Physics of interest

I wonder how many readers are actually interested in my posts pointing towards odd physics papers that I usually don't fully understand myself.  Who knows, but here's some examples of recent physics stories I liked for their novelty:

*  Great title here: Can the Higgs Boson Save Us From the Menace of the Boltzmann Brains?

I can't be the only person who thinks of the Futurama episodes with giant floating brains whenever I hear "Boltzmann Brains", can I?

In any event, the paper notes that one of the simplest present explanations for the universe carries with it a serious "Boltzmann Brain" issue, and asks whether there is a way around it.   The answer seems to be:  maybe.   Here's co-author Sean Carroll giving an easier to read explanation of the paper.   I should have read that first.

*  The Economist, of all places, notes a paper that argues that dark energy, causing an acceleration in the expansion of the universe, does not exist at all.  Instead, the universe is just getting heavier:

In Dr Wetterich’s picture of the cosmos the redshift others attribute to expansion is, rather, the result of the universe putting on weight. If atoms weighed less in the past, he reasons, the light they emitted then would, in keeping with the laws of quantum mechanics, have been less energetic than the light they emit now. Since less energetic light has a longer wavelength, astronomers looking at it today would perceive it to be redshifted.

At first blush this sounds nuts. The idea that mass is constant is drilled into every budding high-school physicist. Abandoning it would hurt. But in exchange, Dr Wetterich’s proposal deals neatly with a big niggle in the Big Bang theory, namely coping with the point of infinite density at the beginning, called a singularity, which orthodox theories cannot explain.

Dr Wetterich’s model does not—yet—explain the shifts in the shapes of galactic clusters that the Dark Energy Camera, SuMIRe and ACTPol are seeking to clarify. But perhaps, one day, it could. Dr Wetterich is a well-respected physicist and his maths are not obviously wrong. Moreover, his theory does allow for a short period of rapid expansion, known as inflation, whose traces have already been seen in the CMB. Dr Wetterich, however, thinks this inflation did not happen just after the beginning of the universe (the consensus view), for he believes the universe had no beginning. Instead, a small static universe which had always existed turned into a large static one that always will exist—getting heavier and heavier as it does so. There was thus no singularity.

Probably, this theory is wrong. As Cliff Burgess of Perimeter Institute, a Canadian theoretical-physics centre, puts it, “The dark energy business very easily degenerates into something like a crowd of people who are each claiming to be Napoleon while asserting that all the other pretenders are clearly nutty.”

 I like to think that God has given us a direct clue to this, by ensuring that from middle age, a mass increase takes place in nearly all human bodies for no obvious reason.   So goes the universe too, possibly.

*   Someone from CERN complains that the LHC has not come up with any significant surprises for the Standard Model of physics, which is very annoying for physicists.  Here's the abstract:

The first three years of the LHC experiments at CERN have ended with "the nightmare scenario": all tests, confirm the Standard Model of Particles so well that theorists must search for new physics without any experimental guidance. The supersymmetric theories, a privileged candidate for new physics are nearly excluded. As a potential escape from the crisis, we propose thinking about a series of astonishing relations suggesting fundamental interconnections between the quantum world and the large scale Universe. It seems reasonable that, for instance, the equation relating a quark-antiquark pair with the fundamental physical constants and cosmological parameters must be a sign of new physics. One of the intriguing possibilities is interpreting our relations as a signature of the quantum vacuum containing the virtual gravitational dipoles.

 As with many papers on arXiv, you should read the introduction, which paints a comprehensible summary of the problem before venturing into scores of equations and terminology which are hard to follow.

*  Someone (I have no idea who)  from Hungary seems to think he has found a way that you can get Einstein's results without Einstein-ian physics.  The paper has a charming title:  A simple minded question: Do we live in the four-dimensional spacetime? and starts in a very modest fashion: 

The author of the present paper is not sure that the following ideas are worth for publication or they are more similar to a somewhat lunatic conception.

