling of the full bosonic Wess-Zumino term for the gauge invariant couplingof the matrix Q and will be called Q7-branes. In order to realize a gauge fields of IIB supergravity it is necessary.

Tragically, the original text was on the same level of comprehensibility. For more fun of that sort, try the Gibberish Generator.

I'm back in Canada. Work piling up, but hey, I will derive.

WASHINGTON, April 1st 2008

After more than half a century of research, scientists could finally have made the breakthrough the world has been waiting for: a tactic weapon more devastating than the nuclear bomb, but without its side effects.

"It's clean, it's easy, it erases a town within seconds and leaves nothing than a crater," one of the scientists could be heard saying on a hastily arranged inofficial meeting that took place yesterday.

Construction plans are discussed, the physical principles are clear, but so far no tests have been made. The central ingredient is the creation of a mini-black hole by colliding highly accelerated protons, though L.H. Cee said "We are still working on getting the accelerator into a more handy size." Once created, the black hole will start growing, and suck in its surrounding until it becomes too heavy and sinks to the middle of the earth. Thereby, the actual size of the black hole remains tiny compared to the area it erases, leaving nothing but an crater with a small hole in the middle that can easily be covered to make the ground habitable again.

Critical voices mention the hole would cross the center of the earth and come out on the opposite side. "We can not exclude this possibility," Cee said, "But 71% of the Earth's surface is covered with water, and the risk of losing some jellyfish should not delay world peace."

Today, I want to write about a serious complication that occurs in two particle interactions.


The above depicted gluon exchange is not as simple as it might seem, because virtual particles make contributions to the process


The troublesome thing about these contributions is that there are in principle arbitrarily many of them with arbitrarily high energy


You can easily convince yourself that this process is IQ divergent. One therefore sums up all the virtual contributions, and redefines the initial propagation of exchange particles


This is called renormalization.

(Larger picture)

Today, I want to draw your attention to this groundbreaking paper:

Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken
By Doug Zongker, University of Washington

He summarizes the results of his recent research very aptly in the below shown presentation, which also provides an example for how to give an excellent talk:

See also: Why 3000 chickens crossed the road

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TAGS: CHICKEN, CHICKEN, CHICKEN

Update Oct. 11th: See also The Mathematical Universe

More at xkcd.com