Stable AdS flux vacua must be supersymmetric: a conjecture

Famous physicists Hiroši Ooguri and Cumrun Vafa proposed a new branch of the Swampland program in their new paper

Non-supersymmetric AdS and the Swampland

In 2005, Cumrun Vafa coined the term swampland to describe would-be theories or their low-energy effective field theory limits that look consistent according to the rules of effective quantum field theory but that are banned according to the more stringent rules of string theory or quantum gravity (which are ultimately equivalent concepts) i.e. that have no realization within string/M-theory.

The swampland (TRF) is the "larger" but messier realm surrounding the stringy landscape. The swampland shouldn't be confused with the related but inequivalent technical notion of the part of the Internet and media that is critical towards string theory. It's not called a "swampland" but rather a "cesspool" and the technical term for the individuals in the cesspool is "scumbags". The largest and stinkiest two scumbags are known as "Šmoits" but I don't want to overwhelm this blog post with the review of the standard terminology.

The extra constraints imposed by string/M-theory may be interpreted as "general predictions of string/M-theory". They're usually qualitative. Our weak gravity conjecture is the most intensely studied example of such extra constraints. It says that there have to exist particles light enough so that the repulsive electric force between them trumps the gravitational attraction. In this sense, gravity is the weakest force and it has to be.

Storing excess energy in trains

A recent blackout on Australia has been blamed on the irregular sources of energy, especially the wind turbines, by some people including the prime minister. Others disagree.

Whether or not a particular problem such as this one should be blamed on "renewables", it's clear that their irregularity brings a serious problem for the grids, a problem that may very well beat the advantages.



An obvious way to fight against the irregularity is to store the extra energy and use it when the wind isn't blowing or when the Sun is not shining. Every physical system in Nature carries energy so it is a potential candidate for energy storage. The only question is which mechanism does so efficiently (and boasts the required capacity) and which doesn't.

Male soccer, female referees, stoves, and clever punishments

On Sunday, AC Sparta Prague – the best Czech soccer team for several decades before it was largely surpassed by my hometown's reborn FC Viktoria Pilsen six years ago – played in Brno against Zbrojovka [a gun company], a weaker foe. (The name "Sparta" doesn't mean that the players must be born in Greece.)



In the 93rd minute, three minutes after the normal time, Brno scored from a corner. Brno's player Hyčka stood next to Sparta's goalie, a meter or two closer to the goal than Sparta's defenders. It was a clear offside but the referee's assistant Ms Lucie Rafajová – who is a criminal investigator (someone like the ladies from NCIS) remained silent. Hyčka's goal was counted, Zbrojovka tied 3-to-3, and Sparta lost 2 points.

It was surely great news for many fans here in Pilsen because the leader Viktoria is already 6 points ahead of Sparta – and everyone assumes that the two other teams that are above Sparta right now will eventually drop.

Václav Havel: 80th birthday

Had he avoided the mistake of dying in 2011, the last and the first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of post-divorce Czechia would celebrate his 80th birthday today.



To commemorate, the small but luxurious area inside the National Theater in Prague was renamed "Václav Havel Square" yesterday while here in Pilsen where he spent over a year in the early 1980s, a special metallic plate about his "vacation" was posted in the famous and interesting Bory [Pinewoods, a suburb] prison.

I do think that the name "Václav Havel Prison" would be more appropriate than the "Václav Havel Square" because it isn't a real square; as well as the "Václav Havel Airport" because Havel was afraid of flying.

Greek yogurt isn't a yogurt made in Greece

I honestly don't remember when the European Commission did something that wasn't insane or completely, fundamentally wrong.

One of the recurring themes are the EU apparatchiks' opinions about "how we can or cannot name things". Among the decisions that are most notorious in Czechia, we were told that the domestic rum cannot be called the domestic rum and the butter spread cannot be called the butter spread. In a confrontation closely analogous to one described below, Greek politicians wanted to ban the word "feta" (Czech: "Balkan cheese") in the U.S.



Greek yogurt is sold under this name in the U.S.

The European Commission has just added another classic when it voiced its opinion that the Greek yogurt produced outside Greece cannot be called the Greek yogurt. These children left behind believe that the adjectives such as "Greek" represent the country of origin of the single actual product.

If the idiots knew at least something about the language and the real world, they would know that the Greek yogurt is a textbook example of a generic brand or a generic term. The adjective describes the noun – a food product, in this case and many others – by the characteristics and the characteristics are classified by geographic names they are positively correlated with. But that doesn't mean that the adjectives express the same thing as the country of origin of a single product.

Thouless, Haldane, Kosterlitz win the 2016 Nobel in physics

Topological phases and topological phase transitions have won the 2016 Nobel prize in physics.



David J. Thouless of Seattle won 50%, F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton won 25%, J. Michael Kosterlitz won 25%. All three men were born in Britain and have moved to America.