 I don't really follow the argument at all, but have only looked at the paper quickly.  Still, if this is ground breaking new physics, you read it here first.

*  If you are interested in the "fine tuning of the universe" issue, Catalyst on the ABC had a pretty good 30 minute summary last week, which features some short interviews from some of the big names in physics.   There are the more extended interviews with them here, I think, although I haven't watched them yet.

I saw from the show that Paul Davies, who moved from Adelaide University to Arizonia State University (he seems to showing greater affinity for "dry and remote" as he ages) finds a sort of backwards causation causation appealing, although I don't really understand the mechanism he thinks might work.  As Frank Tipler's similar idea, that the future God causes the past, seems to have sunk under the experimental finding of the mass of the Higgs boson, I should look up what Davies is saying on the topic.

That was un-necessary

I liked a couple of recent articles about the [lack of] merit in much modern writing.

The first, in the Fairfax Good Weekend magazine (get your digital subscription now, and be hip and fight the Murdoch hegemony, like me) is about a spate of 20-something "hyperconfessional" women writing autobiographies, sometimes making much money in the process.   The question is - should any 25 year old who has done nothing extraordinary really think they should be writing autobiography?   The obvious answer is "no":

Summerlandish reads like an engaging blog; the prose is restless and flecked with Gen-Y pop-culture references, as if Carrie Bradshaw wrote it after a night in with a bottle of Prosecco and The O.C. box set. She has the "cute girl with the dirty mouth" routine down pat. A certain audience will love it. But good or bad, the question remains: is Summerlandish necessary? Are any of these 20-something memoirs necessary? If acclaimed British singer Adele, 25, could turn down a seven-figure book deal because she felt she was too young to say much of anything, what do these Oscar-less, Grammy-less writers think they can offer the world?

The other article was in The Guardian, by a publisher who wishes people (be they successful authors or not) would just stop writing for a while:

According to Google, some 130m titles have been published since the first books took form on the desks of monks. This overwhelming catalogue is today being supplemented at a rate never before seen in the history of the book. Another industry statistician, Bowker, reports that nearly 1.8m new titles were published in 2012, an increase of half a million in just three years. As the constant thrum of laptop keyboards in coffee shops across the nation testifies, nearly everyone, it seems, wants to be an author. And, according to the New York Times, 81% of Americans feel they have a book in them. New technology plays its part here. So too, perhaps, does writing's attraction as a way of asserting one's existence in a world where the traditional terrain for being acknowledged by others – the workplace, family or neighbourhood – is increasingly under strain.

But if writers today are ubiquitous, readers seem an increasingly endangered species. A recent survey revealed that one in four Americans had read not a book in over a year. Again, technology is a significant factor in this (electronic Scrabble entered my life like a new drug a couple of years back). Bye-bye bedtime novels.

Paradoxically, the deluge of writing itself contributes to declining readership. It's not just that if you're writing then you can't be reading. It's also that the sheer volume of what is now available acts as a disincentive to settle down with a single text. The literary equivalent of channel surfing replaces the prolonged concentration required to tackle a book. Condensed capsules of digital communication are infecting all forms of reading. But books, the longest form that writing takes, are suffering disproportionately in the reduced attention spans of readers.

I sometimes have a creative story telling urge, usually while thinking idly in the shower.  But for as a long as I can remember, when I am thinking about story ideas, my mind rushes back to past books or movies I have liked a lot, and gets stuck in reverie about how good they were.  I don't seem to have anything resembling a truly creative gene, and it puzzles me how people develop the skill to come up with engaging, realistic characters in interesting plots. 

 

Some novelists do it via continual drawing on life experiences (either their own, or of others in their circle - I remember reading a biography of Evelyn Waugh and thinking that people he had met could more or less be assured of turning up, not necessarily favourable, in some fictionalised form in one of his books sooner or later.  And his contemporary Graham Greene had a ridiculously complicated personal life that provided lots of source material.)

 

Writers in the field of science fiction and fantasy perhaps have the harder task of coming up with characters who have to react to things which have never happened anywhere to anyone real, and I suppose that may mean that when they do characters well, they deserve special credit for their feat of imagination.  It's just a pity that fantasy generally leaves me cold, and science fiction is not all that well known for well detailed characters.

I would like to be able to do science fiction, if only because I find myself dissatisfied with nearly all of it these days.  But the skill set is not there, I'm sure.

And anyway, it probably is true - too much of everything is being written these days...

 

 

Disagreement with the Uncertainty Queen

Learning From the Hiatus | Climate Abyss | a Chron.com blog

Judith Curry's "blown mind"about the recent paper on the East Pacific being behind the hiatus in global surface temperatures has been criticised as in error by conservative climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon.  His post above contains a detailed look at the issue, and is not all easily understood, but his strong belief that Curry is wrong is clear.

I still expect others to weigh in on this.     

But it's a dis-aster

Life is much better under Labor after all, says study

From the above article:

Politicians of both persuasions will always, during election campaigns, claim that they know "families are doing it tough".  But that's just politics.   John Quiggin had a column recently about the false perceptions that flourish and why, and ended with this:

Another possible explanation of the ‘doing it tough’ perception arises from inconsistent responses to price variation. Despite sustained low inflation and falling interest rates, many Australians perceive themselves as facing ‘cost of living’ pressures. Over the past decade some highly salient prices such as the retail price of electricity have risen sharply, but consumption continued to grow until recently, driven largely by the increased use of airconditioning. By contrast the cost of telecommunications services has fallen , but households have responded to lower prices and the availability of new products by increasing their total expenditure. It is easy enough, though misleading, to see this as a story of ever-increasing bills for everything.

Despite all of these partial explanations, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ‘doing it tough’ perception is nothing more than a manifestation of some of our less appealing human propensities: envy and chronic dissatisfaction. This can be seen all the way up the income scale, to the point of British bankers who complain that they can’t live on a million pounds (roughly 2 million dollars) a year.

News media have an obvious commercial interest in telling stories that make their audiences feel victimised, and politicians have made the judgement that telling voters the truth is too costly. At current rates of growth, incomes will double by 2050, but we will doubtless still be living on Struggle Street.

Amazingly, too, I note how little attention there has been in the media (and how unsuccessful Labor has been in talking about) the reductions in government family support the Coalition is committed to (such as ending the School Kids bonus) while at the same time promising that families will be $500 a year better off because of the carbon tax going.

Families, do your maths! 

Introduced last year, the bonus provides eligible families with $410 a year for each child in primary school and $820 for each in high school.

 If you intend voting Coalition, you probably think you are "doing it tough" and that your electricity bill is a dis-aster.  Yet if you have kids at school, this one item alone shows, what the Coalition "gives" is going to be more than taken away.   

Good news

Remember the awesome trailer for Gravity?  The movie has opened in Venice, to pretty much ecstatic reviews.

It's a must see for me....

Labor policies people might like, if they ever heard about them

Amongst all the "it's a disaster!" analysis coming from News Ltd and Fairfax and now even Lenore Taylor at the Guardian (Lenore, pull yourself together!), it seems to me there are some policy things that are more Labor than Coalition, and which most common sense people would support, with little need for explanation:

1.  an emphasis on high speed rail from Sydney to Canberra, and then perhaps Sydney to Newcastle.  The Sydney to Canberra route is particularly apt - the distance seems too short for a plane flight, it takes too long to get through the outskirts of Sydney in a car, and people are always going to need to travel there.  If the train connected to Sydney Airport, it would be perfect.  Why doesn't someone commit to that, at least?

2.  the commitment to bring some Navy ship construction forward at Williamstown.   Everyone thinks we should be able to build ships, don't they?  It's manufacturing, it's a bit high-techy; it's the next best thing to having an aircraft industry.