The condensed matter insights are genuine and very important – the main 1973 theoretical paper has almost 9,000 citations while Haldane's 1983 paper on the Haldane gap in 1D Heisenberg anti-ferromagnets (chains) has over 2,400 citations – but I believe that this choice is a surprise for virtually everyone, anyway.

In fact, I am convinced that even most of those people who were suggesting a Nobel for "topological" things in condensed matter physics were betting on other names. For example, in 2014, Thomson Reuters predicted a Nobel prize for topological insulators – to theorist Charles L. Kane, experimenter Laurens W. Molenkamp, and theorist Shoucheng Zhang.

Breakthrough Prize winner Alexei Kitaev could have been awarded a prize for the topological quantum computers but his work is probably too mathematical (although less so than e.g. Maxim Kontsevich's). Various other condensed matter physicists comparable to the newest winners and their collaborators – e.g. Ian Affleck – could have won, too.

A gigafine for Deutsche Bank is a plain robbery

Western governments act as increasingly aggressive gangsters, targeting especially large yet vulnerable foreign companies

Deutsche Bank, a major German banking institution, is another source of recent economic worries, partly due to a gargantuan fine that the U.S. Department of Justice wants to charge the bank. If you pick an informative article, you will learn that the fine was supposed to be $14 billion – wow – but it's plausible that both sides will agree with a more humble amount, $5.4 billion, a promising possibility that has been improving the market sentiment since Friday afternoon.



The total assets of Deutsche Bank are almost $1.8 trillion but the equity is just around $70 billion if you believe some 2015 numbers. The fine $14 billion would be equivalent to 20% of the total value of the banking institution. Moody's just publicized its opinion that even this high fine wouldn't be existentially threatening for Deutsche Bank but 20% is a huge change, anyway.

Flooded Czech cave found to be the deepest one in the world

Czechia is a beautiful land, our anthem correctly points out, and there's a lot of cute architecture built on it.

At the same moment, many people feel that the nature is an ultimate prototype of the "average place in the world". It's located in central Europe and the moderate climate zone. After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, the height of our highest peak has collapsed from 2655 to 1603 meters. We don't have the sea so the lowest-lying area isn't extreme, either. Hřensko (on the Elbe River) near the border with East Germany is the country's lowest-lying village, 115 meters above the sea level – which is funny because visually, Hřensko surely looks like a typical village in the high mountains (and it partially is). You may want to know that Prague is around 200 meters above the sea level in average.



So it looks like you can't find any similar "global extrema" in our homeland. Well, it's completely wrong. Even if someone – or a country – is average from many directions, you may always find directions from which it ends up being extreme. A new example is the Hranice Abyss, the deepest flooded abyss in the world, as a Polish researcher with a Polish-Czech team including a transnational underwater robot (ROV) found a few days ago.

Janet Yellen is right: central banks' purchase of stocks may be useful and justified

When Janet Yellen was being chosen as the boss of the Federal Reserve, I didn't really know who she was, what she knew, and I was somewhat skeptical that she was an extremely bright economist.

Larry Summers – whom I intimately (don't overstate this word, however) know as the former president of Harvard – was an example of a guy whom I often disagree with but whose thinking was expected to be more penetrating, impartial, rational to me than Yellen's. After all, I have known way too many examples in which a less qualified female was picked by the forces of affirmative action.



I must say that after I have watched several press conferences featuring Yellen, I have largely changed my mind. As far as I can say, she understands economics, the economy, and the forces and pressures that affect it. And she is remarkably rational and impartial when it comes to the evaluation of the relevant questions.

Barry Barish deserves a LIGO Nobel prize, too

It's not certain at all that next Tuesday, the Nobel prize in physics will be given to the people associated with LIGO, the (double) L-shaped experiment that announced the detection of Einstein's gravitational waves in February 2016. Recall that the waves were actually detected on September 14th, 2015, a year ago, just four months after an interview where someone said that the detection would take place "within five years". Sometimes things are slower than expected but indeed, sometimes they are faster, too.

Despite the uncertainty about the 2016 Nobel, the LIGO possibility is reasonably likely by now. Rumors indicate that the January 31st deadline for the nominations didn't turn out to be a fatal obstacle for the LIGO-related candidates.



In February, I was afraid that there could be some politically correct folks who would want to reward the current leaders of the experiment – basically random politically chosen hires. But thankfully or hopefully, it seems that the probability of this scenario has decreased and the actual fathers of the LIGO success – which made the decisive steps decades ago – are more likely to win.

In 61 days, a Slovak billionaire will monitor every single Czech cash transfer in real time

Millions of stupid and jealous Czech sheep embrace the new "1984"

Unless something unexpected happens – and I pray that it will – the first batch of 50,000 of Czech businesses, mainly restaurants and hotels etc., will be obliged to immediately report every single payment from a consumer to the ministry of finance led by the Slovak-born food industry billionaire, media mogul, a VIP ex-member of the communist party, and a former communist snitch Andrej Babiš (net worth over $3 billion).