3.  the support to the car industry.   Everyone sensible likes the fact that we can design and build cars, and I gather that lots of countries give support to car builders in one way or another.   The Coalition presumably thinks it is quite OK that we attempt to emulate New Zealand, which is trying to build an economy on making frozen food, soap and Hobbit films, as far as I can make out.  The way the Coalition is going about the FBT has let them off the media scrutiny hook on this one - it's a disgrace.

The other odd thing is that ideas which Rudd has flown seem to be being treated in media talk as if they would actually happen - the Northern Territory tax reduction, and the wholesale removal of the Navy from Garden Island.   In fact, these were kite flying exercises and don't need to be treated all that seriously.  There is plenty of scope for them not to happen at all, or on reduced scale.

But no, it's a disaster.

Pretty much how I see it

From The Economist:

The choice between a man with a defective manifesto and one with a defective personality is not appealing—but Mr Rudd gets our vote, largely because of Labor’s decent record. With deficits approaching, his numbers look more likely to add up than Mr Abbott’s. Despite his high-handed style, Mr Rudd is a Blairite centrist. A strategic thinker about Asia, he has skills that will be useful, especially as Australia has to balance its economic dependence on China with its security dependence on America. It would be nice if he revived his liberal approach to asylum-seekers. And, who knows, he may even live up to his promise to be less vile to his colleagues.

An upset possum

The Possum who runs Pollytics is very cranky about the reporting of the costing issue yesterday.  It is fun to read an argument between two furry animals:

Surely the problem that Possum alludes to is the "sound bite-ese" which is used in all political reporting, but particularly at election time.  That elevates an exaggerated bit of rhetoric into an unqualified claim, and both sides of politics both use it, and are victims of it, all the time.   (Even Malcolm Turnbull, who has been happy to repeat a claimed  $90 billion plus estimate for the NBN many times, completely without running through the questionable assumptions.)  But this time, an out of context Rudd made some public servants worry that people might think they had been used inappropriately, and they made it clear they hadn't.

Meanwhile, the fact that the Coalition is playing silly buggers with paper that is already in their hands gets ignored in headlines.

Free Advertising

Having paid for a digital subscription to Fairfax, I have put the App on the Samsung and iPad at home. 

I had previously used the apps without paying for the subscription, and found the advertising intrusive and the navigation a bit annoying.

The subscription makes it a much, much better experience, and my wife is happy that she a supply of suduko.

Go on. Do it.

Headlines, headlines

Fairfax has had its fair share of "it's a disaster for Rudd!" headlines this campaign too; often with the headline sounding more extreme than the article itself.

And Tim Colebatch, who I have been quoting a lot over the last 12 months, actually said at the Hockey/Bowen press club debate on Tuesday that he assumed Hockey would be Treasurer. 

So is it much surprise that he is running a "it's an absolute disaster!" column today about the costings issue yesterday?

It's interesting this self fulfilling prophesy business.  I suggested a couple of times at places like John Quiggin's blog that if you keep talking down how Gillard is a failure, of course you're helping the public perception of that and assuring a Labor loss, even when you think the Coalition would be the true disaster.

It's also interesting how clearly David Koch on Sunrise this morning was doing what I would do - telling Hockey, who has transformed himself into a unlikeable s*#% for the purpose of getting government, that the real problem here is that the Coalition is sitting on papers which they claim support them, and could release them anytime to support their argument.  The Coalition is hiding its assumptions, except, it would appear, to selected friendly journalists.

Mind you, Rudd himself did this in 2007.   He faked his way into government, and Abbott and Hockey are doing exactly the same this time.

I was unhappy in 2007; I am very unhappy now, because the Coalition will seek to disassemble some decent policies and replace them with crap ones.

The Coalition trusts Rupert, but not you?

So, according to The Australian, Treasury is perhaps a bit peeved that Rudd is using some figures they did before the election was called to contradict Coalition costings of savings.   But, says Treasury, their work wasn't a true costing of Coalition policy: it was more a hypothetical exercise and different assumptions would give different results.

OK.

But here's the thing:  The Australian is saying it has seen the Parliamentary Budget Office costings on public servant cuts that Abbott and Hockey are refusing to release.  (Maybe next week you'll some of their work?):

The costing, seen by The Australian, assumes that natural attrition would see the size of the federal public service cut by 6,000 positions by June 2014 and another 6,000 by September 2015.

So who leaked this to The Australian - the surest source of a sympathetic account for the Coalition that is possible?

I think I should assume that the Coalition is leaking to Rupert what they won't give directly to the public.

How ridiculous is that?

It is done....

Inspired by the appalling standards of the Murdoch press (and, I have to admit, the paywall that kicks in after 30 visits in a month) I have just for the first time ever paid for a digital news subscription to Fairfax.

Go on, join me.  Keep alternatives to Murdoch alive (at least while ever Gina isn't telling them what to write.)  

But please - don't pay for the AFR with their Murdoch escapee Stutchbury.  He should not have been let into the place.

New subscribers will be sent my entertaining video "Hey Kids! Make your own Tony Abbott Voodoo Doll!" in time for the election.

Short answer: no, they don't

Do Hockey's clean energy cuts add-up? | Business Spectator

Read it for some explanation of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and how Coalition claims of where money will be saved is on very, very shaky grounds.

Andrew's band of twits

Cooling ocean blamed for hiding missing warming | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

You have to wonder:  does Andrew Bolt take pride in being the ringleader for a band of followers who don't have a clue about science, and  aren't bright enough to even realise they don't have a clue about science?

Read some of the comments following the article for illustration.  It's gobsmacking.

Mind you, I reckon Judith Curry is about to get some heavy smackdown from other climate scientists for her [mis] interpretation of the implications of the study, too. 

Sometimes, it's quite OK to not understand

Millard Fillmore's Bathtub has noted this letter from the Financial Times:

From Mr. K N Al-Sabah.
Sir,
Iran is backing Assad. Gulf states are against Assad!
Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi.
But Gulf states are pro-Sisi! Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood!
Iran is pro-Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood!
Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the US!
Gulf states are pro-US. But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro-Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi.  And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states!
Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day.
K N Al-Sabah
London EC4, UK

Which is a relief.  I mean, my lack of knowledge of the geo-political significance of this civil war is now fully justified as being one of those things just a handful of my fellow citizens probably understand.  (And note, the letter doesn't even mention Russia backing Assad.)  

History to drink to

Gin and tonic kept the British Empire healthy: The drink’s quinine powder was vital for stopping the spread of malaria. - Slate Magazine

I didn't realise the full extent of quinine's historical importance:

Quinine powder quickly became critical to the health of the empire. By the 1840s British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons of cinchona bark annually for their protective doses of quinine. Quinine powder kept the troops alive, allowed officials to survive in low-lying and wet regions of India, and ultimately permitted a stable (though surprisingly small) British population to prosper in Britain’s tropical colonies. Quinine was so bitter, though, that British officials stationed in India and other tropical posts took to mixing the powder with soda and sugar. “Tonic water,” of a sort, was born.

Still, tonic water was basically a home brew until an enterprising Brit named Erasmus Bond introduced the first commercial tonic water in 1858—perhaps not coincidentally, the very same year the British government ousted the East India Co. and took over direct control of India, following the so-called Sepoy Mutiny, a violent rebellion and counterattack. 

Bond’s new tonic was soon followed by Schweppes’ introduction, in 1870, of “Indian Quinine Tonic,” a product specifically aimed at the growing market of overseas British who, every day, had to take a preventative dose of quinine. Schweppes and other commercial tonics proliferated both in the colonies and, eventually, back in Britain itself.

And another bit of quirky history from the article:

Quinine proved as critical to the battle over the Pacific in the second world war as it had to the struggle over India. As Amy Stewart notes in her new book, The Drunken Botanist, Japan seized Java, the home of huge cinchona plantations, from the Dutch in 1942, cutting off nearly all of the Allied supply of quinine. The last American plane to fly out of the Philippines before it fell to the Japanese carried some 4 million quinine seeds. Unfortunately, the effort was largely in vain: The trees grew too slowly to provide sufficient quinine to the Allied war effort. 