The consumer gets a receipt and he or she – an amateur snitch – will be able to send the receipt's ID to a server of the ministry and verify that the payment has been reported by the business. A motivation is that he may win a lottery for the amateur snitches. Andrej Babiš's former career of a snitch is seen in every aspect of this sick system. If the payment hasn't been reported, the businessman will immediately face existentially threatening fines and other punishments that the minister himself may decide about – or forgive. The law defining the EET things is a classic "rubber law" that may be bent by the executive power. It's a similar kind of a law that made Adolf Hitler the Führer.

This system is meant to guarantee that the taxes from that payment – every payment – will be sent to the government. Andrej Babiš, a member of the very bottom of the Czechoslovak moral cesspool who would have been executed in late 1989 if we hadn't decided to make our revolution in the "velvet" way (for example, their dirty family disinherited a relative who "dared to emigrate" from the communist Czechoslovakia, to emphasize how deeply into the communist leaders' aßes they are willing to climb in order to keep their undeserved advantages), and a guy who already owns most of the largest newspapers, will have access to all the information about every single cash payment to every business on the territory of Czechia, at least after all businesses are included into the system in a coming year or so.

Aspects of the Indian-Pakistani (so far) miniwar

The British Empire has been in charge of the British India for some time. In 1947, that territory declared their independence and new countries, Pakistan and India, were created. Pakistan is some 98% Islamic. India is mostly Hinduist (Buddhism is below 1% these days) and only 15% Islamist (Christianity is over 2%, the third largest religion there). However, you may see that India is still the by far more diverse country among the two.



I would surely say that India is the more "politically Western" country among the two. You could say that it's "ironic" given the Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif's Western suit and "Aryan" skin color on the picture above with the visually darker and more folklore-dressed Indian prime minister Modi. But India's fights against the Islamic terrorists basically coincide with the logic of similar fights that sensible Western countries have to wage.

There have been three conflicts between India and Pakistan. Most of the conflicts are linked to the most disputed part of the border, inside Kashmir. Kashmir is a territory in the Northern part of the Pakistani-Indian border, a cool region adjacent to the Himalayas. Both countries claim all of it. In practice, it's divided to two similarly large parts by the de facto (but internationally unrecognized) border, the so-called "Line of Control" (LoC). That's where the newest tension is concentrated, too.

Rainer Weiss' birthday: from Slovakia to circuits, vinyl in Manhattan to LIGO

Along with Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever, Rainer Weiss is one of the most likely "triplet" that can share the Nobel prize in physics next Tuesday. Weiss' key contribution already occurred in 1967 – see the history of LIGO – when he began to construct a laser interferometer and published a text pointing out its usefulness.

WVXU, a BBC-linked news source, just released a fun biography:

A physicist who proved Einstein right started by tinkering with the family record player

Aside from fundamental physics, one of the additional reasons why this biography may be relevant on this blog are his family's links to Czechoslovakia.

92% in unhealthy air? Another example of a boy who cries wolf

By Václav Klaus, Czech ex-president

Today in the morning, my smartphone beeped and informed me about the reports that "an overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the planet, namely 92 percent, is living at places where the air pollution surpasses the limits defined by the World Health Organization".

Most Czech viewers: Trump won 1st debate

Donald and Hillary met in the

first presidential debate (90 minutes of video)

at Hofstra University, New York. Lester Holt was the moderator. The host had the full control over the questions, the audience – partly students – was expected to remain silent and not to use cameras and phones.

Hillary said "Hey Donald!" and he shook her hand, apparently confident in his immunity against pneumonia and other contagious diseases. Quite generally, I am sure it's right to say that they behaved in a much more friendly way towards each other than their voters. ;-) Concerning similar formalities and speaking strategies, Trump was attempting to interrupt Hillary more than 20 times but only succeeded once. She didn't try to interrupt him, with three failed exceptions.

Civil casualties in Aleppo are sad but negligible

I just listened to a rant by Samantha Power, the current U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

Well, what a hateful woman – when it comes to anything that has a relationship with Russia. She has nothing to do with the America that we used to love and that was inspiring us. One of the reasons I would love Trump to win is that he could end this absolutely insane anti-Russian hysteria in the U.S. Among other things, he could help to fire this particular insufferable female talking head.

But it's not just Samantha Power. Boris Johnson talks about Russian war crimes in Syria while The Telegraph shocks us with the Aleppo horror. From that paper, you may learn what has actually happened.

In a hugely intense bombing of the anti-Assad forces in Aleppo, an operation masterminded by the Kremlin and Assad, "dozens" of civilians have been killed. That's sad. (Media close to the Kremlin dispute even these dozens of death but let me assume that these sad reports are true.) But is that unexpected? Is that a lot?