Some more skepticism needed

Abbott to hit business with hikes

Apart from Colebatch's column linked above, there seems to be little in the way of commentary about on whom the Coalition's claimed savings are falling.

In fact, there seems to be little skepticism about the claim that the Paid Parental Leave plan would actually save money in the long run.  To give just one example, I'm pretty sure that in the summary Hockey provided,  it made mention of savings from double dipping being reduced in State public service schemes.  How does that work?  Why is a saving to a State budget being credited to a Federal bottom line? 

But back to Colebatch:

The Coalition will pay for its campaign promises by raising taxes on business, cutting support for middle-income and low-income earners, and cutting environmental programs, under the list of savings given out by shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey and shadow finance minister Andrew Robb....

The decision to hit business - mostly small business - with $4.6 billion of tax hikes was politically shrewd. Not one business lobby came forward on Wednesday to criticise the Coalition's new taxes on its members. They would have screamed had Labor done the same.

The Coalition made its riskiest cuts known long ago, and they don't seem to have hurt it.
The savings claimed are surprisingly large - $4.6 billion from axing the Schoolkids' Bonus, $3.7 billion from scrapping superannuation contributions for low-income earners and $5.2 billion from cutting 12,000 public service jobs.

These claimed savings are higher than previous estimates, even by the Coalition. It was a surprise to learn that the Coalition will over-fund its controversial paid parental leave scheme by $1.1 billion in its first two years. The policy it released two weeks ago made no such claim.

There are some errors in Hockey's costings. Innovation Minister Kim Carr pointed out that the Coalition could not claw back the $680 million it claims from axing two business programs without breaking contracts: the money it already committed.

And on another matter of flakey Abbott policy - why is the "Green Army" attracting so little attention?

It's an absolute bit of trivia and typical of Abbott's terrible judgement on environmental issues that he is determined to stop the Clean Energy Finance Corporation - which is specifically about making returns on lending, a point the Coalition does not want people to know - but proceed with his own silly idea.

Save a bit of money now, pay more later

Can Australia afford the Coalition’s NBN?

No doubt the writer is biased, but this article does set out in pretty good detail the reasons I have read elsewhere why the Coalition's planned revision to the NBN is not technically or financially a good idea.

Hint to Kevin Rudd No2

Kevin, a politician who has a video in circulation containing what seems like 5 minutes of swearing to the camera and room in frustration at not being as good at something as you thought you were should not talk about the poor temperament of your opponent.

The way to attack Tony Abbott on how he would conduct foreign affairs is to note that he's never shown much interest in the topic, as Peter Costello said about him with respect to economics; he would take over-simplified lines with no nuance ("Go Israel!" would be the guiding principle for anything to do with the Middle East, just as it is with the Tea Party), and he keeps putting his foot in his mouth with odd comments on all matters.  (What was that line about "maybe you shouldn't be there" in reference to being king hit in Kings Cross at 2 am all about?)

Well, that's odd

I could have sworn I heard Judith Sloan on the Drum last week saying something about how she was writing a column about all the ways she considered the Coalition's Paid Parental Leave scheme a bad idea.

So what do we get today?  A Sloan column that boosts the suggestion that the PPL will not actually cost any money to the budget at all!  So, does that mean you actually like the policy now, Judith?  One could be excused for thinking so.  (And by the way, you caused a bit of a stir a year or two ago amongst Labor types by talking about how it probably made sense to increase unemployment benefits.  I haven't seen that mentioned in an Australian column for a long time - or did it ever appear there?)

The headline to her column, which she presumably did not come up with personally, is of the "Ha! Take that Rudd!" variety, which is very, very popular at the Australian at the moment.

If a photo like this was real, the Murdoch headlines would be: